A Homily for Trinity Sunday

A homily preached by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on Trinity Sunday, May 26, 2024.

I always marvel at the journey Nicodemus makes in, with, and under the power of the Spirit in the Gospel according to John. From the stilted, cagey, halting, hesitating, and bewildered encounter with Jesus where this “teacher of Israel” thinks the Christian life is all about crawling back into his mother’s womb in order to be “born from above,” to anointing and wrapping the very body of the crucified Jesus... it is a remarkable turning (metanoia) of events. The contrast between beginning and end is jarring and seemingly paradoxical–always a good indication that something of God’s ways and not our ways is being disclosed for us.

When we first encounter Nicodemus, he’s keeping to the shadows and sneaks off on a night mission to rendezvous with Jesus. Is it out of fear of reprisals from the religious authorities that he meets Jesus under cover of darkness? Is he secretly ashamed by his restless doubt that, despite all his learning and his prominent standing in the community as a religious leader, his heart recognizes something in the person of Jesus that cannot be accounted for, that doesn’t fit his tidy conceptual schema? Is he, despite being considered someone who is in full possession of the capital “t” Truth, following his yearning for encounter and connection with the one in whom he recognizes the shape love takes when it’s fully embodied in a human person? Is this the Spirit’s work drawing Nicodemus out-of-doors and into the night where all his previous certainties and strategies for having God pinned down and under control are revealed as dust? Probably all of those things and more.

Fast forward to chapter 19 of the Gospel according to John and we find an entirely different Nidcodemus: a Nicodemus once prodigally far-off, benighted in his iron-clad certainties, now the person arguably most intimate with Jesus. He has come near as a friend of Jesus: washing his body, anointing it with spices, tenderly wrapping the linen strips around pierced and torn flesh, so close that his stilled breath flutters the eyelashes of the Savior’s closed eyes. All we get are these two glimpses: one of distanced, groundless bewilderment, the other of unspeakable intimacy with Jesus, the Christ, very man and very God. How can this be? What happened in that intervening time? How might the change we see in Nicodemus illuminate something of what gets worked in us drawn along the way of love, keeping company with Jesus in the Spirit moment-by-moment?

Especially on “Trinity Sunday” (the only Sunday of the church year dedicated to the celebration of a doctrine and not an event in the life of Jesus), the temptation is to think that we Christians worship bad math. The temptation is to think that faith is all about having the right set of ideas between your ears. Nicodemus’ transformation–his descent from head to heart–gives us an alternative to the picture of the Christian life as thinking one’s way into the Kindom of God. 

And what is that alternative? Instead of faith being figured as “intellectual assent to propositional truth” (Newman), Nicodemus’ life shows us that it is in relationship with the Father in the person of Jesus Christ through the power of the Spirit that persons alienated from Divine Love as the Ground of Being and the Good, Beautiful and True Mind of the Cosmos are adopted as beloved children of the Most High, as inheritors by grace of the fullness of divinity pressed down and overflowing. It is in relationship with Jesus–keeping company with He who keeps company with us–that minds are first darkened of what they think they know, then turned, illumined, opened, and Christed. It is in relationship with Jesus’ loving presence that hard hearts are softened, and balled fists opened as love’s washing work, love’s anointing work, love’s tender wrapping work for Christ our neighbor, even in the grave.

I’ve often wondered about what happened in-between these two fleeting vignettes. Why don’t we know more? Why aren’t we given a clear set of how-tos, methods and techniques, so that we can do what Nic did and enjoy spiritually the same Christic intimacy that he did? This would, at first glance, appear to be a bug in John’s Gospel… all-too-predictable given his portrait of the speechifying, discourse dropping, fact-spitting Jesus who seems to glide about six inches off the ground. “No surpise,” we sniff, “Ole John is always long on talk and short on practicality!” 

But the bug is actually a feature. We don’t get methods, because it’s the Spirit’s work in us worked in hiddenness and secrecy that can’t be boiled down to mere mastery of techniques. The trouble with techniques is that they are self-powered, we can do them well or badly, and worst of all can easily mistake successful performance of the technique for undefended, vulnerable, relationship with the Living God by grace through faith.

Tell me, what technique is Isaiah applying in his “Here am I. Send me,” throne room vision? What did the three young men tossed into the furnace do to conjure that fourth unbounded and walking in their midst, that cool, moist breeze that opened a door through the towering flames? What technique did Nicodemus successfully perform? Is not God the actor in both cases? Is not this love’s work worked in us by grace? 

The dizzying conceptual overwhelm of Isaiah, the thrown-into-the furnace desperation of the three young men, and Nicodemus being booted out into the night of unknowing, into the pregnant darkness of possibility, are reminding us that it is in softened, awed encounter, in relationship, and in the power of the Spirit that this thrilling intimacy with God is wrought in us. We simply keep company with Jesus. "I assure you that the good Lord is much kinder than you can imagine,” St. Therese of Liseux counsels. “He is satisfied with a glance, with a sigh of love….” Little traffic light looks, brief bedside  glances, many times. We come home again and again to the one who has made his home in us. In his love, we are moved from the obsessive and possessive pursuit of certainty, to a stilled, sobered place of wonder and awe. The simple, easeful, trust in  this vibrant, living, dancing Presence. Trust that keeping company with Jesus–in happiness and heartbreak, on the peaks and in the valleys, by the sweet springs and on the baffling wilderness roads of daily life–simple, open-handed, trust that keeping company with Jesus is enough. 

Do we, after all, want to know about Jesus Christ, or let ourselves be loved into loving by Him? Are our hearts restless for an air-tight conceptual grasp of life, the universe, and everything? Or are our hearts in fact restless, yearning, longing for “life that is truly life?” Restless for that hot coal kiss of belovedness we receive, dumbstruck, at this very altar plopped into our adopted, opened palms? “Take, eat, this is my body given for you.” It is through this hot coal kiss, through the touch, through come-as-you-are relationship with Jesus, not the idea of Christ figured out between the ears (not merely comprehended, grasped), that the Trinity is pots-and-pans lived out and enacted from the grace-softened heart. Do we want the menu, or the meal? Amen.