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When they saw him they worshipped him; but some doubted.
The story involves a street-wise servant, a wide-boy, who through many a tortuous plot and cunning scheme winds things around to his own advantage and twists his aristocratic employers around his little finger. So, what is the story? Well, it could be the plot of a farce by the Roman comic playwright, Plautus, who lived two hundred years before the birth of Jesus. On the other hand, it could be the story of "The Marriage of Figaro", first a play written by Beaumarchais and then an opera written by Mozart. Or, to come full circle, it could be an episode from Frankie Howerd's television series, "Up Pompeii" – which pinched many of its best plots and lines from Plautus in the first place! Ascertaining precise origin and provenance is very important, not least when considering the text of the Gospels.
So, what do we find when we consider the closing verses of Saint Matthew's Gospel? Let us take a scholarly look at this without being dry and dusty about it. Most commentators have long believed that the first Gospel to be written was that of Saint Mark, and they date it around about 65AD, just before the outbreak of The Jewish War which saw the eventual destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. Saint Matthew seems to rely upon the written source of Mark's Gospel to construct his own, but in turn, the first person to quote from Saint Matthew's Gospel is Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, who was writing about 110AD. Most scholars give a bracket of possible dates for Saint Matthew's Gospel, and the safest assessment is to say that it was written sometime in the last quarter of the first century AD.
Now go to the text, where you will find the well-known saying, ostensibly of Jesus himself, in reference to baptism "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit". You have a variety of choices that could be made. This formulation could be, verbatim, the words of the risen Christ himself. Or, it could be a formula drawing on various parts of Jesus' teaching and explaining how a form of words came into being when the Early Church took over the baptismal practice of John the Baptist and adapted it as a rite of entry into the Christian community – effectively, a summary or synopsis of divine teaching and developed church practice.
But do not let that blind you to the utterly staggering realisation that the Trinitarian formula at the end of Saint Matthew's Gospel is found at least two hundred and fifty years before the Early Church catches up and enshrines its own doctrinal conclusions in the Trinitarian Nicene Creed. It pre-dates Saint John's statement of the pre-existence of the Son in the magisterial Fourth Gospel Prologue. It renders almost irrelevant the opening of the Letter to the Hebrews that suggests that Christ was a form of being higher than the angels, but less than fully God. More amazing than all that, it shows that a community who were strictly monotheistic – that is, they believed that there was only one divine being – were validating the sacrament of baptism in the name of three divine "persons", even before the Early Church Fathers came up with the concept.
What was the Early Church doing when it enshrined the Trinitarian formula so deeply in its faith and practice, so early in its history? They were trying to describe not only the reality of their experience of the life and death and resurrection of Christ, and the subsequent experience of the Holy Spirit, but also the spiritual and metaphysical implications of all those things. They were saying: this is what we have experienced, and therefore this is what we believe the metaphysical reality of it must amount to. The later Great Ecumenical Councils of the Church, which formulated and validated the Creeds after many years of debate, set the conclusions that the Christian Church, in its orthodox statements of belief, still adheres to nearly two thousand years later.
In the light of two thousand years of the development of thought in science and philosophy, do we now need a restructured formula or model to describe what Christian people believe about metaphysical realities? Perhaps there can be no definite answer to that question, except to set against it other questions. Dare we leave behind the expressions of personal relationship, literal or metaphorical, in respect to the divine that Jesus taught us to use – to speak of Father and of Son, and of the spiritual presence of the divine amongst us? Dare we say that our knowledge and experience are now infinitely superior to the knowledge and experience of those who lived so close to the absolute foundational events of our faith? Are we ready to substitute our own insights and speculations for the conclusions of the Early Church that took four hundred years to wrestle out and refine?
I think that we need to go back to the closing verses of Saint Matthew's Gospel that so often constitute the scriptural foundation for the exposition of the doctrine of the Church that we contemplate on Trinity Sunday – the description of metaphysical realities as Christians have understood them for two thousand years. In the Gospels of Saint Mark and Saint Matthew, the angels at the empty tomb speak of the risen Christ going to Galilee. Saint Luke omits this, because he is immediately going to describe a resurrection encounter on the road to Emmaus. So, Saint Matthew's Gospel closes in Galilee, to which the disciples have travelled. They meet the risen Christ and their immediate response is to worship him.
Leave aside the fact that only the fully divine can be worshipped, and by so doing the disciples have already gone beyond the practice of strict monotheism. After all that they had experienced, at a point in the Gospel when Saint Matthew should be at his most triumphant, he is honest enough to admit that some doubted. Initially, that assertion sounds not honest but ridiculous. There they are, confronted by the reality of the risen Christ himself, and yet still some doubted! Why? How? Even more amazingly, Saint Matthew is not talking about casual followers on the fringe. When Saint Matthew says, some doubted, he is speaking of some amongst the remaining eleven apostles. These are the people who ought to have no doubt whatsoever, because if they do, will it not then be a case of the blind leading the blind?
No – Saint Matthew's assertion is far deeper, far more sophisticated, far more perceptive than that, and on Trinity Sunday we have got to take seriously what he is getting at, and to relate it more closely to our own circumstances and experience of Christian faith. Faith is always a mixture of emotion and intellect. The intellect is what prevents the emotions from making faith an exercise of wish-fulfilment. The emotions are what prevent the intellect from making faith an exercise of dry philosophising that misses the encounter with the divine. Such an encounter always constitutes a relationship, and the doctrine of the Holy Trinity attempts to describe a divine relationship that has reflections in the relationship between God and human beings. It may be complicated. It may even be tortuous, in its attempt to maintain belief in one divine being and yet relate that to human experience of three divine manifestations. No wonder that some doubted. But despite intellectual difficulties to resolve, they still worshipped him, possibly because, when they thought about it, what God had given them was all that they were going to get this side of heaven. To formulate metaphysical conclusions other than in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity would have been to risk losing that element of "relationship" that was so vital in describing what they believed that they had experienced.
It was all so long ago, wasn't it, that mountaintop in Galilee? It was centuries ago that fervent old men, faithful and marvellously be-whiskered, the religious intellects of their age, formulated the structure of what did justice to the reality of the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and how that related to the experience of the one God whom their forefathers had worshipped for centuries before that. When they saw him they worshipped him… Yes, I shall go along with what they concluded, and worship the God in three Persons whom they worshipped… But some doubted… oh, of course they did. Doubt is always the most respectable anvil upon which the real truth in all its beauty is hammered out.