Description
Trinity Sunday - Year A Isaiah 40.12–17, 27–31
2 Corinthians 13.11–13
Matthew 28.16–20
The doctrine of the Trinity used to be caricatured as a piece of irrelevant theory: learned people using human philosophy to make simple things overly complex. The charge often rebounds on those who make it. The beginnings of Trinitarian thinking, in the New Testament, are powerful and relevant, designed to help in time of need, to bind us together in love, to send us out on our mission.
People often puzzle, reading Matthew’s conclusion, over Jesus himself offering his followers the first-ever ‘trinitarian’ formula as their baptismal symbol. Actually, the whole passage is implicitly trinitarian; if there wasn’t a trinitarian formula somewhere we’d have to supply one to make sense of it all. What does it mean to say that all authority, in both created realms (heaven and earth), has been given to Jesus?
What does it mean to say that he is truly the Emmanuel (1.23), with his followers to the close of the age? The Trinity is, paradoxically, a doctrine about Jesus: it safeguards the reality of his humanness...
Taken from Twelve Months of Sundays Year A by N T Wright
Published by SPCK