Day: May 26, 2024

“Behold, a door was opened in heaven”

It is a lovely image that belongs to our meeting together in the glory of God revealed, the glory of the Trinity. All our beginnings and all our endings, all our comings and goings, and all the comings and goings of God with us in Word and Spirit, have their place of meeting and meaning 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.

The Athanasian Creed is really an explication of the fuller meaning of that phrase. It sets before us the wonder and the mystery of God in terms of the interplay of positive and negative ways of thinking about God, kataphatic and apophatic theology, respectively. God is properly nothing, meaning no thing and thus all analogies that make God like this or that thing or concept have to be strongly qualified by the way of negative theology that distinguishes God absolutely from everything else. God is, as John Donne puts, “only and divinely most like himself,” while at one and the same time the principle of all that is. Revelation is about an understanding of the essential mystery of God made known through word and metaphor, through images and their meaning but without reducing God to the world and to the limits of finite thought. Only by staying close to the images of Scripture and thought can we begin to enter into what is revealed; in short, to enter into what we are given to behold.

Trinity Sunday signals an ending and marks a beginning. There is an ending of all that we have gone through from Advent to this day, an ending that is a kind of gathering, a threefold gathering: first, there is a gathering of all the history of salvation into this fullness of revelation; secondly, there is a gathering of all religion into this fullness of meaning (following Hegel’s insight that the world’s religions adumbrate the Trinity); and, thirdly, there is a gathering of all the substantial moments in the life of Christ into this fullness of understanding. Everything belongs to the mystery of God.

Trinity Sunday marks a beginning for us as well. There is our entry by grace, year by year, into the fullness of revelation, the fullness of meaning and understanding which is opened to view. “Behold a door was opened in heaven.” 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. Such is the pageant of grace at work in us through the project of the Trinity Season. Having run through the Creeds in the sequence of Advent to Pentecost in the comings and goings of God, now the Creeds are meant to run through and live in us; such is our life in God.

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