Trauma in the Trinity

Photo by Wim van 't Einde on Unsplash

For all we say, I wonder if we want what this season offers, this Holy Week so focused on the Cross of Christ. There’s glory in the message we tell on Good Friday, but also a bit of the gory: An innocent man put through a horrible death. The Cross, when we look hard, was dramatic: a trauma, even. It feels gritty, like sand in the mouth when you’re at the beach, gravelly instead of the smoothness of water or silk.

My new friend Margery Kennelly told a story in a recent sermon that made me think of how gripping and possibly off-putting the crucifixion of Christ can seem. Especially if what we want is a modest God, a spoonful of comfort, maybe. A taste of companionship but not the whole meal.

She was doing rounds in a hospital as a student chaplain.

“In the morning,” she recounts, “I was visiting patients on the third floor.” One patient, having endured a stressful time that landed her in the hospital with ulcers, told Margery that she was looking for “some sort of spiritual resources.” She wanted hope or guidance that might help her better cope. “But,” Margery recalls, “she told me that she could not quite get around to becoming a Christian.”

“Why?” Margery gently asked.

“I never asked God,” the woman said, “to send his son to die for me.”

Margery had felt something similar earlier herself: “A time in my life,” she said, “that I had also thought that Jesus dying for me seemed—well, just too much. My life was going along just fine without him, thank you very much.” She didn’t see why she needed a savior.

And trained to be attentive and understanding, reflecting back what she perceived the woman felt, Margery said, “Oh, so it seems sort of overkill on God’s part, [his doing that] on your behalf—presuming you need more help than you actually do, and you feel a bit put out that now you are supposed to be grateful for something you never asked for.”

The woman nodded her head. “She needed a little dose of tranquility or maybe a teaspoon of hopefulness,” Margery observes. “Maybe a few wise sayings from our Lord. But she did not need Jesus himself.” Not Jesus with his expansive heart and inconvenient talk of a cost to knowing him and following him. (From Margery’s March 10 sermon at St. George’s Episcopal Church in Nashville.)

And I think of our own wants, our “felt needs.” Do we want God to be close to us, involved in our human lives?

Well, sure, sometimes, when we need help in a jam. When we want a sense that “the universe” is somehow “working things out” in our seemingly haphazard lives. When we want to turn to Someone to utter a welling-up word of gratitude.

But the story of Jesus, particularly during this Holy Week, puts before us something more jarring and intimate and ultimate.

Some see talk of what happened on the Cross as a repugnant betrayal of who a loving heavenly Father should be. There’s certainly brokenness here: The nail holes, the wound to Jesus’s side from a spear run through. His cry of forsakenness. The abject humiliation and dehumanizing inherent in crucifixion. It takes some stomach to look on. For now we see how this sunny, airy doctrine about the Cross of Christ looms darker than we thought—but also, I’m seeing, looms in a good way, an honest way.

What Christian Wiman calls our “solitary and singular” suffering through the human condition, it turns out, has been shared by Christ. He knows our suffering well because he took it all on; he lived among us, experiencing even death. And might the harder turns in the story of the Son of God’s suffering and death ring true to life’s wickedness and wreckage, the battering ram of our own disappointments? Ring true to our trip-ups and screw-ups and unruly penchants for what harms us and others?

For the ancient church has taught from the beginning that to speak of a God named Trinity is to point to a God of costly kinship and self-sacrificial kindness, One whose love weathers great estrangement and thereby has great power to reconcile. Whose story line seems hopeless but for all that overcomes the sting of death and opens the kingdom to all believers.

There is no question, then, seen in some extreme examples of distaste for a crucified Messiah, “of a sadist Father torturing an innocent Son,” as Fleming Rutledge writes in her masterful The Crucifixion. For no, here I see what she calls “the joyful cooperation of the whole Trinity to rectify human disaster.”

This is not cosmic child abuse, but God willingly submitted to the suffering that true love entails.

Jesus died desperately alone on the cross, but there never occurred to me any sense that the Son was subject to neglect from an angry Father while a distant, disinterested Holy Spirit stood off. Rather the whole array of the Trinity’s loving communion allowed for this disruption, willingly participated in the horrors. “It is indeed,” says Thomas Torrance, “God’s threefold giving of himself to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit that is our salvation.” (Quoted by Fleming in The Crucifixion.)

Isn’t it true that to love another means the holy risk of being hurt? I am moved by what theologian Jürgen Moltmann calls the “suffering of love, in which one voluntarily opens himself to the possibility of being affected by another.” Willingly is the operative word. To say that God in all God’s triune greatness and transcendence does not have to suffer for us is true enough. God is, in more than one sense, above all that causes us hurt and fear. And God is not obligated, nor prone to the changing seasons of feelings.

But to love is not only to feel joy, it also inevitably sometimes means a longing wound. It is to mourn when the beloved turns away, or dishes out rejection, or walks off, shrugging shoulders as if to care less. Or crucifies One sent to do good.

All that God gives comes out of freely given, interchanged love, extended now to us, offered to help us. We in our need realize how much we yearn for Someone just like this.