Jesus said to his disciples: “I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now. But when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to all truth. He will not speak on his own, but he will speak what he hears, and will declare to you the things that are coming. He will glorify me, because he will take from what is mine and declare it to you. Everything that the Father has is mine; for this reason I told you that he will take from what is mine and declare it to you.” (John 16.12-15)
For about the last seven-hundred years, the Western or Roman Church has celebrated on the Sunday following the Feast of the Pentecost a special day called Trinity Sunday, choosing this time of the year to honor the Holy Trinity. Pope John XXII officially put the day on the calendar in 1134. Certainly, there were earlier celebrations in some places, but with his decree it was mandated for all Christians in the Western Church.
Interestingly, the Eastern or Orthodox Church does not have a special feast for the Trinity, but instead uses Pentecost as the occasion to honor the Triune God. To my way of thinking, it may be the better way. As it stands, we in the Western Church end up discussing much the same thing two Sundays in a row, evidenced by the fact that the same passage from the Gospel of John is used some years for both Pentecost and for Trinity Sunday, giving people in the pew a strong sense of deja vu unless they somehow slept through the storms of Pentecost.
Another conundrum posed by the special day is how to reconcile the irreconcilable. On one hand, the Church teaches that the Holy Trinity is a mystery, meaning it cannot be understood. At the same time, the special day requires making zealous efforts to explain what cannot be explained, resulting in preachers becoming overconfident, speaking of God as if they were on a first-name basis, bar buddies on Saturday nights. The overconfidence shows they are blissfully ignorant of their own ignorance.
The brutal fact is that God is unknowable by mere mortals. Unlike the frog we all dissected in high school biology class, the Most High God can never be understood in precise and exact detail. One thing is certain. If we say we understand God, then it’s not the Most High God we’re explaining. One of the greatest minds in Western theology, Thomas Aquinas, spent his life writing about the nature of God, only to discover at the end that it was “so much straw,” to use his phrase.
Experiencing some sort of beatific vision one day, he told his secretary, “The end of my labors has come. All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me.” He never wrote another word and he died three months later. It was a humility learned at the end; far better, I believe, to have learned it near the beginning.
Of course, humility is tough to sell these days, resulting in more than a few people presenting themselves as expositors of the Most High God, treating the mysteries of God as no more than another geometry problem, even if a bit more complicated. The chutzpah is both dangerous and damning, the presumption unimaginable in a former age when the “mysterium tremendum” was respected and feared in equal amounts.
Fearless and foolish, they march through the minefield of buried explosives with little care for a misstep or a mistake, their stride confident and unafraid while they should be tiptoeing with utmost care, heresies planted all around them, blowing all their wisdom to smithereens and exposing their lack of sure footedness on all matters relating to God.
So, as that prelude to our discussion should make clear, I have no intention of explaining the inner workings of the Most High God, not today or any day for that matter. Like Moses before the burning bush, I prefer to take off my sandals, hiding my face out of fear as did the great prophet who had sense enough not to think he could look God in the face and live to tell about it.
Instead, I will talk about the human experience of the Most High God across the eons, really our only pathway to knowing something of the Most High God unless we are blessed with a beatific vision such as Aquinas had. Of course, this examination of the human experience is also only “so much straw,” as Aquinas came to see and as all wise men come to know when speaking about the awesome mystery of God.
And, in doing so, should I step into a heresy or two, I accept it as a given. Far greater minds than mine have done the same and I hold to the belief that anyone who thinks they can explain the Trinity without detonating a few heresies should apply for Saint Peter’s job at the Golden Gates. He probably would appreciate the relief from his long hours on duty.
For my part, I am fond of the image of a voice when speaking of the Most High God, primarily because it is used so frequently in the pages of Sacred Writ for the same purpose. If we want to place the template of the trinitarian formula onto the image, then we can argue that the one and same voice was heard before time at the dawn of creation, in time with the Word made flesh, and throughout time in the Spirit that leads and guides humanity on its way back to God.
The first book of the Bible, Genesis, begins with the voice. “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters, God said, “Let there be light and there was light.” We’re told that God separated the light from the darkness, calling the light day and the darkness night. Hence, time began.
All of creation follows, but as the writer of Genesis makes clear, it is the voice that brings creation into being, the writer always using the words “God said” as the preface to any individual act of creation. Without the voice, there would be no creation, everything in heaven and on earth dependent on the voice speaking into the abyss, his words reverberating through the darkness, all of creation molded by his words “Let there be.”
When the voice in the burning bush calls out to Moses, he identifies himself in terms of the past. “I am the God of your fathers.” However, it was a voice that was heard long before Abraham, Issac, and Jacob walked the earth, heard before anyone or anything walked on the surface of the earth. It was the voice that created something from nothing.
As the eons passed, the voice continued to speak, heard by a selected few such as Moses and the prophets, a voice that held the world together. Had it stopped speaking the words “Let it be,” all creation would have turned into dust in a split second, returning to the formless mass that it was before the voice spoke.
In the fullness of time, meaning in God’s time, the voice of the Most High was heard in a precise moment in human history, a moment that we call the Incarnation, or as the evangelist John describes it, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us and we saw his glory, the glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth.”
It is much the same thought that the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews beautifully expressed when he began his letter with these words, “In times past, God spoke to us in partial and various ways to our ancestors through the prophets. In these last days, he spoke to us through a son, whom he made heir of all things and through whom he created the universe.”
The divine voice was heard in the Man of Galilee as he preached to the people and as he taught in the synagogues and in the open air, telling his listeners, “My sheep hear my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish. No one can take them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one can take them out of the Father’s hand. The Father and I are one.”
Born in human time, the Word made flesh was limited both by space and by time, requiring his return to the right hand of the Father when his mission on earth was done. However, as he made clear to his followers, his Father would send the Spirit to stay with them. That selection that we hear today from the Gospel of John contains the same promise, Jesus telling his disciples, “I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now. But when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to all truth. He will not speak on his own, but he will speak what he hears and he will declare to you all things that are coming.”
Hence, there is the assurance that once the Word made flesh returns to the high heavens, the voice will not cease, but will continue. In fact, the voice will speak the word, now heard throughout time. The Son of Man tells us, “The Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you.”
So, is this a perfect analogy of the triune God? Of course, it isn’t. No one is perfect except God himself. But it works for me. The Psalmist once expressed a similar sentiment when he wrote: “A voice I did not know said to me, ‘I removed the burden from your shoulder. In distress you called and I rescued you. I answered you in secret with thunder.”
In many ways, then, the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity tells us to whom the voice belongs so that we no longer have to say, “A voice I did know know.” The voice has chosen to reveal himself to us, telling us at one and the same time that his is a voice of command, a voice of compassion, and a voice of consolation. It was his voice before time in the Father, in time in the Son, and throughout time in the Spirit.
If nothing else, the feast reminds us that the Most High God has stayed with humankind, speaking to us from dawn to dusk through the ages, and his promise is that his voice will be heard until the consolation of the ages, revealing to us at every moment his immense love for his creation, telling us that in every age, “I was there,” to borrow a phrase from the Book of Proverbs.
I was there. It is a comforting thought as our world and as our lives move slowly towards completion that his voice can be heard in every season and in every place, the same thought contained in the verse from the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins that reads: “And for all this, nature is never spent;/ There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;/ And though the last lights of the black West went/ Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs–/ Because the Holy Ghost over the bent/ World broods with warm breast and with ah! Bright wings.”
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 