Today the Church celebrates the revelation of the Holy Trinity. This means I’m going to say some puzzling, if not troubling things today.
What is the Holy Trinity?
This revelation is not the revelation of a proposition or opinion about God, but is instead about who the Lord Jesus has revealed to be the one, true God- the one, true God is the Holy Trinity- which we know to be the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
We are here in the realm of what I call the deep mysticism of our Christian Faith. And for this reason, we tread carefully. God reveals himself to us in Christ in a manner that is intelligible to us- he takes on flesh, lives a real, human life, speaks to us in real, human speech. God in Christ literally, in his revelation, meets us face to face.
Yet, while God in Christ makes himself intelligible to us, he remains utterly mysterious. Even in his similarity to us, his dissimilarity to us remains most striking. What we can understand of him invites ever deeper wonder, a wonder which invites us beyond what merely human categories of understanding would impose. We come to know God in Christ best when we find ourselves at the limits of our ideas and emotions about him. We ultimately meet him in deep mysticism.
Thus, when we speak of the mystery of the Holy Trinity, we are in this place of deep mysticism. What does this mean? Think about the deep mysticism of the Holy Trinity in these ways:
We can understand some things about the Holy Trinity, but its deepest truths are not revealed merely in propositions about it, but in our acceptance of the revelation. When preachers and teachers use the mystery of the Holy Trinity to dismiss its importance or to make jokes there seems to be a lack of appreciation that God is not something akin to a math problem that we can figure out if we just put our minds to it. None of the great saints and real scholars of the Church approached God’s revelation in this manner.
They knew that faith, which is a supernatural gift, leads us to limits of human knowing, and then beyond. It is at this limit and beyond it that we enter into deep mysticism. All Christians are to go into this place.
It is in this place, the place of deep mysticism, that the revelation of the Holy Trinity, leaves its deepest and most lasting impression. This happens because we are no longer grasping at an explanation that we think should satisfy us or clinging to conditions through which we think God should make himself known to us.
Instead we are to be receptive, open to letting God be who is, rather than who we want him to be.
The realm of deep mysticism is frightening to us, mostly because it removes the defenses that we use to keep God confined to categories that keep us safe. Safe from what: from the demands of a true relationship with him.
A true relationship with God is always on his terms. God knows better than us who we are and what is the real purpose and meaning of our lives. We would, in our narrowness and sin, limit our relationship with God, believing that we can do just fine without him, using him only inasmuch as we might need him. Giving him some things rather than what properly belongs to him- which is everything.
When we do this, we are merely playing with religion, rather than truly being religious. And for this reason, so many find the Christian faith to be “boring”- if it is “boring” it is because we make it so, and perhaps really want it to be. We want Christian faith to be boring because its real demand is scary and as such, we construct safer alternatives to its real demands.
Letting God be who he is, moving from a superficial appropriation of the Christian faith and into its mystical depths, seems to us to be too much because we don’t want God in our lives telling us the truths we don’t want to hear. We don’t want to acknowledge that we are not meant to be in charge of everything and try as we may, God is not going to conform to our easy expectations.
So then, what is the Holy Trinity, the one true God called Father, Son and Holy Spirit?
The Scriptures testify that the Holy Trinity is love, by this we can understand that God doesn’t just have love, but is love, and from this we know that the one, true God that brought everything into existence to which everything in existence returns is love.
The significance of this should strike us. For this means the highest power is not, as most seem to think, raw power, but it is love. There is much for us to consider in this, because we so often build our lives and values on raw power, on the force of will and then we project this tendency to be our God. The revelation of the Holy Trinity stands athwart this tendency and Christians are placed in the world to be a contrary witness to our tendency to make power and willfulness into our God.
Instead of raw power and human willfulness, the Christian is a witness to love, and we are witnesses to love because of the revelation of God as the Holy Trinity.
But what is this divine love that is the Trinity?
Love is, for many of us, an emotion, a feeling. But this is too limited in terms of how God, the Holy Trinity, is love.
The reference point we have to understand how God, the Holy Trinity, is love is the revelation of Christ- in what he does. And we come to know what Christ does from the testimony of the Gospels.
Knowing what Christ does reveals what is meant when we Christians say God is love.
And in this regard, we Christians need to cease being so glib and superficial or vague when speak of the love of God in Christ.
When we Christians are glib or superficial love it sounds like we think love is just being nice, polite and avoiding conflict. But that’s terribly misleading.
We Christians can do better than clichés because we have the Gospel and the Gospel should give direction to our spiritual lives not clichés or abstractions, or opinions.
The love of God is very specific in the Gospel and it is expressed by Christ in numerous ways that culminate in his willingness to give his life to us even when this action is unappreciated and even refused. This is what the cross reveals. This is what the cross is about. The cross shows us how God loves us and in doing so shows us who God is, and, what God wants us to do.
If you want the thick description of what Christians should mean when we speak about the love of God, it is the cross and its aftermath- this is the love that manifests the love that God is.
The love of God looks like Christ on the cross- there we see the greatest representation of the Holy Trinity.
The love of God looks like giving one’s life away for others. It looks like a willingness to forgive. It looks like inserting oneself into the world’s suffering so as to transform suffering from within.
It looks like not running from the opposition of the dark powers of sin, death, and the devil but instead running towards these things so as to rescue those languishing under their bondage.
It looks like abandoning a life hemmed in and shut down by preoccupations with safety and ease, and instead, accepting risks. It means that we move away from a superficial understanding of faith and religion where we are always in charge and setting the agenda.
The cross reveals all this as the best explanation we Christians have for what it means to say God is Love- and the cross is the thickest description we have what it means to profess in faith that the one, true God is the Holy Trinity.
This is the deep mysticism of our Christian faith.
Father Steve Grunow 