Trinity Sunday
June 15 – Trinity Sunday, Year C
Proverbs 8:1-4,22-31; Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15
In one of my favorite Bible stories (John 7:53-8:11), some scribes and Pharisees drag a woman before Jesus, just to put Jesus on the spot. They tell Jesus the woman was caught in the very act of adultery. “The law of Moses says we should stone women like this,” they say. “What do you say?”
Jesus takes his time before responding. Then he answers: “Let anyone who is sin-free themselves throw a stone at her first.” People start leaving one by one, until Jesus and the woman are left alone.
I once acted this story out on a retreat. I remember picking up a stone. I also remember taking my turn dropping the stone and walking away. Even now, my body remembers how it feels to let go of judgment—just like dropping that stone. It feels like loosening my grip, and letting a weight fall.
I’ve also visualized this story as part of a prayer practice called imaginative contemplation. I imagined myself as the woman dragged before Jesus. When we were alone, I imagined him saying to me with a bit of humor: “Well, where’s everyone now? Is there nobody here to condemn you??” Then Jesus bent down, looked in my eyes, and said, “I don’t condemn you either.” I remember this powerful experience of non-judgment whenever I deeply need grace.
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In the Episcopal Church, we don’t normally preach on our favorite Bible stories. By bringing up a favorite Bible story of mine, I was basically cheating. Our church uses a schedule of assigned readings for Sunday mornings. The story of the woman caught in adultery isn’t ever on the schedule.
Not only is this story not in our Sunday morning lectionary schedule. There’s also a decent argument that it shouldn’t even be in the Bible. It’s not in the earliest biblical manuscripts. In later manuscripts, it pops up in different places—at the end of John’s gospel, like a bonus track; or even in the gospel of Luke. Some modern Bibles put the story in brackets or italics, with a sort of warning label that the passage is “doubtful.”
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It’s hard when your favorite story gets kicked out of the Bible. Especially a story that feels so true to the spirit of Christ. It’s possible that the story has a basis in the life of Jesus and circulated orally before someone finally wrote it down. But still, it’s hard to lose such powerful evidence of Jesus so brilliantly disarming the forces of condemnation.
A similar thing happened with another biblical passage about five centuries ago. The biblical scholar Erasmus cut some very cherished words from his Greek edition of the New Testament. These words appeared in some, but not all, Latin translations of the Bible. But they weren’t in any early manuscripts of the passage in Greek.
It just so happens that these words, cut by Erasmus, were very, very important as biblical proof for the doctrine of the Trinity. Before Erasmus’s research, the First Letter of John was thought to say this: “For there are three that bear witness in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit: and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the Water, and the Blood, and these three agree in one” (1 John 5:7-8, KJV, alt.).
Now, the part about in that passage “bearing witness” and the mention of “the Spirit, and the Water, and the Blood” are in the authentic letter. But the part that mentions the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and declares that they are one, isn’t there. The Spirit, the Water, and the Blood refer to Christ’s wounded side on the cross and to his promise that the Spirit would comfort and guide Christ’s disciples. It seems that someone making another copy of the First Letter of John added a list of the Trinitarian persons in heaven, because they were such beautiful counterparts to the witness on earth of Spirit, Water, and Blood.
When Erasmus left these words out of his Greek New Testament, people accused him of reviving the ancient heresy of Arianism. When I preached a few Sundays ago, the gospel for that day actually included a verse that Arian Christians used as a proof-text for their anti-Trinitarian view that God the Son was subordinate to, not coequal or coeternal with God the Father. In the passage, Jesus tells his disciples, “the Father is greater than I” (John 14:28).
There was Jesus, with his own mouth, admitting that God the Father was “greater” than he was. Arian Christians had a point. (I didn’t mention the heretical implications of this verse when I preached. We Episcopalian preachers can’t choose what biblical texts we preach on, but we can ignore the parts we don’t want to talk about.)
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After the most rock-solid Trinitarian verse was excluded from most Bibles, thanks to Erasmus, Christians embraced other biblical bases for Trinitarian theology. Since it’s Trinity Sunday, a few of these passages are our readings for today. Our first reading shows God with a companion—Wisdom—present at God’s side, helping God create, and delighting in creation and humankind. Some theologians associate this Wisdom with God the Son, because this biblical portrait of Wisdom so closely resembles the Greek concept of “the Word”—the Λόγος, mentioned in the gospel of John. (It’s a little sticky, though, because Wisdom says she was “created”—and the Trinitarian persons are all supposed to be uncreated.)
Our short passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans mentions “God,” “Our Lord Jesus Christ,” and “the Holy Spirit,” and shows all three working together: Christ gives us access to God through grace, and God’s love is poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.
In our gospel, Jesus describes his close relationships with both “the Spirit” and “the Father.” “All that the Father has is” Christ’s. And the Spirit “will take what is [Christ’s] and declare it to” Christ’s followers from then on.
These passages aren’t the solid proofs that the now-rejected part of John’s First Letter used to be for proving that God is three persons who are one. But these passages do give us strong glimpses of creation and redemption as collaborative processes.
They also suggest that there’s more to this life of faith than finding just the right Bible quote—on papyrus, or on stone. In this life of faith, there’s delight in creation and in humankind. There’s grace and love poured into our hearts. There’s all that the Spirit, the Water, and the Blood bear witness to: a love that fills the earth and binds it to heaven.
~The Rev. Dr. Lora Walsh