Trinitarian Mission (Part 2)

John 17

Fodder

So, Trinitarian mission.  If, when attempting a conversation involving the uncharted waters of the Trinity we are to avoid any mention of food or arithmetic, what are we (humble laymen and women that we are) to talk about?  How about with the words of Jesus himself, the perfect image of God (Colossians 1:15)?  We’ll use John 17, seeing as I’m still feelin’ fresh from last weeks Bible Study.

John 17 is the last chapter in an epic four chapter-long Jesus throw-down message.  These four chapters (14-17) are epic for two reasons: 1) because of what Jesus is saying and 2) because of when he is saying them. 

1)   Jesus is spelling out for his core group of disciples what things will be like and who they will be after he conquers the world and returns to the Father.  Though the world will indeed be conquered by what He’s about to do (16:33) it will also be hell-bent on persecuting any and all who follow in His footsteps (15:18-16:4).  Following Jesus means obeying his commands (14:21), and his command to them is to love one another (15:17).

2)   Jesus says all this during what he calls “the hour” (12:23).  Judas, the devil, and some soldiers are literally on their way to arrest Jesus during these four chapters (14:30), giving a profound sense of urgency to the whole scene.  These are truly Jesus’ last words to His followers.

The entirety of chapter 17 consists of Jesus praying a prayer, which brings together and fills out themes and ideas from the previous three chapters.  Instead of focusing on the entire chapter I’d like to highlight select portions, combined together and shown below.

17 After Jesus said this, he looked toward heaven and prayed:

“Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you. 2 For you granted him authority over all people that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him. 3 Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. 4 I have brought you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do. 5 And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began.

10 All I have is yours, and all you have is mine. And glory has come to me through them. 11 I will remain in the world no longer, but they are still in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name, the name you gave me, so that they may be one as we are one.

15 My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. 16 They are not of the world, even as I am not of it. 17 Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth. 18 As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world. 19 For them I sanctify myself, that they too may be truly sanctified. 20 “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, 21 that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22 I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one — 23 I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. 24 “Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.

26 I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.”

I’d like to begin by highlighting the end of verse 11: “may they be one as we are one”.  Verses like this are responsible for the death of thousands of trees and octopus to supply the paper and ink needed for the thousands of books and articles devoted to the verse’s unpacking. 

Let us unpack a little.

Firstly, it should be noted that the thrust or underlying motive for these words of Jesus is missional.  That is, Jesus isn’t telling the disciples how they are to live and love for their own sake, but for the sake of the world that He means to redeem.  He commands them to love one another and even seems to make this command central to his entire programme, but not simply to form a private community hidden from the eyes of outsiders.  The opposite is true.  His prayer is not for them to be out of the world but to be in it, guided and protected by the providence of God (v. 15). 

 The church does not exist for her own sake.  God’s plan for the church extends beyond a private me-and-Jesus relationship.  He means for us to exist, to be little Christ’s, in the world.  That the church loses her identity when she loses her missional existence is true on the corporate and individual levels.

Second, we must be sure to understand Jesus’ definition of love.  Jesus’ love, like his peace, is not of this world (14:27).  The greatest love of all, says Jesus, is exemplified when someone lays down his life for his friends (15:13).  True love is sacrificial. 

For the average American Christian this definition of love, if not totally trite, at least feels very normal.  We have heard it a thousand times.  But we shouldn’t forget the scandal it is.  Friedrich Nietzsche, an infamous German philosopher, described Christianity as “the one great curse, the one enormous and innermost perversion… the one immortal blemish of mankind”, and said this precisely because of the way Jesus defined the word “love”.  In a world where power is worshipped, Jesus’ words and actions can aptly be described as Nietzsche has done.

To further the scandal, Jesus does not merely say that this love is for humans alone, or that the love available to us is less because of our creaturely status.  No, Jesus roots this love in the Triune God himself.  He claims this love characterizes who God has been for eternity.  Literally, in 17:24, Jesus claims the Father has loved the son this way “before the foundation of the world”. 

And here is some fodder for our Trinitarian understanding and subsequent conversations.  There it is, in Scripture, in “plain language” (16:29).  “Triune God” means “God who is Love”.  “Triune God” means “God who is Community”. 

And we, little Christ’s filled with the Spirit of this Triune God, can practice this love and community right now.

