Andrei Rublev, "The Holy Trinity" (icon, 1400-1425).
The Trinity is a world, not of definition, but of prayer.
You can see how it began. In those years when Yeshua walked
the earth, he tirelessly taught everyone who would listen about the Father. Our Father. Not just the Great God who
made the universe; not just the jealous God who chided Israel; not just the
just God who would one day judge the earth; but a God who was, is, and always
will be our Father, our loving Father who may get justly irritated with his
children but whose love for them will neither falter nor fail. He even taught
us the words to address our Father.
But there was more. We are all the Father’s children, but as
time went by and the Cross approached, Yeshua increasingly spoke about his own
place in the scheme of things. Presumably trusting the disciples to be a little
less thick now than they had been before, he began to tell them, in more than
just parables, about the place of the Son in relation to the Father. Not just a
pretty face; not just a guy. Not just a man. “He who has seen me has seen the
Father.” Whoa! “All that is the Father’s is the Son’s; and all that is the
Son’s is the Father’s.” “You will see the Son of Man [a term from Ezekiel]
coming in clouds of glory.”
And then, when he came back to visit them in their
loneliness, after the Resurrection when at first they often didn’t recognise
him, he spoke of someone else still. “If I don’t leave you, the Comforter
cannot come to you.” “I will send you an Advocate.” And he breathed on them,
and they received the Spirit – the ruach,
the pneuma, the very breath,
wind, or spirit that after the Creation brooded over the waters like a gigantic
bird. The heilige Geist in German,
the Holy Ghost in the original Germanic English, now fallen out of use.
And so, when he had left finally to go back to his (and our)
Father, and when the Geist had come
upon the motley crowd of Pentecost – the Spirit taking up residence, as it
were, in the ecclesia, in the Church,
the collective of Christians, and not just in some individuals – one can
imagine them sitting around for a few hundred years trying to make sense of all
this, even as they prayed. After all, they had to explain it to new converts
and interested strangers who wandered in from, say, Hellenistic civilisation
where there were lots of gods, and who might say, “Oh, so you have only three
gods? Interesting!” No, no, no. Not three gods. One God. “Right,” would say a
Jew coming by. “But then what is all this nonsense about three Persons? God is
one Person, and one Person only.” No, no, no. Three Persons. Father, Son, and
Holy Ghost. And even the most benevolent would end up saying How does this work?
When I first got to know the Book of Common Prayer, one text
I shied away from was the Quicunque Vult, or Athanasian Creed. It always seemed
cross and minatory, as well as interminable. Yet reading it again today, on
Trinity Sunday, I realised that it is a desperate attempt to understand just
that difficult concept, 500 years on. Of course, it also contains anathemas
against those who do not believe
these essentials to salvation, which were what used to put me off. But it is
fascinating in its dogged pursuit of the inexplicable.
The Trinity is a world, not of definition, but of prayer. It
is a world of meditation and contemplation. Quicunque, whoever, pursues it in
that manner will find a huge glory opening, and welcoming. It is a circle, a
dynamic circle, a vast and stately whirl of love. Of a love in relation to
which the Universe as we are coming to know it is a mustard-seed.
And Trinity Sunday? My American study of the BCP Collects
notes that Trinity Sunday is the border between the season of Christianity’s
great Truths and the season of Christianity’s activity and duty in the world.
From now on, the liturgical colour is green, as are the fields and the hills
beyond my window. Ora et labora: pray and plough.
And for those who want to be reminded of the hard-edged content of our faith, here is the (pseudo-) Athanasian Creed itself:
Furthermore, it is necessary to everlasting salvation; that he also believe faithfully the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ. For the right Faith is, that we believe and confess; that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and Man; God, of the Substance [Essence] of the Father; begotten before the worlds; and Man, of the Substance [Essence] of his Mother, born in the world. Perfect God; and perfect Man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting. Equal to the Father, as touching his Godhead; and inferior to the Father as touching his Manhood. Who although he is God and Man; yet he is not two, but one Christ. One; not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh; but by assumption of the Manhood into God. One altogether; not by confusion of Substance [Essence]; but by unity of Person. For as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man; so God and Man is one Christ; Who suffered for our salvation; descended into hell; rose again the third day from the dead. He ascended into heaven, he sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty, from whence he will come to judge the living and the dead. At whose coming all men will rise again with their bodies; And shall give account for their own works. And they that have done good shall go into life everlasting; and they that have done evil, into everlasting fire. This is the catholic faith; which except a man believe truly and firmly, he cannot be saved.
