Kingdom of Heaven
TRINITY
There are cherubs and martyrs and confessors, all rushing towards heaven. In the middle of this riot, there is a dome. Look up, and you will see the Virgin Mary being assumed into heaven. It is breathtaking. You are looking straight into heaven, and of course it puts a strain on the neck. Looking at heaven is always problematic.
The painter of this dome, Giovanni Lanfranco, thought that this was his masterpiece. Other people thought so to all those clever perspectives and the bravura composition. Then the theologians came, with narrowing eyes alert to error. Lanfranco had filled heaven with saints, all of them watching Mary arrive in glory.
And the theologians pointed out that he had got it wrong. Some of those saints should not be there - they could not possibly have already been there waiting for Mary; she died before they did.
Lanfranco got into trouble because he tried to show us one specific moment in heaven. He tried to show us a bit of history, the day Mary died and arrived in glory. The problem is that there is no history in heaven; heaven is eternal. The saints are there forever. There are no Tuesdays in heaven, no yesterday
no 'coming soon', no 'later on'. That is very hard to paint; it is very difficult for us to even think about God's throne. Our words, our concepts, are not up to the job. Each Trinity Sunday, this is the problem we must negotiate, as we set out to describe the nature of God.
Trinity Sunday is not one of the ancient feasts of the Church. In the eleventh century, Pope Alexander II argued that the idea of a Sunday dedicated to the Trinity was a nonsense. We say 'Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit every day, he said; the Trinity is proclaimed in every liturgy. He was making an important point, but a tide of devotion was running against him. By 1334, a successor, John XXII, ordered that the Feast of the Trinity should be kept on the Sunday after Pentecost.
Pope Alexander understood that all day, every day, we live within the Trinity. On other feast days, we tell a story. At Pentecost, we can read about the Apostles speaking in tongues. On their saint's day, we could tell the story of Ambrose, or Augustine; we could put them in context, explain their significance. On Trinity Sunday, however, we cannot do that. This is a day when context eludes us.
When we want to get to grips with something complicated, we talk about getting perspective, finding an angle. When it is getting near lunchtime, and you are 40 minutes into a tricky debate about margins, risks and priorities, someone is bound to suggest we 'step back'. You cannot do that with the Trinity. The Trinity is simply not a story we can tell.
The Trinity is our beginning and our end, our meaning and our existence. We can no more get an angle on the Trinity than a halibut can get an angle on the ocean. We have no perspective, no angle, on God. We could never frame an argument about what God is like, as though God might be contained. Nor can we compare God to anything else. That is a point that Isaiah made long ago: To whom then will you liken God, or what likeness compare with him? (Isaiah 40.18)
We say that God is mighty or wise, but if we begin to think that this makes God a bit like the Incredible Hulk or Maya Angelou, then we are headed into a theological cul-de-sac. So, we need to recognize that despite all the books we have written and all the sermons that have been preached, we do not know God. Christians (and indeed Muslims and Jews) are the people who know that they do not know God. Description and explanation will always fail.
We do not know God. There are, however, some things that we can say about God. The first of them, and the place you must start on Trinity Sunday, is that God is one. As well as insisting that God is not like anything else, Isaiah declared that there could be nothing alongside God, nothing before God, nothing to inform God:
Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? (Isaiah 40.21) There are one' lots of explanations, there is one. Christians do not believe in the gods. We do not believe in fate, or good luck; we do not believe in Mother Earth, or crystals, or the capitalists and their markets, who have driven mother earth to a discourse full of agony and disbelieve.
We do not believe in a God who has only partial oversight, or particular concerns, as though God might like the English and dislike the French. There are no exceptions, no oversights, no accidents under God, as though God is a God of sunrise and sunset but not of cancer or crucifixion. We believe in one God.
Our God is not one of the gods, not one explanation among others, not a thing to set against another thing. Everything that has happened and will happen, all existence, every idea I have, all your hopes and dreams, they all exist simply and only because of the God who creates and tells us you must have no other gods but me.
That is important. In all the confusion of processes we cannot master, and amid narratives that spool out of control, we live in fear and in confusion. Because we can see no solution and no story, we introduce boundaries that make us feel safer and more powerful. We talk a 'fake news' and decide who we will and will not trust.
We see the world as 'them' and 'us'. We make politics more local, we locate our-selves within communities of shared conviction and reinforce association with a hashtag. Yet, if we truly believe in one God, we must believe in the absolute integrity of all that is. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, there must still be a common narrative. It must still be the case that we are more united than divided; everything that is with a single point of origin and a single destination,
It is for these reasons that we have slipped into the habit of calling God 'Father'. The language is flawed; it is limited, God might be like a Father, but of course God is nothing like the way I am a father, affectionate and grumpy by turns, and just possibly prone to cheating at games of Cluedo. We use this language because it is the best we have. God is like a Father because (for some of us at least) the image of a father who precedes and protects conveys some ideas about how the story holds together.
That is the first thing we say about God. On Trinity Sunday, we say God is one. We also say (and say it very quickly) that God is three. We do that because the God we can never know makes known the existence we could not describe. God is a God who reveals. From what God reveals, there are things we can know.
We say that God creates. All that exists, exists because God pours himself out in creation. We go on to say that the God who creates is also a God who communicates. You could, I suppose, have a God who creates and then retires into hiding. Our God pours himself out. God speaks. 'In the beginning was the word,' says St John. God does not turn inward, but proceeds out and issues a word. The word that God speaks is Jesus. Which changes everything.
The love that is at the heart of all things, the mysterious love of a Creator that pours itself out in the joyful business of creating, is also the love we encounter in a human being, Jesus. The God we cannot know, the love we cannot describe, we meet in Jesus and we recognize it. Notice that Jesus is not created; he is not a creature.
He has the same life of the Father and in him that life, the life of God himself, is perfectly united to the lively and messy business of being human. And then we say, that mysterious life and love of the Father, which is lived in front of us by the Son, is also lived within us. We do not just see it, we participate. We are drawn into that life and love. That is the third thing we know. We know that the life of God breathes in us, that we are taken up into the life of God. That is the work of the Spirit.
God is one and God is three. We must say, and go on saying, that both those statements are true. Err one way, and you have three gods; err the other, and you have one God simply operating in three different ways. God is one, but God is three persons, Father, Son and Spirit. There is a real distinction and a real relationship between the three. There is, indeed, a relationship of love at the heart of all that is.
We may not know God. We do not know God. But we know what we need to know. We know that the God who is always and utterly one is also three. We have to say that the one God is a Trinity. The one God is Father, Son and Spirit. The one God in whom and for whom all things exist is visible in Christ, and is at work within us living his life in us.
We have to say that God is one and that God is three. Anything less is less than the truth. Anything else fails to assert the fundamental truth that relationship and unity lie at the heart of all that is. And Pope Alexander was right every day is a day lived in the glory of the Trinity.
Scarless Warmth
↪ Kingdom of Heaven
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