A Trinitarian / Ecclesial Tapestry – Robert Saler reflects on living into the economy of trinity and church.
Care for Creation Commentary on the Revised Common Lectionary
Readings for the Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year C (2016, 2019, 2022, 2025)
Acts 9:36-43
Psalm 23
Revelation 7:9-17
John 10:22-30
The Acts 9 reading for today is a clear instance of how the logic of Acts’ depiction of the early church works. In what we would today call a “callback” to Luke 8, Peter resurrects a woman who has died—in this case, a disciple of Jesus. Meanwhile, in the John reading, Jesus has a plain occasion against his opponents to state—in the high Christological fashion characteristic of that gospel—the plain fact of his literal identity with the Father: “the Father and I are one.”
Taken together, the readings weave a sort of Trinitarian/ecclesial tapestry. What is the point of the Trinity? It is that the character of Jesus reveals the character of God. William Placher, the late professor of theology at Wabash College, was fond of telling a poignant story wherein he was at the bedside of a dying woman. Turning to him as her resident theology expert, she said to him, “Bill, I just have one question. Is God really like Jesus?” As this dying woman prepared to meet the God whom she had worshipped most of her life in church, her main question was whether the character of that God is trustworthily revealed in what we know of Jesus from the gospel accounts. The point of Trinitarian theology, behind all of its metaphysical nuances and exegetical subtlety, is really to be able to give a “yes” answer to that question.
And if Jesus truly reveals the character of God, then the point of the parallelism between the Jesus of the Gospels and the early church in the book of Acts is to continue that symmetry and identity even further. Jesus is really like God, and when the church is at its best, it is “really like” Jesus. Jesus suffers on the cross: this event has implications in the life of God, and it creates a church that is willing to suffer rather than dominate (at least, at its best!). The church has, clearly, failed spectacularly at various points in history to live into this symmetry—and indeed, no more so than when the church is powerful on cultural and political terms. But the vision is still present, and it still finds embodiment in countless (largely anonymous) works of care and humility throughout time and space. As the theologian Bruce Marshall has stated, the church is not a by-product of the gospel; the church is part of the gospel itself. The real body of Jesus of Nazareth gives way to the real body of Christ formed by the church community acting in the name and Spirit of Jesus.
For those engaged in the work of creation care, then, this Sunday is a chance to reflect on what it means to live into this symmetry in a world imperiled by our radical failures to live lives of love, healing, and reconciliation. If, as activists say, “the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house,” then environmental activists cannot actively mimic the ways of domination that got our planet into its mess. This is not to say that we do not occasionally engage in leveraging power through community organization, politics, etc.—indeed, those are crucial parts of environmental activism. But the church’s role is to ground such action in a broader economy of God’s salvation such that people look to the church’s action and see in it the sort of logic that drove the early church to model itself upon a crucified and resurrected Galilean peasant.
If Jesus truly shows God, and the church truly shows Jesus, then how does the church go about the work of healing creation as Jesus did? What implications does this have for particularly Christian modes of environmental action, even as part of that answer surely involves solidarity with non-Christians? This Sunday is a rich time to reflect on these questions in robustly Trinitarian, ecclesially rich fashion.
Originally written by Robert Saler in 2016.
rsaler@hotmail.com