by CCW | 16 June 2019 15:00
Nicodemus’s question highlights the mystery and the wonder of this day. It is complemented by Mary’s question. “How can this be seeing I know not a man?” she asks the Angel Gabriel. We are in the midst of great mysteries, the mystery of God and the mystery of our humanity. The mystery of the Trinity and the mystery of the Incarnation are just so intimately and inescapably connected.
Trinity Sunday is the speculative Sunday of all Sundays, a day when we, quite literally, it seems, are walking on our heads. The Athanasian Creed[1] wonderfully captures the mystical wonder of this day in the dialectical dance of affirmation and negation. To put it in other words, “This is Thou and neither is this Thou.” God is more unlike than like anything created. Think the Trinity in this way, the Creed advises. We cannot take God captive to our minds but our minds can be taken captive by God, by what we are given to see and hear; in short, to think, and in which we are privileged to participate.
“Behold a door was opened in heaven,” John the Divine tells us. Revelation is not a window out of which or into which we might peek and peer, but a door through which we enter into the mystery of the understanding. To think God as Trinity is to praise him.
The Trinity is the central and great teaching of the Christian faith. “There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible,” as the 1st article of the Anglican Thirty-nine Article begins, articulating in a concise and clear way the classical understanding of the idea of God common to ancient philosophy and to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam alike. Today’s readings are about the making known of the mystery of God in himself and for us, a mystery which we can only think. To think it is to be born again, literally to be born upwards into what is revealed and belongs to thought. God in thinking and loving himself thinks and loves all else; everything is gathered into the mystery of God, the mystery here revealed to us. The 1st Article goes on to express the specific Christian understanding of the mystery of God, gathering up the triplets of everlasting unity, life and truth, and of infinitepower, wisdom and goodness, into the Trinity. “And in unity of this Godhead there be three Persons, of one substance, power, and eternity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost”.
Trinity Sunday is not about some sort of holy riddle, some sort of clever puzzle, some sort of mathematical conundrum, a kind of Rubik’s cube or should I say triangle? ‘I do not understand the Trinity,’ people often tell me. Of course not. To understand the Trinity is to worship the mystery of God who by definition is beyond our understanding. We are being raised up into the mystery of God, not God being collapsed into our thinking, into our assumptions and agendas. This is the great tragedy of our Church and our world and day. To speak of God as the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost is not about gender politics. God is neither male nor female. The classical understanding of the Trinity is not the projection of some imagined power structure. Yet images are not simply interchangeable and transferable or of equal weight and meaning as if we could substitute the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost with something more neutral or differently gendered or supposedly inclusive. That would assume that God is nothing more than the projection of our thinking: then, in a remote past, one way of imaging God; and now, in our imagined more progressive present, another way. That denies the mystery revealed, the mystery upon which our own very being and thinking depend. We cannot nothonour the way the mystery of God is revealed for thought.
For however much revealed religions in particular are “unabashedly anthropomorphic,” that is to say God is understood through aspects of our humanity, they emphatically reject the tendency to collapse God into the forms of our humanity and equally reject reducing “scriptural imagery to mere metaphor” (John Renard, Islam and Christianity, 226). In other words, there is and always an awakening to mystery that counters and checks any merely human or finite knowing. “How can these things be?” yet again reminds us of a sacramental understanding in which the things of God are made known through the things of the world without being collapsed into them.
Revelation is mediation. Something is made known as beyond us into which we have to think. Our thinking the Trinity in the way of negation and affirmation, as the Athanasian Creed insists, is at once humbling and exulting. It is about praise and wonder. It is, literally, rebirth, a kind of constant rebirth of our minds by thinking upward. Being born again means being born upward into the transcendent wonder and mystery of God. “How can these things be?” Nicodemus asks with a sense of wonder and perplexity. It is his wonder at the wonder of what he is learning, of what is being made known. And what is being made known is the inexhaustible wonder of the mystery of God in Himself and for us.
This is the mystery into which we are gathered by being raised up by the one who was lifted up on the Cross. Such is the connection between the Incarnation and the Trinity. We cannot think the one without the other. And as the lesson suggests, thinking the mystery of the double Trinity – God in Himself and God for us – is the vocation of all creation realized liturgically in the praise and worship of God.
Thou art worthy, O Lord,
To receive glory, and honour and power;
For thou hast created all things,
And for thy pleasure they are, and were created.
This redeems all our attempts to use and abuse God and one another. The point is well made by the poet/priest George Herbert drawing explicitly upon this passage.
Thou hast but two rare cabinets full of treasure,
The Trinity, and Incarnation:
Thou hast unlockt them both
And made them jewels to betroth
The work of thy creation
Unto thyself in everlasting pleasure.
We cannot notthink God apart from the images given by revelation and given for thought. We can only think upward into the wonder and the mystery of God. The artistic representations of God as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost open us out to the divine self-relation which is the ground of his relation to us and to all else. Nothing is but what is in God. Thus as another poet/priest, Thomas Traherne, wonderfully notes:
GOD is so Transcendent in His Essence, that He is Wholly without, and
wholly within us, at the same Time: and so Mysterious, that He is wholly every
where: and so Beautiful, that He is everywhere ours, and wholly ours. He that
is without, unless he bee within, cannot be Enjoyed. for whatsoever is seen, is
in the Understanding; and whatsoever is Enjoyed, is there Enjoyed. All Things
therefore being within to be Enjoyed, how much ought we to live within, that we
might Inherit All Things?
This recalls us to what has been our recent theme, the idea of metanoia, repentance understood in a more profound way as our minds thinking after or upon the things of God made known and given for thought. It is all the wonder and the mystery of God.
We are, on the one hand, too much with ourselves, too sceptical and cynical about any thinking from the past having deconstructed it all in the name of the hierarchies of power, too much imbued with our own feelings of superiority and the presumptions of progress, and yet, on the other hand, too fearful and too anxious, defeated and in despair about our world and about ourselves. The counter to both aspects of our current malaise is the wonder and the mystery of God given for us to behold and to think. How? In the humbling and honest way of Mary and Nicodemus, the way of holy questioning which at the very least opens us to the mystery of God in himself and for us. Here is the counter to our presumptions and the fears of our world and day.
Praise God for God alone is worthy to receive glory and honour and power. This is the great good news if we care to hear it and to live it. It will mean to ask with Nicodemus,
Fr. David Curry
Trinity Sunday, 2019
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