The Sunday after Pentecost is celebrated in the Christian Year as Trinity Sunday. It is usually the most challenging topic for preachers. The nature of God is beyond human imagining because of our finitude. Other religions find the doctrine of God as Holy Trinity as inexplicable. Both Jewish and Muslim believers find it blasphemous. Yet Christianity is a monotheistic faith in one God. The Lord our God is One God. Yet we believe that in this one living and true God there are three Persons, of one substance, power and eternity: the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. How so? A good friend of mine, John H. Rodgers, Jr. in his commentary on the Anglican Articles of Religion argued for the following implications of this triune nature of God.

God is love, “Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.” (1 John 4:8) This is one of the few direct, definitional statements about the nature of God in Scripture. It is not simply that God loves, but that God “is” love. The doctrine of the Trinity makes sense of that assertion. Love has many meanings, but love in all its meanings is a relational word. Someone loves and thereby relates to something or someone else. This is true of God as well. God is, by nature, a relationship of love within Himself. The Father and the Son and the Spirit live in a life of divine love. God is not an isolated, undifferentiated, loveless monad; He is an eternal life of Holy Love. This love-in-relationship character of God’s nature undergirds and shapes all His relations with the world and with us who are made in His image. It is natural for God to love His world, and above all to love those whom He has made in His own image. It is hard to envision a more far-reaching and fundamental assertion about the nature of God than “God is love,” keeping in mind that His love is holy love. Creation is a free act of God’s love. His decision to create flows from the fullness and richness of His triune life.

Because God is a relational God within Himself, when He calls forth a world and people with which and with whom to relate, He is doing what is compatible with and expressive of His own eternal nature. Relationship comes naturally to God; they are not strange to His being.

We are made in the image of God. This makes clear the relational character of human beings. We are made in and for a relationship with God and one another. We are born within a community of relationships, the family, the country, the world of peoples. It is impossible either to be conceived or born in an entirely unrelated manner. In all of this we reflect the nature of the triune God, who has made us in His likeness and for Himself.

This is why Jesus said that the first and greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself. (Mark 12:29-31)

God is our standard of holy love. The more we know this God as revealed in Jesus Christ, the more we will learn to love. May we increase in this knowledge more and more each day.