Sunday Readings: Exodus 34.4-6,8-9 2 Corinthians 13.11-13 John 3.16-18
Yes, God so loved the world, that God gave God’s only Son, that whoever believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life (John 3.16).
The Greek theologians Gregory Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa were especially helpful in imaging the Trinity. They use the term person to name Christians’ experience of God as three. They understand God’s very nature as free and relational. God exists not first as one and then as three, but God exists as persons-in-communion.
These Greek theologians use the word perichoresis in imaging the Trinity as persons-in-communion, who exist in a kind of divine round dance in which no one person is superior or inferior to the other. The three persons together form one source of life, one source of our being, which like theirs is being-in-relation.
English speakers know the prefix peri, for example, in the word perimeter. We know chores from doing them every day. The Greek lexicon explains that chor means to dance around. A chorus is a joyful round dance, circling, intertwining. In Broadway musicals a chorus sings and dances, creating joy and intertwining their voices in both harmony and unity.
A chore refers to a regular task that involves getting out and about, such as feeding animals and taking out the trash. Doctors make rounds to check on their patients. Perichoresis gives us a picture of three persons in one love interacting dynamically, making the rounds of each other as in a dance, reciprocally and mutually exchanging beauty and delight.
Unlike the round dance image, the common two-men-and-a-bird image creates a problem. It leads us to see the three persons of the Trinity in an order of importance and chronology—the oldest man first, the Father; then the young man, the Son; and finally the bird, the usually neglected if not forgotten Spirit.
In the image of making rounds, God is a dynamic community, and a community of equals becomes our human ideal. Once we no longer image God as an isolated, aloof monarch, we realize we should not live isolated lives either. Bonds of love and ever-generating life link us and all creation.
What difference does your image of the Trinity make in your life?