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In touch

Up-to-the-minute jumping-off points for sermons, linking the reading to the latest news and global issues

Generous love

Can the trinitarian hints offered by John (3.1-17) offer resources for positive engagement between Christians and people of other faiths?

 

Context

Rawan Anani is a Palestinian artist whose colourful paintings evoke her love for her homeland and its culture. Last week my attention was drawn to her recently painted ’Gaza in my heart’ which shows three women standing in the waters off Gaza closely drawn together and set against a backcloth of a traditional roofscape of Gaza. The crescents on the top of a number of buildings are intended to suggest the minarets of mosques; but it is also notable that one building is marked with a cross – a reminder that, though the Christian community of Gaza is now very much diminished in size, Gaza has been a city where Christians and Muslims have lived together for centuries.

However, perhaps because Trinity Sunday was already in my mind, when I saw Anani’s painting I was reminded of the very famous icon of the Trinity by Andre Rublev, which depicts the three divine figures who visited Abraham (Genesis 18.1-15), and which is called ‘the Icon of the Hospitality of Abraham’. The pose of the three women in Anani’s painting is curiously reminiscent of the pose of Rublev’s angels, and both Rublev and Anani seem to invite the viewer to enter the picture and join the circle. One key difference of course is that the features of the faces of the women are somehow ‘blotted out’ – which is also a feature of other examples of Anani’s art. See examples at Anani’s gallery.

What is the message that this feature is intending to convey? Certainly for me, those ‘blotted out faces’ speak into the sadness of the current situation in Gaza and other places in Israel and Palestine.

Intriguingly, when my husband looked at Anani’s picture what came to mind for him was not Abraham’s visitors, but the three young men of the burning fiery furnace of Daniel 3.23-25. The male figures of Daniel’s vision have been replaced by three young women, and the fire by the waters in which they stand. That too is a powerful cross-association.

 

Ideas for sermons or interactive talks

• I wrote the following prayer about 20 years ago. It focuses on this week’s lectionary readings, drawing together Isaiah’s vision of God’s holiness, with the trinitarian God of John 3, who is both loving and elusive. Over the years since I have found myself, almost by accident, working increasingly in the area of interreligious engagement, initially on behalf of the Anglican Communion, more recently ecumenically. One of my learnings has been that the Christian understanding of God as Trinity is not a barrier to dialogue with other faiths but can actually help to enable it. A trinitarian understanding of God allows Christians to affirm diversity in unity, to hold together ‘the scandal of particularity’ which focuses on God working in a particular time and place, with and in the particular person of Jesus Christ, alongside a sense of God’s divine generous elusiveness which means that we can never quite pin him – or her – down. ‘The wind blows where it wills…’ (John 3.8). The prayer I hope catches something of that dynamic, as it speaks of the particularity of ‘the song of a people’ alongside the elusiveness of the ‘quiet breeze’

A prayer of thanksgiving

Holy One, we hear your music in the roar of the sea,
In the song of a people,
In the quiet breeze rustling through the trees.
We thank you God:
That you so love our world. 

Holy One, we sense your power in the flickering of fire,
In the yearning of our spirits,
In the dispelling of shadows.
We thank you God:
That you so love our world. 

Holy One, we feel your caress in the gift of our humanity,
In our desire to be whole,
In the blessing of peace.
We thank you God:
That you so love our world.

• One of the pieces of work that I was most proud to help bring to birth in these years was an Anglican Communion report on a theology of inter faith relations: Generous Love – the truth of the Gospel and the call to dialogue. Generous Love, which was well received, (the name itself was a ‘winner’!) explores the Christian understanding of Trinity as a rationale for interreligious/interfaith engagement on the part of Anglicans. It alludes to John 3 – and if you look at it there may be useful insights that you could draw on more widely for reflecting on our understanding of God as Trinity.

• It is only fairly recently that I spotted something that intrigues me, in the ‘great’ verse, John 3.16. This is actually the first time that the word ‘love’ is mentioned in the Gospel of John. Later on of course, particularly in the Farewell Discourses, ‘love’ will reappear many times. But it is interesting that this is the first occurrence. What I also realised is that the first time that the word ‘love’ appears in the Bible, in the Book of Genesis, is in Genesis 22.2 as God commands Abraham to sacrifice Isaac ‘his only and beloved son’. There is therefore a curious parallel – yet difference - with John 3.16 which also speaks of an ‘only Son’ being sacrificed, but in this case because God ‘so loved the world’. In later chapters in John’s Gospel the mutual love of Father and Son will be stressed, but it is intriguing that on this first occasion it is God’s love for the world that is mentioned. I believe that this is a deliberate ‘echo’ of the story of Abraham and Isaac in John’s Gospel. I have in fact recently written an article on this.

• Abraham is of course a figure who is important to Jews and Muslims, as well as Christians. So is the story of the near sacrifice of his son. Can Abraham – the first human being in the Bible who is the subject of the verb ‘love’ become a common thread of reconciliation for his strife-ridden contemporary children, in Israel, in Palestine and throughout our world today?

‘Abraham’s house was open to all the children of men,
those going past and those returning,
and day by day they came
to eat and drink with Abraham.
To those who were hungry he gave bread,
and the guests ate and drank and were filled.
Those who came naked to his house
he clothed,
and helped them to experience God,
the creator of all things.’
M.J.Bin-Gorion, Berlin, 1935, p. 268. Quoted and translated in Karl-Josef Kuschel, Abraham, p.xi

 

Questions for discussion

• In what ways can our Christian faith in God as Trinity be helpful in affirming the many diversities in our present day world?
• Is it significant that the first time the word ‘love’ is used in the Gospel of John it comes in this passage which speaks of both God as both mysterious, yet also so close at hand?

Since retirement in 2018 from her role as head of the interreligious office of the World Council of Churches, Dr Clare Amos still continues her interest in biblical studies and interreligious engagement. She has recently finished a new edition of her commentary on Genesis, first published in 2004, and is currently completing a short book exploring religion, violence and peace-making.

  

Check-in

Connecting faith with everyday, real-life issues for young people

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s been a fairly damp May.

In fact, for large parts of the United Kingdom it is on track to be the wettest May since records began. It definitely hasn’t been the weather for hanging out with friends at the beach or the park. Although, if you are in the middle of revising or working on coursework, perhaps that lack of temptation to ditch the books and head outside has been a relief.

What has brought about all this rain?

The complicated answer involves a combination of jet stream, low pressure fronts and towering cumulonimbus storm clouds. The simple answer is wind. The wind was gentler than normal in April, now it has got stronger and is pushing over the rainy conditions we’re used to seeing earlier in the year.

In John 3.8 Jesus compares the Spirit of God to the wind, saying that while we cannot see the wind or predict how it will move, we can feel and hear its effects.  Jesus was doing this to teach Nicodemus, a religious leader, how the Holy Spirit moves in ways we cannot fully understand but which can change us and help us find new life in God.

The challenge for all of us in our busy lives is to take time and be still and see where God ‘s Spirit is at work in our lives and the lives of those around us. This isn’t always easy but in doing so we become closer to God.

Where can you see God at work in your life? What does it feel like if God’s presence is sometimes unusual or unexpected like the wind and rain we’ve seen this month?

Chris Neilands runs Play it by Ear drama company which helps people connect with the Bible and explore some of the big questions of faith through performances and workshop. You can find out more at www.playitbyeardrama.com 

 

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