In fact, we are commanded to in the name of Jesus.  The degree to which we practice this love, by the power of the Holy Spirit, while being in the world, is the degree to which we are a part of the holy, universal church.

Trinitarian Mission: loving one another with the love of the God who is Three, in full view of the eyes of the world, so that the world may know who Jesus is (17:21).

This is the mission of the church.

Trinitarian Mission (Part 1)

Defense of the Trinity

If you’ve begun reading this post pat yourself on the back.  You saw the word “Trinitarian” in the title and still chose to click the link.  I almost changed the title to something less intimidating (almost anything without the word “Trinity” in it) but deliberately did not.  The word is hardly heard in lay-Christian vocabulary today and when it is it almost always seems to be accompanied by an apologetic hesitancy, as if the word were reserved for “theologians” (as if there could exist a Christian who isn’t a theologian); as if the Trinity was so hopelessly abstract that there were no hope of casually speaking of it it without sounding either arrogant or ignorant. 

Where does this fear come from?  Obviously the word “Trinity” is simple enough- the Wachowski brothers had no problem allowing Neo’s girlfriend to be named “Trinity”.  And it certainly does not come from Scripture.  I have never heard anyone hesitate to speak on John 14-17 because of it’s strong Trinitarian streak, or of Philippians 2:5-11 (an especially popular Scripture) because of it’s portrayal of the supra-rational concept kenosis.  Actually the opposite is true.  These passages are a couple of the more popular New Testament passages in the church today.  And, in defense of the Trinity, I’d like to point out that it is precisely because of their overt Trinitarian-ness that they are so loved. 

Common fear of the word “Trinity” comes from the training we’ve received from theologically shallow church leadership, who have allowed us to associate the word with the question of how three persons can be one God.  The question is not invalid in and of itself, but like most things, becomes problematic when it becomes our fixation.  My personal experience is that the great majority of conversations about the Trinity depend on the chemistry of eggs or water, or elementary level mathematics, typically the equation 1+1+1=3. 

Though the enquiry into our God’s likeness to eggs or water or math equations can be entertaining, it is not only marginally helpful at best to knowing more about who our God is, but is ultimately unbiblical.  By “unbiblical” I mean outside of the way that God is concerned with revealing his Triune self through his Word (though I have heard it said that one infinite+one infinite+one infinite=one infinite, but I couldn’t personally verify the math J).  By “unbiblical” I mean the Bible doesn’t seem to give any consideration to the questions we often get stuck on, while being incessantly concerned with who this God is: love, humility, servant and Lord, to name a few. 

In defense of the Trinity I’m using this blog post as a street preacher uses a soap box, and would like to nobly remind anyone who cares to listen that everything we love in our Scriptures we love because of it’s direct or indirect Trinitarian-ness, and hope in Part 2 of this post to provide some new fodder for our hopefully-increasingly-common conversations about our God who is a love/service-centered eternal community- in other words, about our Triune God.

breaking it down- 1st peter 1:16 (part 2)

"be holy, because i am holy"

holy: the English language contains few words abused as often as this.  In Scripture “holy” is one of the most powerful adjectives used for God, so powerful that it at times becomes terrible (Isaiah 6:3-5).  In fact “holy” is a term reserved, in Scripture, for God alone, and nothing in Scripture is deemed holy without a direct connection with Him.

Somehow “holy” has mainly become used to describe special four-letter words.  And just when the common-usage of “holy” seems to be close at all to the word’s true meaning it has a negative feeling to it, as when someone is described as having the attitude of being “holier than thou”.  Normally when this phrase is chosen to describe someone the intention of the person doing the describing is not good, and so the word “holy” comes really to mean “stuck up” or “arrogant”. 

You might think there is hope for this four-letter word in more pious circles, where being “holy” is actually something worth striving for and one of the standard descriptions of God.  Yet even here only 50% of the word’s meaning, power, and terror are usually tapped in to.

The fancy way of stating our error, the error of the pious, when we read the word “holy” in 1^st peter 1:16, is that we read the word only in the negative sense and either forget or do not know that it has a positive sense as well.  A sophisticated, complex diagram should help clarify.

                         Negative Version                                         Positive (Actual) Version


        "do not be bad, because i am not bad"                        "be holy, because i am holy"

Notice the difference: one speaks of not doing something while the other speaks of doing something.  The problem, as shown above, is that our understanding of 1^st Peter 1:16 is too often limited to the negative sense.  This really is a damaging problem when we consider that there is a positive sense to the concept; if the negative sense of holy means it closes certain things off from us, the positive must mean that it opens up others.

