Date: The Holy Trinity, May 30, 2010

Text: John 8:48-59

Title: God revealed

Since the Holy Trinity is such a mystery to the common Christian, what do you want to know that you don’t know? We could be here, all day, as it will feel like we will be when we confess the Athanasian Creed, after the sermon.

The very first thing for you to know about knowing the otherwise unknowable God is that you can only know Him by knowing Jesus Christ. Unless the eternal, heaven-abiding Creator breaks into the temporal, created world, mankind is left to guessing who his creator is. And, when we go about guessing who our creator is, we always get it wrong.

So, from the beginning, God visited His creation. Even after He had to pronounce the death penalty to Adam, the Creator kept visiting His creation. The Creator of mankind promised that He would also be the Savior of mankind. Indeed, from the time of Adam’s sin, all of the Creator’s contact with mankind would be for the purpose of revealing His loving plan of salvation.

But, God remained other to this world. He didn’t dwell here; He made appearances. He came in visions. He spoke from bushes. He thundered from the heavens. He addressed prophets and priests and kings, who would address His people in His stead.

God remained a bit of a puzzle. Oh, He made it clear that He was a good God, that He always had in mind the best interests of His people, that He was forgiving, that He was patient, that He put up with plenty. But, during those Old Testament days, He remained untouchable, remote, a shadowy figure to the common believer.

All of that changed when the second person of the Holy Trinity came into human flesh in order to, besides dying for the sins of the world, reveal the first person of the Holy Trinity. The presence of God in the flesh, in the person of Jesus, was almost too much for mankind to grasp. That’s what we see in today’s Gospel lesson.

They accused Jesus of being possessed by a demon. Jesus’ preaching, Jesus’ healing, Jesus’ everything, was so far off the charts of the Jews’ experience that they could only imagine that His work was the work of the devil.

See what I mean, that God was a puzzle to those folks? How could all of the good that Jesus was doing ever have come from Satan, who is the author of everything evil?

The Lord Jesus answers their accusation, telling them that He didn’t come to seek His own glory. Indeed, reading the Gospel of John, you see that Jesus’ mission was to glorify His Father, and the way that He did that was by speaking everything His Father gave Him to speak, and then by laying down His life, the Good Shepherd for the sake of the sheep.

Listening carefully to Jesus, one of the mysteries of God, and of ourselves, is revealed. He refers to God as His Father. If God is His Father, then He is God’s Son. A bit later, in John’s Gospel, He will tell us that He and His Father will send their Holy Spirit.

What I’m saying is, it’s not only when Jesus told us how to baptize—in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit—that we learn that God is a complex being of three persons who form a perfect unity.

Even more, in Jesus’ referring to God as His Father, He teaches us an awful lot about what it means, back in the very first chapter of the Bible, that God made mankind in His image. A key aspect of God’s image is that He is relational, He is a family, He is love.

God reveals His image in the way He made us. He made people different from animals. Animals don’t form families. Animals are not relational. Animals don’t love.

Oh, you’ll get a few arguments that some birds are monogamous, that your favorite pet has affection for you, that they show love. But, none of it is on the level of us humans.

What raccoons ever celebrated Mother’s Day? Where do fish gather for birthday parties? When did brother deer ever go north for a big party that they call human camp?

Animals leave their fathers and mothers and never return. There is no horror in nature if a parent mates with an offspring. They have no last names. They don’t live as families. They don’t celebrate the births of their grandchildren. They don’t mark graduations. They don’t rally to each other at the time of death. They don’t remember their loved ones, because they have no real loved ones.

But, we do. Indeed, that we have tomorrow’s holiday, Memorial Day, is because God made us in His image, and God’s image is that He is a family—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

We have Memorial Day because certain people gave up their lives for the good of other people. We have Memorial Day because those people are important to us—they are our brothers and sisters, our dads, our aunts, our grandpas, our friends, our neighbors, and members of our church.

We have Memorial Day because death affects us. We are not simply roadkill. Our bodies are not left in the woods for the buzzards and rodents to finish off. Our bodies are precious. We care for the bodies of our dead. We lay them to rest. We decorate their graves. We remember them.

We remember them because we need to remember the past and learn from it, so that we appreciate what we have. We remember them because they don’t remain in the past—because, being made in God’s image, each one of them is an eternal being.

This takes us back to knowing the true God, who is His own family, and who is love, and who reveals Himself to His creation in the person of His Son, so that we, whom He made in His everlasting, family, image of love, don’t suffer the grave for eternity.

Jesus revealed it, as we heard in the lesson: "If anyone keeps my word, he will never taste death." Then, Jesus backed up His promise by informing us that He existed before Abraham ever lived, and Abraham lived more than a thousand years before Jesus was born.

How can this be? This can be because Jesus is the eternal Son of the eternal Father.

Jesus’ mission was to reveal His Father, and so He did. Jesus’ mission was to teach us, so that we could know who God is, who we are, and how we can have lives that are not defeated by the grave, and so He did. Jesus’ mission was to taste death so that, when we taste death we will taste the eternal life of the image in which He made us.

And, so He did, taking your flesh to His cross, making the sacrifice of your life with His death; baptizing you into the name of your Creator—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—by which He made you part of God’s eternal family; feeding you at the family table upon the very body and blood which He took upon Himself to make You His own; declaring you beloved of God, forgiven of your every sin, and children of the heavenly Father.

In Jesus, the mystery of the Holy Trinity is revealed to you in the Trinity of the Gospel proclaimed, the Baptism poured, the Supper distributed. Live in the Trinity of Christ’s means of grace so that you will live with the Holy Trinity—in the family of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—past the grave and into the forever of Paradise, to the glory of your Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.