Jesus’ Greatest Failure
Let’s take a minute and think about the greatest Teacher the world has ever known. It is a great miracle that Jesus was able to show us profound spiritual truths without using the big words theologians love! We stand in awe at the depth and beauty and power of His words. Sadly, Jesus’ parables are also woefully incomplete! Somehow or another He failed to address the single most important theological issue Christians are expected to understand. We must face facts and admit that Jesus neglected to teach us anything about the Trinity! Jesus’ greatest failure is that He taught no parables about the Trinity. None at all. Not even one.
Jesus Did Not Give Us the Parables We Need!
It is deeply disappointing to realize that the Son of God failed to give us any teachings or parables to help us understand the trinity! You know it’s true! Jesus claimed to have told us “all things” but can we find even one parable He taught about the Triune God? Where in Jesus’ teachings is there any attempt at all to explain the Holy Trinity? Where is it we ask? The answer is distressing… it is not there. Jesus did not give us the parables we need most!
What an incredible oversight! We all know there is nothing more important in our theology than the doctrine of Three Persons in One God! How can it be that Jesus completely failed to give us a single parable about the Trinity? Not even one! It looks like the greatest Teacher the world has ever known really dropped the ball on this one brethren, and that is why we had to come up with our own parables.
We Are Not Passing Judgment on Jesus!
Now don’t think for a minute that we are passing judgment on Jesus! We all know He did a great job with so many other things. Nevertheless, His failure to teach about the Trinity is a glaring omission and one we cannot overlook! Thanks be to God for the Church Fathers! They were the theologians who bravely stepped into the gaping holes Jesus left in His teachings and filled them to the brim with intellectual sophistication and scholarly language. The Church Fathers wrote their high quality creeds about the trinity out of necessity! Like the crew of the star ship Enterprise on Star Trek “They bravely went where no man had gone before.”
Do “The Secret Things” Really Belong to God?
The Good Book says, “The secret things belong to God but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever.” (Deuteronomy 29:29) Are we, as some like to say, just pretending to understand the deepest mysteries of God’s very Being? Perhaps we actually do “see through a glass darkly” (I Corinthians 13:12). We who can barely understand our own wives now claim to have penetrated the mystery of God’s very Being in eternity past! It almost makes us wonder if we have waded out into water that is way over our heads.
Why Didn’t Jesus Explain the Trinity?
You may be wondering why Jesus never gave us a clear explanation of the Trinity. Everyone knows it is the single most important thing we believe! Those who deny it have been banished, tortured and killed by those who are smart enough to go along with the dogma of our triune creeds. Many have wondered why Jesus didn’t write a good trinitarian creed Himself and just get it done with. We know that trinitarian belief is really important so why didn’t Jesus explain the trinity?
Jesus Was Depending on Us!
Yes we have devised some beautiful parables of our own but why didn’t Jesus teach these Himself? Was He so busy with His earthly ministry that it just slipped His mind? To this day no one really knows why He left us so tragically in the dark and adrift on a sea of uncertainty. Is it possible He knew we would come up with some pretty good parables of our own if we just had enough time? It seems clear in hindsight that Jesus was depending on us! We believe He was hoping that we would create some parables for Him from the richness of our own imaginations! We should be flattered that Jesus never taught on the most important doctrine of the church. He was counting on us to do it!
What Magnificent Parables We Have Written!
And what magnificent parables men have written! Our parables are easy to understand and they do seem to convey something important. Some of our illustrations are so good I bet Jesus almost wishes He had taught them Himself. Just because the parables we invented about the trinity have no basis in scripture is no reason to mock them. No indeed! That would be rude.
An Imaginary Meeting With Jesus
Close your eyes and try to envision this imaginary meeting with Jesus. His disciples were sitting at His feet in the quiet and stillness of the evening. The labors of the day were finished and the crowds had been sent away. Multitudes had been fed, miracles had been wrought and a great many people had been healed. Perhaps Jesus had walked on the water that very day! His disciples believed in Him and loved Him, but they still had questions. And then… one of the disciples raised a hand and said, “Lord, could you kind of explain to us about You and God? I don’t mean to sound stupid but how does it all fit together?”
