“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.
To behold the highest things of heaven is to make a new beginning: “ye must be born again,” born anew, born from above, Jesus tells Nicodemus. There must be in us a 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.
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; the lifting up of heart and mind into what is revealed for thought and life. They are the things into which everything he says and does are gathered and find their place.
He has come 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 in fact 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.”
The point is made most directly in the Prologue to St. John’s Gospel. “No one has ever seen God; the only-begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known” (John 1.18). It is the only place in the Scriptures where exegesis – a making known – is used, not about a text or about an event, but about God himself. Jesus is the exegete and exegesis of God. He 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.
The 17th century poet, George Hebert, puts it best, even as a twentieth century theologian, Austin Farrer, helps us to understand the special wonder of it all.
Thou hast but two rare cabinets full of treasure,
the Trinitie, and Incarnation;
Thou hast unlockt them both
And made them jewels to betroth
the work of thy creation
Unto thy self in everlasting pleasure.
(Ungratefulnesse, George Hebert)
Herbert’s words reveal the wonder and intimacy of God for us and with us. Our good, our highest pleasure and blessedness, is found in fellowship with God.
Austin Farrer gives us some sense of the nature of the fellowship.
The disciples who were present at the Supper saw and heard Jesus Christ making eucharist to the Father over the bread and the cup. They were witnesses of the intercourse between the Eternal Son and his Eternal Father. Mortal ears and eyes at that moment perceived the movement of speech and love which passes in the heart of the Godhead; human minds entered into that converse of the Divine Persons which is the life and happiness of the Blessed Trinity. Belief in the Trinity is not a distant speculation; the Trinity is that blessed family into which we are adopted. God has asked us into his house, he has spread his table before us, he has set out bread and wine. We are made one body with the Son of God, and in him converse with the Eternal Father, through the indwelling of the Holy Ghost.
It is not a window that has been opened through which we might glimpse and see something outside in the world. It is rather a door opened in heaven so that we might enter into the fellowship of God through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Such is the wonder and mystery of this day, the eternal wonder and mystery of God himself. “No one has ever seen God;” and yet, “the only-begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known.”
And we have fellowship with him whom we behold. All our lives as spiritual beings are about this one thing: the constant circling around and into the mystery of the Trinity. Such is our liturgy and all the meaning of our prayers and praises, our service and sacrifice. It is all about the mystery of God as Trinity, the mystery of the eternal love of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, the mystery into which we have been incorporated in Baptism and in which we participate in the Holy Eucharist. God in us and us in God because of God in Himself.
“Behold, a door was opened in heaven”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity Sunday, 2024