Day: June 4, 2023

“Thou art worthy, O Lord”

It is the mystery of all mysteries, the mystery of God as Trinity. It is the counter and check to all of the illusions and the idolatries of the self. God is not a metaphor for our pursuits and projects and interests. God is nothing, no thing, we have to say, for God is the mystery of all reality and not some aspect, not some thing in a continuum of things and beings, nor some idea in an endless chain of ideas.

God is the ultimate mystery which we cannot not think and yet cannot be contained and limited to our minds and hearts. God is the mystery revealed for thought into which we are lifted up by grace even “as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness.” God is the mystery revealed for thought: “a door opened in heaven” into which we see and enter. God alone is the mystery of praise and worship, the praise and worship of the whole of creation. “Thou art worthy.”

Trinity Sunday is unlike any other Sunday or festival day in the Christian calendar. It marks no event, no happening. It is purely speculative in the most positive sense of that word and yet gives meaning and substance to all our liturgies and celebrations, to all of the activities that belong to the life of faith. God as Trinity is the faith. Everything arises and converges in the mystery of God in himself and what that means for us, God for us.

The Trinity is not a puzzle or a riddle to be solved, some Rubik’s cube to be twisted and turned about in the illusions of our own cleverness. At once the summary of the whole pageant of scriptural revelation – this is the point of the reading from Revelation – it is also the pinnacle and height of all thought and requires our willingness to engage with what we have been given to see and think, to live and honour; in short, to be like Nicodemus. We have to want to enter into the mystery of all mysteries because it concerns the very truth of our souls. The mystery lies in what is disclosed for thought. Trinity Sunday in this sense signals the true vocation of our humanity: to think God in the form of God’s own thinking as revealed and shown to us for thought, each according to the capacities of our own thinking. It is for all for all are called to worship. That is the real truth and meaning of our humanity as souls made apt for worship, to honour what is truly worthy of honour above all else.

“Thou art worthy, O Lord,” as the lesson from Revelation puts it, drawing upon imagery from Ezekiel after quoting Isaiah about God as the Trisagion, the thrice-holy. God is worthy “to receive glory, and honour and power” not out of any need or desire on his part but as belonging to the truth of all created beings “for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are, and were created.” All creation is good and finds its good in God.

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