Be—Know—Love

Midweek Worship

The Week of Holy Trinity

A Reading from John’s Gospel:

“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.

“He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.”

The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Someone asked me recently whether I imagine God as a person or as more of an alien. And I confess the question threw me, in its apparent innocence and literalism. He was asking me if God looks like Zeus up on a cloud, or more like the Flying Spaghetti Monster of Pastafarian fame.

And taken like that, the answer of course is neither. God is not a guy in the sky, nor some eldritch horror dredged up from the recesses of the collective unconscious. God is not a thing at all, not a being, but Being itself, Being with a capital B. How do I express this to someone who’s imagining Hercules or Thor?

Yet on a deeper level, I realized that this fellow was inquiring about a basic concern of theology: is God more like us, close to us; or is God immeasurably far away? In other words, is He immanent, closer to you than your jugular, or transcendent, beyond space and time, beyond word or thought? Is it love or glory, intimacy or majesty? And that’s a good question. That’s a good place to begin.

Before all else—God is. And I don’t just mean “before” in terms of time. God does not exist in the way that we exist. His existence is infinite, eternal, and perfect; so infinite, in fact, that there is no separation between His essence and His existence. God is existence itself. Everything else that exists, everything else that is, only is insofar as it exists in God. We derive our being from Him, in every heartbeat, every breath, “for in Him we all live and move and have our being.”

That’s why we call God Creator: because we are always being created. That’s why we call God Father: because we are all derived from Him. And that’s why we call God Yahweh, the great and holy Name that means “I AM.” God is an infinite act of existence. And simultaneous to His existence is His knowledge: God knows Himself; perfectly, infinitely, eternally. All things are in God and God knows all—always has, always will.

Indeed, one of the most miraculous aspects of our world is that all things that exist appear to be knowable, intelligible. Even if some things are beyond our knowing, we understand that they can be known by minds greater than ours. Even if we don’t know the answer, even if we can’t, we believe that there is an answer. The Greeks called this λόγος: the logic, the reason, the Word that permeates and precedes and binds all things. Reason is divine, the workings of the mind of God.

Now, we are all of us self-aware, are we not? To one degree or another at least. We each have an image of ourselves within ourselves: an image distorted by ignorance, ego, and sin, but an image nonetheless. We see as in a glass darkly. Yet if we knew ourselves perfectly—if we could see ourselves for who we truly are in the white-hot light of absolute truth—then it would be effectively impossible to distinguish ourselves from our knowledge of ourselves. The person we are would truly be the person whom we know ourselves to be.

And this is how it is for God. God’s self-knowledge, His self-awareness, His perfect Image of His own Being, is fully and truly who He is. The territory is the map. The God who is, and the God who is known, are one and the same. We call this God-within-God, this God-who-is-God, the Son of God or the Image of God or the Word of God: again, the λόγος. God is and God knows. And just as God infinitely is, and so is Being itself, so also God infinitely knows, and so is Knowledge itself.

This does not mean there are two gods, mind you. It simply means that the One God is infinite, eternal, and perfect. Still with me? Good, because we’re not done.

In the same eternal instant that God is, and God knows, God also loves. He knows Himself perfectly, fully, eternally. And He loves what He knows, loves what He is. God is Goodness and Beauty and Truth, Consciousness, Being, and Bliss. How could He not love that? How could anyone not love that? And this isn’t pride, mind you, nor arrogance. This is perfect, selfless, self-love. I know that sounds like a contradiction. How can you selflessly self-love? Well, like so:

The Son is begotten of the Father, which is to say that the God who is begets the God who knows that He is. He sees Himself as though in a mirror, as though He were another person. And this is not an illusion! God is not Narcissus staring ever in a pool. Rather, God’s λόγος is a Person; because again, a perfect image is indistinguishable from the original; in fact, is the original in essence and in form. The Image of God is God, the Father’s only Son.

And the Father loves the Son, infinitely, eternally, perfectly, pouring out His Being into Him. And the Son, His perfect Image, loves the Father right back, infinitely, eternally, perfectly, pouring out His knowledge and His knowing into Him. And the love between them—the Father’s love, the Father’s Being, poured out into the Son, and the Son’s love, the Son’s adoration, poured out unto His Father—that’s God too. That’s God giving of Himself unto God, pouring out His very life, His breath, His Spirit unto His beloved. For the Holy Spirit is Love, and Love is God.

We call this perichoresis, the dance of the Trinity: the Three who are One God—eternal Being, eternal Knowing, eternal Love—in perfect motion, which is perfect stillness. It is a beautiful, mystical, revelation of our Lord. And it is true. The Trinity is no mere metaphor, but how we speak of God analogously. What that means is that who and what God is will always be beyond us. We are timely and finite and flawed; God is eternal, infinite, and perfect.

There will always be more to God—to His Being, His Knowing, His Love—than we can ever hope to encompass. Yet it is true that God is Being itself. It is true that God is Knowledge itself. And it is true that God is Love itself. Everything we are and know and love down here is but a pale reflection, a derivative, of the being and knowing and love of God. Father, +Son, and Holy Spirit are not three separate gods but are how God relates to Himself. He is that relationship.

And we are the products of it. We are the children of the Trinity, created not out of necessity or caprice but from infinite, superabundant, overflowing love. We and all things—a Creation that might well be infinite for all we know—exist as the joy of the Trinity, swept up in the eternal dance of Father, +Son, and Holy Spirit. God is always with us, for God is our Father. God knows us better than we know ourselves, for God is the Son. And God loves us, pours out Himself into us, makes us in His Image—and the Image is the Son—because God is Holy Spirit, the breath and the life within our veins.

So to return to that initial question: God is at one and the same time both farther beyond us than we could ever comprehend, and also closer to us than we could ever be to ourselves. He is both immanent and transcendent; indeed, both God and Man.

Christians are not the only monotheists. We are not even the only monotheists to speak of God in this way. There is a trinity in Hinduism; a trinity in Islam, though it goes not by that name. Our Jewish brethren also speak of multiplicity within God. To confess that God is One is to say that God is many—He is, He knows, He loves—yet that within this multitude He remains the One True God. God must be; God must know; God must love. Yet in God these three are one, for all these three are God.

Bit of a mindbender, isn’t it? Good. That’s how it ought to be. The Trinity is not a doctrine of dissection but the confession of a mystery. It is how finite beings such as we can speak of an infinite God, confessing truths that point beyond themselves to the One who is the Truth.

But this doesn’t mean that we ignore it. It doesn’t mean we wipe our hands and say, “Oh, whatever, the Trinity’s a mystery,” and then never speak of it again. In Christianity, a sacred mystery is something that we can only begin to understand by experiencing it, living it, doing it.

God is Trinity. We know Him as Trinity. We love Him as Trinity. And by the grace of Jesus Christ, the Trinity is what we will be.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.