1. Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Heavenly Father, and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. The message from God’s Word as we celebrate Holy Trinity Sunday is taken from John 3:1-17, it’s entitled, “Glimpses of God.” Dear brothers and sisters in Christ.
2. Carl Sandburg once defined poetry as “the opening and closing of a door.” I like that definition because it focuses less on what poetry is and more on what poetry does. Poetry gives you a glimpse of something. A door opens and closes. In between the opening and the closing, you catch a glimpse of something. You do not have everything, but you have a glimpse. And the more you think about that small glimpse, the more it grows into a larger vision which transforms your world.
3. The gospel of John is like that for me. Unlike Matthew, Mark, and Luke, John does not offer us long descriptive narratives that record the fullness of the earthly ministry of Jesus. Instead, John offers us much smaller moments. They are moments when Jesus is with individual people. They are characters we are familiar with like the Samaritan woman at the well, the man born blind, and Lazarus. And those moments, which quickly come and go, open the door onto a much larger vision that transforms your world.
4. That is the case with the story of Nicodemus. Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night because he has seen or at least heard of the miracles of Jesus. “Rabbi, we know that You are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the miraculous signs that You do unless God is with him” (John 3:2). John has only recorded one miraculous sign of Jesus so far, the changing of water into wine at the wedding in Cana. But we are told how, with that sign, Jesus “revealed His glory” (John 2:11).
5. Through miracles, Jesus revealed His glory. For John, the glory of Jesus is that He is the only begotten Son of God, full of grace and truth (John 1:14). But Nicodemus, like the reader, is not yet sure of the fullness of what this means. So, John will take this one moment, this short conversation between Nicodemus and Jesus, to transform our vision of who God is and how God works in the world.
6. Nicodemus says to Jesus, “Rabbi, we know that You are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the miraculous signs that You do unless God is with him.” (John 3:2) Here, Nicodemus sees something, but it is just a glimpse, a small window into something more. Nicodemus believes Jesus “has come from God” and that “God is with Him.” This is a start, but not the end, a glimpse, but not the fullness of God’s glory. Jesus has not only come from God, but Jesus is God. God is not only with Jesus. God is Jesus and Jesus is God (John 20:28). For after Jesus rose from the dead and revealed the wounds in his hands and said, the disciple Thomas confessed of Jesus, “My Lord and my God!”
7. In response to Nicodemus, Jesus begins to reveal His glory. His words are poetic. They offer brief glimpses of the work of our Triune God. The Father is present, sending His only begotten Son into the world so the world might be saved through Him (3:16). The Son is present, offering His life, being lifted up like the serpent in the wilderness so that everyone who believes in Him has eternal life (3:14-15). And the Holy Spirit is present, granting new birth. People are being born from above through water and the Spirit (3:5-8).
8. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are glimpsed in this brief encounter with Jesus and from that glimpse God opens a much larger vision which transforms the world. Jesus invites Nicodemus and John invites us, his readers, to trust that the gracious work of God the Father is transforming this world, through His Son Jesus Christ, and through the power of the Holy Spirit.
9. Today, the Church celebrates Trinity Sunday. We find ourselves drawn to confess something about God that we can only glimpse and can never fully explain. The workings of the immanent and the economic Trinity can become a stumbling block for Christians if they are seen as something we need to master and have to be able to explain. Rather, the Trinity is a mystery that masters us, and gently unfolds how God is present and active in our lives in His world.
10. While we cannot fully explain the Trinity, we have experienced God’s saving mystery. The Father sent His Son who sends the Holy Spirit who brings us to the Son who then brings us to His Father. God’s work is eternal and yet enters our lives daily in the smallest of ways. Whether as an infant at the baptismal font or as an adult in an instruction class, whether speaking of Jesus with other Christians or explaining God’s work to our children, whether invoking God’s name at the beginning of worship or crying out to God from a hospital waiting room, we witness the saving mystery of our Triune God.
11. If someone were to ask what is one of the chief characteristics of God is, many theologians would probably respond that God is a God of love. We see this in our text where Jesus tells us, “God so loved the world…” (John 3:16). But, what does it mean for us that we have a triune God who is love, and how is our triune God different from the false gods of other religions? While media pundits seek to convince the gullible that the Muslim cry “Allahu Akbar” means “God is great” (Allahu kabir), in actuality Allahu Akbar means Allah is greater—greater than all that is, including greater than the Christian God. But, the Islamic Allah cannot be great, much less greater than our triune God, because the unitarian Allah of Islam, by definition, lacks the moral perfection of love and, so, on the basis of logic, is morally defective.
12. This is so because for God to be a perfect being, He must of necessity also be a loving being (1 John 4:8). The Apostle John writes in 1 John 4:8, “Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.” This implies that there is someone to love. But there has not always been someone to love, because in accordance with Scripture and modern cosmology, the universe and the people who inhabit it came into being a finite time ago. So, independent of creation, the unitarian Allah would not have had an object on which to lavish love.
13. While there is a moral lack in the unitarian Allah, such is not the case with the trinitarian God of the Bible. Why? Because though the biblical God is a single being, there are subject-object distinctions within the Godhead. And the three centers of consciousness within the one true God have loved one another from all eternity. Said C. S. Lewis: “All sorts of people are fond of repeating the Christian statement that ‘God is love.’ But they seem not to notice that the words ‘God is love’ have no real meaning unless God contains at least two Persons. Love is something that one person has for another person. If God was a single person, then before the world was made, He was not love.” Additionally, Christian philosopher William Lane Craig stated: “On the Islamic view of God, God is a person who does not give himself away essentially in love for another. He is focused essentially only on himself. He cannot therefore be the most perfect being. But on the Christian view, God is a triad of persons in eternal self-giving love relationships. Thus, since God is essentially loving, the doctrine of the Trinity is more plausible than any unitarian concept of God such as Islam.”
14. God has filled our lives with moments, pieces of poetry, which reveal the gracious beauty and powerful mystery of the Trinity. By telling the story of Nicodemus, John invites us to stop and notice these moments, to think about them, pray over them, and pray through them. He encourages us to trust that, although we cannot see all God is doing, we know enough of His person and work to live in His forgiveness and, by faith, to walk in His mysterious ways. Amen. Now the peace of God that passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, until life everlasting. Amen.
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