“If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not; how shall ye believe,
if I tell you of heavenly things?”
It is Jesus’s question to Nicodemus who had asked, “how can these things be?” “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” Jesus had said. “Behold, a door was opened in heaven” and “immediately,” John the Divine tells us, “I was in the Spirit.”
Great mysteries are before our very eyes. Trinity Sunday celebrates the great and distinctive teaching of the Christian Faith. It does not celebrate an event. Nor is it about some moral lesson for us to act upon in our lives. It celebrates simply and clearly the mystery of God revealed. That is the great wonder that underlies the whole of reality and the whole meaning of our lives, morally and spiritually, intellectually and practically.
Our Church and culture is dead when it is no longer alive to the mystery of the Trinity. God’s relation to everything else is founded in God himself. We cannot not think the Trinity; to think it is our greatest challenge. The to-and-fro of questions between Nicodemus and Jesus signal the nature of that thinking. It is in the truest sense analogical thinking, thinking upwards, thinking into what has been shown to us, which are not simply earthly things but heavenly things. Being born again is not the monopoly of the charismatic and Pentecostal forms of Christian faith; it is the truth of the Christian faith. We are defined by what God reveals to us: himself, from which everything else derives. Religion is as dead as a door-nail when we think of it in terms of what pleases us or what is useful to us. Our instrumental reason betrays us when we attempt to turn everything into ways and means and deny what has intrinsic worth and value.
Trinity Sunday is the counter to the deep atheisms and shallow idolatries of our contemporary world. We behold a mystery. A door, and not merely a window, has been opened. We are privileged to stand on the threshold of heaven itself. We are asked to think upwards into the mystery which is revealed. It is the mystery of God as Trinity, the central mystery of the Christian Faith without which all the other doctrines and teachings are as nothing and nothing worth. God is the great three-in-one, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. As the third great creed of the Church, the Athanasian Creed reminds us, “he that would be saved, let him thus think of the Trinity,” meaning think of the Trinity in this way. And what is this way? How God is this and not this; affirmative and negative theology, as it is called. To distinguish God from everything else in the world – such is his transcendence – he is above and beyond, to use spatial images. To connect God with everything else in the world – such is his immanence – he is the active source and principle of everything that exists.
The Trinity unites the transcendence and the immanence of God in the mystery of God’s own self. Jesus is the teacher of the Trinity, the one who teaches us the most about God the Father, about God the Holy Spirit, and who is himself, God the Son. These are images, to be sure, but not ones which are merely interchangeable with other images. No. They are the divine names that signify the divine reality. As relational, they point us to the mystery of God in himself at the same time as signaling the wonder of his being for us. This is, I think, the great Christian insight and the beginning point of any real and meaningful dialogue with the other great religions of the world.
We can only think it, of course, through the highest forms of philosophical reasoning that engages with the Scriptural revelation. The Trinity takes us beyond the limitations of human reason. In thinking we posit ourselves as objects to ourselves and yet we are the positing subject; it seems we can never overcome that opposition within ourselves and in our effort to grasp what is outside us. The doctrine of the Trinity opens us out to a new and deeper understanding of reality. God’s infinite self-relation is the basis of his relation to everything else which at once is and is thinkable. The opposition between self and other, even our self as other, is resolved in the mystery of God.
What it means for us is a new and deeper understanding of our humanity. The great insight of the revealed religions of the world, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, is that we are made in the image of God. For Christians that means that we are made in the image of the Trinity, in the image of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. It means that we are spiritual creatures who think and love. Being, knowing and loving are the forms of our participation in the divine life which has been opened to view.
The earliest Trinitarian statement is Paul’s claim in 1st Corinthians. “No one can say Jesus is Lord but by the Holy Spirit.” To say “Jesus is Lord” is to identify Jesus with the God of the Burning Bush, with the great “I am who I am” of Israel. It connects Jesus with the whole of the pageant of the Old Testament. It is an astounding statement which troubles the learned doctors of Israel as the encounter with Nicodemus shows. Jesus is at pains to help him think in a new way, to go beyond the literal and the earthly and to think spiritually and intellectually, to think about heavenly realities. To think, and this is the great point, to think what we are being shown, the nature of heavenly things, simply because that is the greater reality to which everything else relates and belongs.
It will not do to think of God merely in terms of a smorgasbord of images, scriptural or otherwise, that are simply of our own choosing, a God for me and a God for you, the God of x or y or z or not at all, for that is all really a kind of atheism. Nor will it do to think of God simply in terms of Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier, great and definitive as those ideas are, for that is simply about God for us and can easily slide into idolatry. No. The greater mystery of this day is the bringing of all the images of Scripture into this fullness of understanding, the mystery revealed of God as Trinity, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. These are not merely shifting modes of divine being, as if God simply appears first in one mode and then another. For that is to make God, yet again, simply accountable to the limits of our thinking. It is to refuse the challenge Jesus makes to Nicodemus and to us, to think not downwards, but upwards. To be born anew is to be born upwards, to be born into a higher form of thinking, into the very life of God.
To think the Trinity is the real meaning of our lives in worship. This is signaled in the lesson from the Book of the Revelation of St. John the Divine. It is a vision, to be sure, but one in which we participate in what we are being given to see. In every service of worship, we are in the Spirit. We are engaged with the God who engages us. To say that “God is love” is to speak of God in himself, first and foremost, and only on that basis in relation to us, the God who cares for us. The God who cares for us is the God who is love, meaning the Trinity, God with God in God, the God who thinks and loves and, as such, thinks and loves all things without which they are not. And we are not.
Trinity Sunday challenges our Church and culture precisely because it redeems all the images and language that we use about ourselves, about the world which we try to grasp with our minds, and about God. It redeems us from the idolatries of trying to make God in our own image, out of the vain imaginations of our hearts. God gives us himself and the way to think about himself and everything else. Everything is drawn into the mystery of the Trinity. God, after all, needs nothing outside himself. Everything begins and ends with him and in him. We are privileged to see and know the mystery of God and to know who we are in him.
It counters the narcissisms of our world. The journalist, Christie Blatchford, tells of running in 10km race and seeing in front of her someone taking out a cell-phone to take a picture of himself as he was crossing the finish line. We are too much with ourselves in the vain imaginings of ourselves, always wanting to be looking at ourselves and lost to reality, lost really in ourselves. Narcissus, in the ancient myth, drowned in the image of himself. Such, perhaps, is the danger of the Facebook culture.
Trinity Sunday signals the necessity of contemplation, the idea that we are more than just what we do. The message of this day, in a way, is “don’t just do something, sit there.” Without it, we are less than ourselves.
The poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, puts this beautifully in his poem, As Kingfishers Catch Fire. We are “selves”, to be sure, individuals but what is the true nature of our individuality, the true nature of ourselves? Are we, as he says, “Selves … Crying What I do is me: for that I came”? Selves, in other words, who are simply our actions? Without saying so, he hints that this is ultimately really nothing. Instead, he goes on.
“I say more: the just man justices;” a lovely turning of a noun into a verb, meaning here that the just man does justice and justice is always about selves and others. He goes on to open us out to the larger dimensions of the reality of our lives in relation to ourselves, our world, and God; in short, grace. “I say more: the just man justices;/ Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces; /Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is – / Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places, / Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his / To the Father through the features of men’s faces.” Such is the deep mystery of our being in the image of the Trinity, thinking the heavenly things that have been shown to us and discovering who we are in God’s eye.
“If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not; how shall ye believe,
if I tell you of heavenly things?”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity Sunday, 2012