God is Like a Triangle!
With great love and patience, Jesus looked upon His disciples and when He knew they were ready to hear Him He said, “You must open your eyes and see that God is like a triangle!” His disciples were dumbfounded! They had never seen anything about God being a triangle in the Hebrew scriptures! Jesus’ explanation left them totally baffled. They were more bewildered than ever. The obvious question no one dared to ask was “What in the world does a triangle have to do with God?” It sure didn’t sound Biblical to their ears. Sensing their confusion, Jesus went on. “Look men, a triangle has three points connected by three sides and a nice big pyramid shape in the middle! Don’t you get it? It has three points but is just one triangle and that is me and God!” His disciples looked dazed but things were about to get worse.
Is God Like an Egg?
Jesus sensed their failure to understand so He raised His voice and said, “God is like an egg I tell you! That’s how it is with me and God! Every egg has a shell and yolk and some egg white but it’s just one egg. All you have to do is think of eggs and the Mystery of God will make perfect sense to you.” Well, that really jumbled things up in the minds of His disciples! They started mumbling, “What does that have to do with God? First triangles and now eggs? These ideas don’t make anything clear, they don’t sound at all like scripture and they sure don’t glorify God. None of this makes sense to us Lord!”
Is God Like Water, Ice, and Steam?
Then all the disciples with one voice began to say unto Him, “Lord, we don’t understand what you are trying to say!” It had already been a long day but Jesus decided to try one more time. He wanted to elevate their thinking to heavenly things so He patiently said, “Let’s see if you can get this one! God is like a cup of water and an ice cube and steam that rises from a boiling pot! They are all different but they are all the same!” That didn’t seem to help much either and this is why no parables about the Trinity can be found anywhere in the Bible to this very day.
The Apostles Were Very Primitive Christians
Jesus finished His teachings by saying, “How is it that you are so blind? In 300 years or so some really clever philosophers will create doctrines you’ve never dreamed of and these are their parables! You are just too primitive to get it.” The disciples’ heads were spinning! They had never heard anything like this before which was little wonder. All they knew was sacred scripture. From our vantage point today we can easily see that the Apostles were very primitive Christians. (Believers didn’t even begin to get sophisticated or modern until the Councils of Nicea and Chalcedon.)
Unbiblical Ideas Call for Unbiblical Parables!
One thing we have learned is that the teachings of scripture do not result in the parables we need. Unbiblical ideas call for unbiblical parables! The dogmas we believe and illustrations we use to explain them may not be Biblical but they are very convincing! Most Christians believe in our creeds and recite them faithfully whenever they meet for worship! Ask them about the mystery of God and they will solemnly recite the parables we have invented. They will proclaim our parables of triangles and eggs and glasses of water with a straight face!
The Possibilities Are Endless!
Perhaps someday someone somewhere will expand the limits of our understanding even further and create new parables that are even more stunning than what we have now. There may come a time when Christians everywhere will embrace the parable of an egg frozen in a block of ice shaped like a triangle! The possibilities are endless! We can only imagine…
A Song of Parables (Sung to the tune of the Doxology)
All God’s points are numbered three, We love triangularity!
How blessed is our theology!
Bless God of shell and yolk and white, Bless every holy egg in sight!
So blessed is our theology!
Bless our frozen liquid One, who turns to steam when we are done!
Oh bless our lovely Trinity, and all our fine theology!
PS: Oh my goodness! Did we actually say these things out loud and in print? You bet we did and think it’s long overdue! Now you can say them too.
Copyright 2025 by Bob Shutes
your theology in the same way we would look at the ingredients in the food you buy. Are there any unhealthy additives in your theology?” Unless you actually look at the ingredients in your food (and your beliefs about God), you won’t know if they contain any toxic additives or ingredients that could be bad for you! If your spiritual nutrition is contaminated with man-made additives (ideas) that no one even really understands, that’s a big red flag!
