SUNDAY SERVICE
Trinity Sunday - Sunday 15th June 2014.
Isaiah 40:12-17, 27-31. 2 Cor. 13:11-13.
Matthew 28:16-20.
Trinity Sunday is the day we realise not that God is some incomprehensible philosophical construct that is difficult to get our minds around, but that his Trinitarian-ness is something familiar to all Christians from our new life’s first cry.
Matthew’s Gospel, famous for its “Sermon on the Mount” also ends on a mountain, with the disciples worshipping Jesus. The word “worshipping” is of course natural and correct, and the disciples have had cause to fall down before his divine power more than once before this. In a programmatic statement, Jesus explains why they feel the urge to bow the knee to him. All authority in the created realm has been given to him, both in heaven and on earth: as legions of angels bow to him, so must we, that his will may be done in both these realms. The fact that he is now Lord and Christ, our priest and king, compels us to go out into his world and bring about the obedience of faith among the nations. We do not share some good advice that others may take or leave, or present a lifestyle option for consumers’ consideration; we bring the authoritative word from the universal king to his rebellious world, and as we do so, Jesus is with us in divine power.
Response to that word is twofold: one must be baptised and one must become a disciple, though the first should naturally lead to the second. Discipleship involves learning all that Christ has taught. Making disciples means teaching people to obey that, not just presenting a dotted outline, but marking in the lines and colouring in the picture so people know how it is meant to look in practice. According to Jesus, disciples need to be taught to obey what they read, not just told the stories and left to draw their own conclusions. One with such authority demands obedience.
And one specific command we are to obey is the command to be baptised. We are to be baptised (we should note) not into three names, but into the one name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. This is not just to be immersed in his teaching, but to receive the “sign of profession and mark of difference, whereby Christian men are discerned from others that be not christened”, which is also “a sign of Regeneration or new birth, whereby, as by an instrument, they that receive Baptism rightly are grafted into the Church” (Article 27). We begin our faltering new life of obedience with the gracious promise of forgiveness signed and sealed upon us, in the name of the holy Trinity.
Our continuance in the obedience of faith is energised and enabled by that same blessed Trinity. Born again into the kingdom of God, as brothers and sisters we are to live in love and peace together, as Paul urges the Corinthians at the end of 2 Corinthians. As we reflect his goodness to the world, the God of love and peace will be with us. Note that for a second time in these readings we are assured of God’s presence — and they say the doctrine of the Trinity makes God distant and cold! Not so in the New Testament! Paul moves effortlessly from the oneness of “the God of love and peace” to the threefold blessing we know as “the grace.” The unmerited favour we enjoy through the work of the Son, stemming from the redeeming love of the Father, enables us to enjoy the communion, the fellowship, of the Holy Spirit, which they themselves enjoy together. That Spirit of the Lord, as Isaiah had already prophesied, is the everlasting God of covenant and creation, who lifts up the weary on wings like eagles, and instructs us in the way we should go. The God who was, and is, and always shall be Trinity, is with us from beginning to end. Dr Lee Gatiss is Editor of the NIV Proclamation Bible and Director of Church Society (www.churchsociety.org)