The same is true with the idea of repentance.  Many an altar call has included a brief lecture on the Greek word metanoia.  It means turning away from something, a change in orientation.  But if metanoia (often translated as “repentance”) means turning away from something it also means turning towards something else, an infinitely exciting thought when we consider that it means turning towards an infinite, loving, creative God, implied in John the Baptist’s calling card: “Repent, for the kingdom of Heaven is close at hand” (Matthew 3:2).

All this considered, holiness must at least mean a “change of outlook or spiritual metamorphosis, an enlarged vision of the dimensions of human life”, in the words of Northrop Frye (italics added). 

Holiness is the quality of that life whose had the shackles of sin (as the old hymn goes) thrown off, the life that has literally been freed and is growing boundlessly outward, into that freedom, by the power and grace of the Holy Spirit, the third member of the truly free Triune God.  The holy life is one that has been opened up to the reality defined by this Triune God, where love reigns and insecurities, skeletons-in-closets, addictions, and even death, do not.

Now this Lord is the Spirit

 and where the Spirit of the Lord is,

there is freedom.  And all of us,

with our unveiled faces like mirrors reflecting the glory of the Lord,

are being transformed into the image that we reflect in brighter and brighter glory;

this is the working of the Lord who is the Spirit.

2^nd Corinthians 3:17-18

This verse takes us to part three of 1^st Peter 1:16, where we will dive head first into the image that we reflect in brighter and brighter glory.

breaking it down- 1st peter 1:16

"be holy, because i am holy."

The Bible is full of statements thick with meaning and complexity like the one above.  Before we dive into them, and before we ever dive into Scripture, it’s important that we know that we will never fully understand everything that Scripture has to say.  This is because it is divine, a vehicle through which the infinite intersects with the finite.  But the infinite comes to us, has entered our level of reality, and so we can and are meant to understand some of His message to us.  Though we cannot understand all of His message, we can understand enough of it to adequately respond.

We will move through the verse a word/proposition at a time beginning with…

be: not “do”.  Today (in our modern, western society) we hardly know the difference, so that we read this verse as if it actually said, “do holy things, because I do holy things.”  God, who Peter is (technically) quoting, knows the difference between the word “be” and the word “do” and would have said “do” if he had wanted.  Obviously God didn’t mean to use the word “do”, and so it is wrong of us to read the verse like he had.

Not that we replace the word “be” with the word “do” on purpose.  Instead it is something we do without even thinking about it.  In fact it is something we do without getting the opportunity to think about it.  This is because we live in a time and place where the word “be” has ceased to have much value.  And this is because we live in a time and a place where be-ing (the verb form of “be”) has ceased to have much value.  It is true that this disintegration of the two concepts (“be” and “do”) is being challenged in those parts of our culture that are becoming exposed to Eastern ideas and thoughts, but these also are in need of correction.  In these areas the tendency is to err in the opposite direction.

God (through Peter) is after much more than our actions.  He is after our heart, our generator, our battery, from which our actions flow, so that holiness starts not with doing holy things, but being holy.  This can be a strange concept to get our heads around because it still uses verb/action language, still sounding like “doing” things.  Perhaps it is.  Maybe the point is that the “doing” needs to be deeper than we think. 

The doing side is indeed important.  Anyone who has read James knows this.  But the point is that being and doing are two sides of the same coin, or the two parts of a fountain; there is the source and that which springs from the source.  If you want to change what comes out of the fountain it would be ridiculous to stand at it’s mouth and pour a bunch of dye to change it’s color, or if you wanted to turn it into a coffee fountain it would be absurd to pour instant coffee into the stream as it leaves the source.  No, you would go to the supply, the heart of the fountain, and change it.  The same is true when we flip the James’ argument; faith without works is dead, but works without faith is equally dead.

So be before you do, if you want your doing to matter at all.  And if you’re wondering how to change the source, or if it’s possible, take comfort in the fact that it’s what Jesus is after in every single person he has ever encountered.  He clearly has faith that it’s possible and seems to think that he is capable of performing such a surgery.  If you still don’t believe just ask Him, I dare you.  But don’t ask with empty words or actions.  Let your asking start with the orientation of your heart, the core of who you are.  That’s what prayer is, after all.