Day: May 31, 2026

“How can these things be?”

The mystery of God reveals the mystery of our humanity; the one envelopes the other. Trinity and Incarnation are intimately connected and inseparable. They go together. “Thou hast but two rare cabinets, full of treasure,” as the poet George Herbert puts it, “The Trinitie, and Incarnation”. He highlights what is emphasized in the Athanasian Creed, namely the connection and interplay between these two essential doctrines revealed to us. He goes on to say, “Thou hast unlockt them both,/ And made them jewels to betroth/ the work of thy creation,/ Unto thyself in everlasting pleasure.” This is a commentary on the Lesson from Revelation indicating how the fullness of the mysteries of the Trinity and the Incarnation embrace, contain, and restore the whole of creation and especially our humanity. Our task is to make the effort to enter into  what is revealed and made known to us; the mysteries of grace perfecting nature not destroying our nature. Nowhere is that more concentrated than in the Athanasian Creed, itself a creedal reflection on God and our humanity born out of the witness of the Scriptures.

“Behold, a door was opened in heaven,” John tells us in his Book of Revelation, the last book of the Christian Scriptures. Earlier this week on Tuesday after Pentecost, in the Gospel from John 10, Jesus identifies himself as “the door of the sheep,” one of the so-called ‘I am’ sayings about the essential divinity of Christ revealed through his humanity. The lesson from Revelation is a lovely summary of the whole pageant of revelation, with the books of the Old Testament symbolized in “the four and twenty elders” referring to the writers, and the New Testament, especially the four Gospels, symbolized by “the four living creatures.” The whole vision is not just about what is seen, but rather, through the telling image of the door, it is what we enter into and in which we participate. And what is that? The life of prayer and praise as the signalling the whole purpose of creation and our humanity.

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