Year: 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.

(more…)

Print this entry

“Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit”

“And having said thus,” Luke tells us, “he gave up the spirit;” literally, expired or breathed out his last. This seventh and last word of the Crucified complements the sending of the Spirit of the Son and the Spirit of the Father, the Holy Spirit, on the Feast of Pentecost. A Greek word, it means the fiftieth day after Easter but has been commonly called Whitsunday, which is a bit confusing since the liturgical colour for the day is red as honouring the tongues of fire that rested upon the disciples. Whitsunday or White Sunday makes sense when you realize that this was one of the premier times for baptism as well, the baptizands robed in white robes, as it were, “made white in the blood of the Lamb.” It is ‘the feast of weeks’ or Shavuot in the Jewish calendar marking the wheat harvest, on the one hand, and the commemoration of the giving of the Torah to Israel, on the other hand. In the Christian understanding, it celebrates the descent of the Holy Ghost bestowing the gifts of the Spirit upon the Church.

It marks an ending and a beginning. In the ordering of the seven last words of Christ by the Peruvian Jesuit priest, Fr. Alonso Messio Bedoya, in the 17th century, this seventh and last word reveals the underlying dynamic of God as Trinity and, ultimately, the doctrine of co-inherence: the co-inherence or mutual indwelling of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the co-inherence or mutual indwelling of the human and divine natures of Christ, and the co-inherence or mutual indwelling between Christ and the Church.

Pentecost is, as Lancelot Andrewes emphasizes, the “festum charitatis,’ the feast of love. Pentecost is the manifestation, the making visible of the Holy Spirit at the same time as it is the making known or revelation of the Trinity. Like the story of Christ’s baptism in the river Jordan, Pentecost is “the visible descending of the Holy Ghost … so that all might see and so take notice of the Holy Ghost, and indeed of the whole Trinity”. It has everything to do with the mystery of God and our incorporation into the divinum mysterium, the mystery of divine love.

“The Holy Ghost is the Alpha and Omega of all our solemnities,” Andrewes notes. This highlights the significance of Pentecost and its connection to all of the credal and doctrinal moments that belong to our lives in faith. We move from the ascension of Christ to the descent of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is “the essential love and love-knot” of the Father and the Son, “the love-knot between God and man” in the person of Christ, and “yet more specifically on this day the love-knot between Christ and his Church”. The Son gives up his spirit into the hands of the Father on the Cross and now the Holy Spirit descends upon the Church as the body of Christ inspiring and infusing the Church with the gifts of grace, things which we do hear and see in the wonder of Pentecost. “A sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind” – something heard – “and cloven tongues, like as of fire” – something seen. These rather elusive and dynamic images from the material and physical world help us to think about the reality of spiritual life as that which contains and holds all reality together in God, the reconciliation of matter and spirit, of God and man.

(more…)

Print this entry