Trinity Sunday Reflection with Fr Robin Gibbons

Trinity icon, Andrey Rublev, 15C

'Mend your ways, encourage one another' says Paul to the Corinthians. It's a nice exhortation because it balances the deep understanding of our imperfect nature, always in need of mending, with a command of the best kind, to share the route of life with all that it contains together rather than alone.

Perhaps that is what the Trinity means, that the Triune God of Creator, Redeemer and the blowing, powerful hidden and unseen Spirit is all about mending the fabric of life, now in ways that draw people together rather than isolate, and in the future when we finally come together and experience the fullness of life in the Kingdom.

For me the Triune God is not an abstract theological concept, but the search that so many go on namely to find the source of all that we hold so dear that reality of coming together with something greater than I will ever know now. This is the relationship we have with God, namely love itself, and all that this love means is written on the page of the story of our lives. It is a story of communication and relationship with the community of the Trinity, where the self-absorption and containment between two equal people is broken into a dance of joy when a third equal person enters into it and makes it community.

This is the mercy of God, to draw us to experience love beyond all telling, this is also the wonder of that mystery of relationships found in the Triune God. We see in Christ the incarnate God en-fleshed, so uniquely one of us that we can never say God does not understand us or know our life.

The Gospel of John talks about the Son being sent so that we might believe and have eternal life but also reminds us that in Jesus the unique presence of God is to be found. We trust and believe in him. Through baptism we are his brothers and sisters, part of a family greater than any we now see, holy ones stretching to the dawn of time and forwards into the future until the end of the ages. Enfolding us always in his arms is the Creator, whom Jesus called Abba, but teaching and confirming us is the one we never see but know so well in our lives, the rushing, bubbling, life-giving Spirit. The living dance and call of love, is the relationship between them, they call us to trust and enter into this love.

Fr Robin Gibbons is an Eastern Rite Chaplain for the Melkite Greek Catholics in Great Britain.