by CCW | 22 May 2016 18:00
It was behind closed doors, literally and figuratively, that Jesus made known to us his resurrection. But it is not only behind closed doors that the things of God are made known to us. Through the fullness of the meaning of God’s Revelation of himself in Jesus Christ, “behold, a door was opened in heaven”. We behold the glory of God. God makes himself known to us.
Trinity Sunday sets before us the vision of God which is the end of man. Trinity Sunday, we might say, is the great Te Deum Laudamus of the Church. We proclaim God as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. We proclaim what we have been given to behold through the fullness of the scriptural witness to God’s revelation. It is what we have been given to proclaim and in which we are privileged to participate.
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. It is the burden of the Church’s proclamation precisely because what has been shown to us in Jesus Christ. The open door captures clearly this idea of this revealed and learned, things known and loved, things which we can only enter into more fully in order to love and understand more deeply.
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. But it is what we are given to participate in, too.
To behold the highest things of heaven is to make a new beginning: “ye must be born again,” born anew, born from above, as John makes clear in his Gospel. There must be in us a constant 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. We are made in the image of God and so we are made in the image of the Trinity (imago Trinitatis) as spiritual creatures who think and love.
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; to reveal God to us and to redeem us to God. What he wants us essentially to know is his divine identity and his identity with us. There is 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.”
Jesus 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.
A door has been “opened in heaven” and we have been invited into the fellowship of God through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity Sunday,
AMD Service of the Deaf, May 22nd, 2016
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2016/05/22/sermon-for-trinity-sunday-200pm-service-of-atlantic-ministry-of-the-deaf/
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