“No-one has ever seen God. The only-begotten Son who is in the
bosom of the Father; he has made him known”
We meet together in the glory of the revealed God, the glory of the Trinity. All our beginnings and all our endings have their place of meeting in the Trinity. It is, we may say, the one thing essential. No Trinity, no Christianity. “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’, except by the Holy Ghost” (1 Cor.12.3). To say “Jesus is Lord” is to make a Trinitarian statement.
Essential Christianity is Trinitarian. What do I mean? That the doctrine of the Trinity is essential to Christian identity, corporately and individually. You are baptized in the Name of the Trinity, God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. At Holy Communion, we participate in nothing less than the Son’s Thanksgiving to the Father in the Spirit. Our liturgy is full of the Trinity. And yet, we have the greatest difficulty about the essentials of the Christian Faith. The doctrine of the Trinity is what gives coherence and meaning to the things which are to be believed, the credenda, the things which we say in the Creed, first of all, and then the things which follow from them which belong to the moral and political order of the Church’s life and which shape the agenda, the things that are to be done in our practical lives. Essential things shape action without being reduced to particular issues and agendas.
The problem for the Anglican Communion lies in this confusion. You see, there are endless numbers of things about which we might have quite legitimate but different opinions. About those things there can be no insistence, no coercion. They cannot be made the essential things of our Anglican and Christian identity. The doctrine of the Trinity, on the other hand, is essential. It is one of the non-negotiables of the Christian Faith. The result of the most intense reflection upon the Scriptures and human experience imaginable, it is at the heart of the consensus fidelium, the consensus of the faith, which we receive. It is not ours to re-invent, re-image or re-define. It is the mystery into which we can only enter and discover the rich fullness of its power and truth.
Trinity Sunday sets this before us most powerfully and most beautifully in our Scripture lessons. Think of that outstanding vision of heaven in the Revelation of St. John the Divine, a vision of humanity’s worship and praise of the Triune God. Think, too, of the story of learned Nicodemus coming to Jesus and being told he must be born again, born into the things of the spirit. His question, “How can these things be?” captures the sense of wonder and awe about the mystery of God which we cannot exhaust and cannot reduce to our own immediate concerns and finite minds. Nor is it a matter of blind faith. To believe it is to think it. In a way, we cannot not think it, which is not to say that we ever understand it fully. It remains the mystery revealed, not concealed.
For centuries, Anglican liturgical practice meant the recitation of the Athanasian Creed, one of the three great Creeds of the Christian Faith, thirteen times a year, including, Trinity Sunday. The Creed is still there in The Book of Common Prayer (Cdn. 1962), albeit at the back of the book. No doubt you have perused it while suffering through your rector’s ramblings. It is most explicit about the Trinity and the Incarnation. I would be remiss if I didn’t commend it to your careful study. It is found on page 695. Awkward for use in the liturgy perhaps, it nonetheless remains one of the foundational statements about the Christian Faith. And so we come to Trinity Sunday itself, a day in which the Church celebrates nothing less than the doctrinal mystery of God’s self-revelation and its significance for our lives.
Trinity Sunday signals an ending and marks a beginning. There is an ending of all that we have gone through from Advent to this day, an ending that is a kind of gathering, a threefold gathering. What kind of gathering?
First, there is the gathering of all the history of salvation into this fullness of revelation. Secondly, there is the gathering of all religion into this fullness of meaning. Thirdly, there is the gathering of all the substantial moments in the life of Christ into this fullness of understanding. We have run through the Creed, as it were, and reached the summit of its understanding. In other words, the doctrine of the Trinity is the Christian teaching, par excellence, through which we engage respectfully with the religions of the world, including the various denominations of atheism, and through which we think the various images of salvation in the Scriptures.
Trinity Sunday marks a beginning, too. There is our entry by grace, year by year, into the fullness of revelation, the fullness of meaning and the fullness of understanding which have been opened to view. “Behold a door was opened in heaven” (Rev.4.1). We are given to behold and enter into what we behold. What we behold are the highest things of the Spirit; in short, the spiritual reality of the living God.
To behold the highest things of heaven is to make a new beginning: “ye must be born again”, born anew, born from above. There must be in us a renewal of our understanding of what it means to be born again. We enter by grace into what Jesus wants us to know so that the divine life opened to view might take shape in us for our good and to his glory. It is our constant challenge and struggle. It is also our highest freedom and greatest dignity.
It means a new perspective, a deeper understanding and a beholding of things from above. There is a constant need for the resurrection of our understanding in the things which Jesus wants us to know. There are essentially two things which Jesus wants us to know. They are the things into which everything he says and does are gathered and find their place.
He has come to us with a twofold purpose: to reveal and to redeem; more precisely, to reveal God to us and to redeem us to God. What he wants us essentially to know concerns his divine identity and his identity with us. There is in fact an exegesis of God, a making known of God. Jesus himself is the exegesis, the interpretive exposition. “He who has seen me has seen the Father.”
The point is made most explicitly in the Prologue to St. John’s Gospel. “No one has ever seen God; the only-begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known” (John 1.18). It is the only place in the Scriptures where exegesis, a making known, is used, not about a text or about an event, but about God himself. Jesus is the exegesis of God. He makes God known to us even as he is the mediator between God and Man who brings us into fellowship with God. That fellowship is the fellowship of the Trinity, the fellowship of God with God in God. “Behold, a door was opened in heaven.” We behold what we enjoy, the fellowship of the Trinity.
The 17th century poet, George Herbert, puts it best, echoing the lesson from Revelation in part, even as a twentieth-century theologian, Austin Farrer, helps us to understand the special wonder of it all in terms of the Holy Communion.
Thou hast but two rare cabinets full of treasure,
the Trinitie, and Incarnation;
Thou hast unlockt them both
And made them jewels to betroth
the work of thy creation
Unto thy self in everlasting pleasure.
(Ungratefulnesse, George Herbert)
Austin Farrer gives us some sense of the unique nature of the fellowship.
The disciples who were present at the Supper saw and heard Jesus Christ making eucharist to the Father over the bread and the cup. They were witnesses of the intercourse between the Eternal Son and his Eternal Father. Mortal ears and eyes at that moment perceived the movement of speech and love which passes in the heart of the Godhead; human minds entered into that converse of the Divine Persons which is the life and happiness of the Blessed Trinity. Belief in the Trinity is not a distant speculation; the Trinity is that blessed family into which we are adopted. God has asked us into his house, he has spread his table before us, he has set out bread and wine. We are made one body with the Son of God, and in him converse with the Eternal Father, through the indwelling of the Holy Ghost.
You see, not only has “a door been opened in heaven” but we have been invited into the fellowship of God through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. “No one has ever seen God; the only-begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known.” We have fellowship with him whom we behold.
“No-one has ever seen God. The only-begotten Son who is in the
bosom of the Father; he has made him known”
Fr. David Curry
Christ Church, Windsor,
Trinity Sunday, ‘09