by CCW | 26 May 2013 15:16
Today is Trinity Sunday. It celebrates the great, grand, and central teaching of the Christian faith. It is about the extravagance of God, how God is always more and greater than we can ever imagine. The Trinity is that greater extravagance – the extravagance of God, both in himself and for us. The Trinity is the mystery of God revealed, the mystery of love made known, the love that is God.
Think God and everything else comes after. But how can we think God? Only by the extravagance of God’s grace that embraces and enfolds us in the community of love, the communion of God. There is the extravagant grace of Holy Baptism when we are named in the intimacy of God’s own naming of himself as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. There is the extravagant grace of Holy Communion which gathers us into the community of love, the communion of the Trinity.
And there is the extravagant grace of language, the language of Creed and Liturgy, of poetry and song. It is the language of adoration. The language of adoration is grace-given and spirit-inspired. The Athanasian Creed[1], found tucked away in the back of the Prayer Book, for example, proclaims in the most extravagant language imaginable the mystery of the Trinity by way of negation and affirmation.
God is always more – always of another order of reality beyond the mundane and the worldly, beyond what is merely human. “He therefore that would be saved, let him thus think of the Trinity” – think of the Trinity in this way, the way which God in the extravagant grace of his Son has opened out to us.
The extravagance is about the fullness of the mystery of God revealed. It is not concealed. It is always more, far more than we can fathom and unravel. It is not a puzzle to be solved, but a mystery to be adored. The Trinity is not so much to be explained as proclaimed. It is the great and controlling image of the truth of God to which all other scriptural images are subordinate and through which they have their place and significance. It sums up the scriptural revelation of God.
The Trinity is simply the mystery of God’s own eternal being, eternal knowing and eternal loving from which all things have their being and their truth and to which all things return. God is not a solitary aloneness; He is God with God in God, a communion. And we have been given access to him and the privilege of calling upon him by name, “the strong name of the Trinity,” as that extravagant hymn, “St. Patrick’s Breastplate” puts it, the name which “I bind unto myself.”
Father, Son and Holy Spirit are not images of human devising, simply ways in which we might picture God for ourselves and therefore ways which we might wish to change according to our own whims and fancies. No. The fatherhood of God is not like any earthly fatherhood; the sonship of Christ is not like any other sonship; and the Holy Spirit is not a metaphor for a warm and fuzzy feeling. No. These are the sacred names which challenge our understanding. They call us out of ourselves and into the presence of God, the God who in the extravagance of his mercy has reached down to us that he might raise us up to himself.
That great reaching down is the mystery of Christ, the mystery of the Incarnation. The humanity of Jesus is the door through which heaven is opened to view. Our humanity finds its place in this extravagance of God. We are made in the image of the Trinity in our being, our knowing and our loving. This is the true spirituality of our creatureliness. We have no end and no blessedness apart from the adoration of him in whose image we are made, in imago Trinitatis, in the image of the Trinity.
The extravagance of the Trinity evokes an extravagance of language. The language of adoration is the language of liturgy. It is always extravagant, a ceaseless round of “Glorias,” an unending succession of “Te Deums”. It is all about praise and worship. John gives us a wonderful image. “A door,“ he says, “was opened in heaven.” Not a window through which we might just peep and peer, but a door through which we might pass into the communion of God, the holy and blessed Trinity. Such is the mystery of the Divine Love which creates and redeems, sanctifies and invites to glory the whole of his creation.
No Trinity, no Christianity. The Trinity is always before us, beyond us, behind us and within us. “Behold, a door was opened in heaven,” and we have been given a glimpse of the Triune majesty of God. Such is the extravagance of God that should awaken in us the desire for the strong grace of the Trinity that we might “run, rise and rest” in him.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity Sunday, 2013
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