Trinity Sunday
A Word about the Readings
by Father Gethin
(The readings may be found here)
The Octave day of Pentecost, which we call Trinity Sunday, celebrates the ultimate fulfillment of God’s purpose in our Redemption, summed up for us today in John’s heavenly vision: ‘A door was opened in heaven’, he tells us, and by way of that door he sees God’s identity and life. God, says John, is a unity of divine nature (one sat upon the throne), and a trinity of relations, or persons: “he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardius stone: and there was a rainbow round about the throne.” By the reconciling work accomplished through the suffering of Jesus, and by the communion and fellowship present in the sending of the Holy Spirit, the Church begins to perceive the reality of God’s own life, and to be moved according to that vision. The earthly Church joins in the heavenly praises, singing ‘Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty’.
Trinity Sunday, by inviting us to turn our glance upward, and to consider the very life and nature of God, shows us that we are not strangers to heaven: ‘thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are, and were created.’ We are meant to receive and to rejoice in the story of God’s own life, because in our Redemption we come to rediscover that we are made in His image: The Trinitarian nature of God—which is the expression and communion of His goodness in one common life—we also share, because we are made with the capacity to love. ‘Love one and other as I have loved you’, Jesus told them at the Last Supper. We are the children and inheritors of God’s own life, which we call the Trinity, and by that delightfully simple word, we mean the whole depth and beauty of holy charity.
Our labour and interest, in other words, as Christians, is just this: to remain stalwart and faithful in our ongoing meditation upon, and our expression of, the life of God and His love for us. To begin with, we must never make the means of that progress an end in itself: even the Cross of our Saviour, the ultimate earthly reality of that love, is meant for us as the means of entering the way of life: We worship the Trinity, and Christ as a person of that Divinity, but not as an earthly martyr. We proclaim Jesus, not only as the forgiveness of sins, but as the Life of our new and heavenly goodness: “whosoever believeth in [me] should not perish, but have eternal life.” It is upon the meaning of that life that the Trinity season bids us meditate, and I rejoice with you that such a high and heavenly calling should come and shape our earthly story.