The Rublev icon of the Trinity has in recent years become one of the most familiar of icons. Three winged and seemingly identical figures are seated round a table gazing contemplatively at each other; they are only distinguishable by the colour of their robes, though blue is present in all of them, symbolic of the eternal heavens. The right hand figure is in green – representing the creative freshness and fertility of the spirit. The central figure is in purple – showing both the majesty and the suffering of the Son. The left hand figure towards whom the other two are looking wears the gold of the Father’s glory. There is something both intimate and yet openly welcoming about the group because a space is left for us in the foreground of the icon and it is that space which is hinted at in all three of this morning’s readings.
The personified figure of Wisdom is God’s assistant in creation, a master worker in whom God delights, and who rejoices before God but also delights in the human race. In other words we are included in the relationship that exists between Wisdom and God.
In Paul’s letter to the Romans we are described as being gifted with the Sprit so that we share in the love and glory of God; and so the peace that exists between the Father and the Son becomes ours also.
In Jesus’ final address to his disciples in John’s account of the Last Supper we hear him say that the Spirit will lead us into all truth because the Spirit is a part of the eternal love that exists between the Father and the Son. So each of these readings in their different way puts us in the foreground of the relationship between Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Trinity Sunday is I suspect often feared by congregations because they expect that the sermon will be hard to understand, a difficulty probably shared by the preacher. However; it seems to me our greatest problem today is not intellectual but spiritual; how are we to occupy the space in the foreground of the icon – and believe that we are delighted in, graced, guided, and welcomed into that Trinitarian relationship?
We might approach this problem through something which puzzles me in our Romans reading. I can see how suffering can produce endurance, and I can see how endurance might produce character, but what seems much less clear is how character can produce hope. Of course we find suffering hard to endure, and in itself endurance is not necessarily a very attractive thing, achieved as it were through gritted teeth. And the kind of character based on endurance might have about it a determined perhaps pioneering quality, played out as it were by John Wayne or Clint Eastwood – the strong silent type. And though such resilience might be based on the growth of an inner hopefulness – that’s not obvious. In the New testament of course it’s God who gives us hope – not some aspect of our character which we have developed over long years of suffering and endurance.
Is this what Paul really means us to think? And is this the character we need with which to approach the Holy Trinity. The word ‘Character’ derives from the Greek, meaning an impress or distinctive mark,. So human beings we could say are impressed with the mark of God in their creation. In Romans. however, Paul is using another word which means the quality of having been approved, or the stamp put on something to show that it is genuine. So what is the character in these various senses which we as Christians should bear – if we are to come before the Trinity?
Perhaps we have to begin by admitting we are entering the presence of something we can’t understand. Atheists will mock us for believing in something we don’t understand – they will see it as the abuse of power exercised by those who rule the church and try to keep people under control by convincing them that it’s ok not to understand. So we need a little clarification; we say we can’t understand because God is the source of all that is, the reason why there is anything at all at any and every moment. If we claimed to understand this God we would be on the first step to idolatry, to an idea we could manipulate to our own ends and therefore use to manipulate others. If God is our creator then he is the most powerful idea we can have and therefore the most powerful idea we could abuse unless we admit truthfully and honestly that we cannot understand this idea – therefore in the face of God we must be intellectually and linguistically humble, that is the first necessary characteristic.
We can of course still talk about God but we talk in two different ways; we talk metaphorically – we compare God as Biblical language does so richly to a shepherd, a stronghold, a mighty warrior, breath, wind, a hovering eagle and so on, but in using such language we can also say that God is not these things – this language can be equally asserted and denied. There is another way of speaking of God, however, which is literal and cannot be denied. We say that God is wise, just, loving and merciful. We know in human terms what these words mean and so we know that if God is God he must also be wise, just, loving and merciful and it would be wrong and false to say that he is stupid, unjust, unforgiving and full of hate. At the same time when we say that God is wise or loving we have to admit that we can’t get very far in saying what divine love is. We must say that God is love and in the same breath admit that his love goes far beyond our comprehension. So we might say that believing in God stretches to the limit our concepts of goodness, truth and beauty and it is good that we should be so stretched. That is the second characteristic we need.
And thirdly besides humility and a willingness to be stretched to the limit we need to be needy, in other words we need to want and to know what we most want and to allow those wants to bring us to the Trinity as the place to express our needs. We may of course be confused about our needs, or we may be frightened of expressing them, or we may even have managed to convince ourselves that we don’t need anything or worse still that what we most deeply want, we can’t have. As I say we can be very confused. But perhaps in the presence of the Trinity that doesn’t matter because God knows what we need. God creates our humanity; the Son is our humanity perfected; the spirit is the overflowing for us of the love between the Father and the Son; therefore the place for us to become less confused about what we mostly deeply need is here in the presence of the Holy Trinity.
Humbly to accept that we cannot understand the Trinity, that we must be stretched to the limit of all we value, and that we must be vulnerable in admitting our deepest needs, all this may be painful both internally and in relation to the outer world. It is a pain in the face of which we have to learn patience (a better translation of Paul’s Greek than endurance) and as we learn patience so God gives us the grace to develop the characteristics I have been describing. For of course we do not have to force ourselves to stand before the Trinity – God draws us there, God invites and welcomes us and waits patiently for us if we are not quite ready. And it is from the patience of God that hope will come to us, the hope that in our lives we may know something of that calm but radiant energy of love in Rublev’s icon. Amen