07.11 | One
John 17
“And I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me, that they may be one, even as we are one.”
John 17:11
I remember somebody once trying to explain the Trinity to me using a hard-boiled egg.
God is like an egg, they said. Because He is three things, and yet He is One. He is like a yolk, the white, and the shell.
One egg. Three parts.
It didn’t really help me.
It wasn’t that it’s a wrong illustration so much. It’s just that the reality of the Trinity in Christian theology is not primarily a mathematical concept. The illustrations that we use to try to explain how a thing can be mathematically one and three at the same time tend to focus on the numbers, all with the intention of saying how 1 = 3 and 3 = 1. It is born from a good desire—the yearning to defend orthodoxy from heresy, the importance of emphasising the divinity of the Son. It looks to hold together the truths that God is One1 and yet that God is revealed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.2
The Trinity is not primarily a mathematical reality. It is a relational reality. It is not something to be counted and explained, but something experienced and lived from. The fact that God is one roots us in the experience of a God of perfect clarity, intimacy, and attentiveness. It means that there is no division with God Himself, and that all that any member of the Trinity does or says is done or said as a perfect expression of the will and heart of any other member of the Trinity. It is a descriptor of perfect intimacy, perfect unity, perfect interdependence. That God is one shows us that love—which is the very nature of the Godhead—binds one to another so closely that three can operate truly as a single unit.
And yet, that God is three is also of great beauty to the God that we know. For in the Son we meet Him who teaches us to interact with God as a perfect Father from the vantage point of a child, learning to operate in all things in the interaction of human limitation and the breath of God’s own Spirit. In the Father we meet Him who lavishes eternal love upon us, sending and remaking us in the image of His Son, breathing upon us the fire and peace of His Spirit. And in the Spirit, we discover Him who weaves the technicolour life and truths of the Father’s love and the Son’s Way into our deepest souls.
The doctrine of the Trinity, my friends, is not for reducing God to simplistic explanations that can fit in our eggcup. It is an invitation to the greater reality that can only and ever and always be known as Love.
Truly He is three, and truly He is one.
And yet, in today’s passage, Jesus prays for us. Hours before His death, He brings the core and most essential yearnings of His heart to the Father. We would do well to not only take note, but to let these words become essential to our own lives of prayer, for in His will do we find that which should become increasingly the content of our will.
And He prays thus:
That they may all be one.
As He and the Father are. As He and the Spirit are. As the Father and the Spirit are.
One.
A depth of belonging and engaging that reflects the Godhead. A quality of interdependence and trust that looks like the Trinity. A kind of community that knows such unity, such togetherness, such trust, such joy, that we begin, day by day by day, to inhabit the very ways of the Godhead that can only be described in the expansive world of love.
Reflect:
Consider your community.
Pray that you may be one.
Repent of any areas that come to mind that inhibit this from your perspective.
Ask that God the Father, Son, and Spirit would enable this transformation in all of you.
Pray:
God the Father,
Make us one:
Soothe our places of fear and distrust and pain,
In the quality of your measureless love.
Let your nature
Become our heart,
And your affirmation
Our security.
God the Son,
May we be one:
Teach us the way of radical surrender,
Holy Wisdom,
Kneeling servanthood,
And powerful truth-telling.
Let Your Way
Become ours.
God the Holy Spirit,
May we be one:
Work the miracles of forgiveness and humility and grace
Among us;
Renew us in truth;
Pour anointing power upon our love,
That our unity
May show the nature of God
To a lost world.
God of love,
May we be one,
As you are one.
In the Name of the Father,
In the Name of the Son,
And in the Name of the Spirit,
Amen
Old Testament:
For those also reading the Old Testament this year, your additional readings are here:
Ezekiel 17-18 | Psalm 125
Deuteronomy 6:4
e.g. 2 Corinthians 13:14