Archbishop of Sydney

Every Sunday is the Lord's Day or God's feast day, but that is true in a special way of Trinity Sunday. Are we God seekers? Are we interested enough to wonder what God is like? Or perhaps ask where He lives? Or whether our God is the same as the God of the Jews and then the Moslems? What will it be like to meet God?

 

Because we use the Old Testament (as we call the ancient Jewish scriptures), we know that we worship the same one true God as the Jews do, but the Trinitarian nature of God was not explicit in the Old Testament, despite today's beautiful passage from the Book of Proverbs about Wisdom.  Here wisdom is described as existing before the earth came into being, before the heavens were fixed and was at play everywhere in God’s world, delighting to be with the sons of men.  This semi-divine Being prefigures the Spirit of God, whom we know as the Spirit of Truth.  Paul says it is the Spirit which pours God’s love into our hearts.

 

There are fewer atheists in Australia than in some parts of Europe, but a higher percentage of unbelievers is still found here than in most parts of the world.  Why is this so? I suspect that among the approximately 20% of Australians who do not believe in God, many of them would be more disinterested than disbelieving.  Does everyone who truly searches for God finish up finding him? The Old Testament Book of Wisdom says that God "lets himself be found by those who do not tempt him and shows himself to those who do not mistrust him" – an explanation which is basically reassuring, brings some measure of comfort, but leaves much to be said and much room for puzzlement and thought.  God should puzzle us, because He is too different from us to be pushed into any human category.  And generally we have to be searching if we wish to find God.

 

We shall never understand very much about God, but the Scriptures and the solemn teaching of the Church do have specific content, so that we know God is one, good and loving, that He is not male or female, not material and not just the first agent in the chain of creation, someone or something basically like us.  God is not just the engine for the Big Bang, because He is outside space and time.

 

The old Catechism taught us in my day that God is in heaven, on earth and everywhere.  The Jews of old might have studied a similar Catechism, because a rabbi once said to a young boy "I will give you a guilder if you can tell me where God lives".  The boy was not Jewish for nothing so he replied to the rabbi "and I will give you two guilders if you can tell me where God doesn’t live".  God is everywhere there is love; everywhere there is truth, goodness and beauty, and everywhere through the immensity of the universe.  God is only driven away by sin, serious sin.  And even then He is waiting to return.

 

God is one.  There is only one God so that while the descriptions of God in the Islamic Quran have much less about love and reason than you find in Catholic theology and the New Testament, they are different approaches to the same single Infinite Reality.  One reason for the spread of Islam is that many of them take God seriously, very seriously, while for too many of us in the Western world God is merely an ancient prop on a new stage, which we fail to notice most of the time because we are used to it and distracted by the play i.e. the glamour and bustle of daily life.

 

Regularly when I am talking to 10-14 year olds I ask them what is the most useful and practical teaching Jesus gave us.  Often they are not used to thinking in these terms, so there is a silence before some hands go up.  Not infrequently someone suggests the commandment that we love one another is Jesus' most useful contribution.  I reply that this is almost right, but not the answer I am seeking.  Nearly always someone will eventually suggest that the news that God loves us is Jesus’ most important and useful teaching.

 

It is easy to acknowledge God loves us when things are going well.  When we need faith to acknowledge God's love is when life is treating us or our society badly.  And here the advantage of knowing Jesus is supreme.

 

The greatest advantage we have over our fellow monotheists the Jews and Muslims is that we know that the person of Jesus Christ takes us to the heart of the mystery of love we acknowledge as our Creator God.  The mystery of the Word’s incarnation means that when we see Jesus we see God the Father.  Moreover Jesus' teaching and especially his actions during his life time give us more than an insight into the Divinity, as they enable us to see God at work.  The mystery of the Cross, Jesus' wrestling with suffering, evil and injustice, death, not only teach us how to live, but somehow reveal how God thinks, what He regards as important and how He acts through good people.

 

And central to all this is love.  It is not misleading to suggest that within the God head there is something of a Trinitarian community of loving and giving, whereby the Father eternally gives himself and becomes the Son and gives himself back again as the Holy Spirit.

 

This is difficult and infinitely mysterious, but we have to hang on to our central conviction that Jesus shows God in action; not as a remote uncaring Architect of the universe, not as cranky and punitive, not as an unpredictable tyrant, but as a loving Father who allowed his Son to share our blessings and our misfortunes.

 

This is the complete truth which the Spirit of Truth gives us and Jesus’ life and teaching explain how we preserve and increase the love of God poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.

 

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.