Sanctus sanctus sanctus Dominus Deus Sabaoth

7 June 2009: Ez 1:4-10, 22-28, Rev 4

The readings we have just heard strike me as quite surprising, and perhaps unhelpful ones for the Feast of the Trinity. When I hear about the four living creatures it is the four evangelists I think of: Matthew the man, Mark the lion, Luke the bull and John the eagle. Not the Trinity. What I think the church is trying to convey by choosing these passages is the awesomeness, awe-inspiringness of God. God, the Trinity, is altogether too much, too high for us, a mystery before which we must bow down and hide our faces.

OK. You can approach the Trinity like that: “Fear God” – you get that right down into the New Testament. And it’s true that the moment we lose that, the moment we forget that we are creatures and have a Creator – is the moment that we cease to be believers, cease to be followers of Jesus Christ. But – should we leave it at that?
Who, after all, is God to us? Who is God to you? Who is the Trinity to you? It’s God the Father, who created us: not some terrifying emperor figure but our father; God the Son, who dwelt among us as one of us; and God the Holy Spirit, who dwells within us. I’ve said many times that if you want to see what God is like, look at Jesus – well, he said so, didn’t he? “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father”. But I’d go further than that, especially for us who do not see Jesus in his day-to-day life. Do you believe that we are made in God’s image and likeness? Do you believe that YOU are? In which case, if you want to see what God is like, look at yourself.

Yes, the angels hid their faces and said “Holy holy holy”; but I venture to say that our relationship with God is different. The angels say holy holy holy, but Isaiah confesses his sinfulness and is cleansed, chosen and given a mission by God. As Paul said, “unto which of the angels said he at any time “Thou art my son, this day I have begotten thee”?

God the Son did not become an angel. He became incarnate as one of us. Like us. Like you. Like me. It is extraordinary and incredible, but after all not so extraordinary and incredible; who, according to Genesis, is “made in the image and likeness of God”? That already suggests something. the Trinity includes Jesus Christ who has been and eternally is one of us. We, the human race, are part of, intimately part of the Trinity.

The Son is not less than the Father because he has been incarnate. The Son is not intrinsically more visible than the Father. Don’t imagine that the OT God is the Father, the NT God the Son, and the God of the era of the Church is the Holy Spirit No. All three are the Trinity. God is the Trinity. YHWH is the Trinity.

All God’s actions external to himself are actions of the Trinity – there is no distinction. It is only in the relations within the Trinity that there is a distinction. Undoubtedly, when it comes to incarnate life on earth, to crucifixion, that blows your mind. but – of course God blows your mind. And that is the sort of awe, the sort of “too much for us” that we should feel about the Trinity: not that God is so far removed but that God is so intimate, so close to us, so much part of us and we of God. Jesus prayed “that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me.” So – hang on to your pews here – God is not just close to us because the Son was incarnate. God, the Trinity, is close to us because we are made in the image and likeness of the Trinity.

I think that was what St Augustine was getting at when he devoted a large part of his book on the Trinity to a discussion of our own internal being and to searching for the trinity within. He found it in many places, but settled for the mind’s self-memory, self-understanding and self-willing or self-loving, and the way in which these mental acts proceed from one another or are generated or conceived one by another. The Trinity, far from being something utterly remote from us, is in fact the blueprint of our being, just as the design of the Temple was supposed to be a copy of a heavenly original. The Feast of the Trinity is our feast. If you feel inclined to argue that we cannot understand the Trinity, that it is a great mystery, indeed it is. But – are we much less of a mystery? I understand myself better than I did twenty or thirty years ago, but there are still deep recesses of mystery within myself, and I think there always will be; and I am just a finite created being. The infinite uncreated God whose finite created image I am will be infinitely, uncreatedly more mysterious than I am, but not in an entirely different way. I don’t think it is a coincidence that Augustine, utterly fascinated by his own being and psychology, made the Trinity the subject of his major work, a work he spent his life writing and rewriting until his friends, impatient with the endless revisions, pinched the manuscript and published a pirated edition.

All this is babbling. Of course we cannot understand the Trinity. But all the people over all the centuries who have tried, suggest to me two things. One: that it is worth trying; and two: that the Trinity is indeed closer to us than we are to ourselves. We try to grasp the Trinity with the same hunger with which we try to understand ourselves. And since we cannot look into the Trinity and we have been told that we are made in its image, all we can do to “feel after him and find him” as Paul says, is to look into ourselves.

Augustine is saying that if you are interested in looking for God and finding him, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, you must look within yourself, through a glass darkly. You must in fact also be engaged in a quest for your true self. And conversely, your only hope of finding your true self is in finding, or at the very least in continually seeking, the true God, who is eternally Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

This trinity in us is not static; as the Blessed Trinity is anything but static, being constituted by relationship and the ceaseless ebb and flow of the love which is God, which generates God and which is the God who is generated. Augustine sees the action of the Trinity in our souls, turning our self-understanding, self-memory and self-loving towards God, when it becomes God-understanding, God-memory and God-love. Our mind or soul reflects the Trinity not just in its structure but in its proper sphere of activity, which is union with God.

So might I suggest, as a hymn to accompany our thinking about the Trinity, our praying to the Trinity, not “Holy Holy Holy” but this one:

Lord, your summons echoes true when you but call my name
Let me turn and follow you and never be the same.
In your company I’ll go where your love and footsteps show.
Thus I’ll move and live and grow in you and you in me.