Biblical Words [718]
Isaiah 6:1-8; Psalm
29;
God as the
Holy One invades human life, shattering earthly powers but transforming those
who respond.
Trinity Sunday is a transitional day between the long sacred
seasons of Lent-Easter and the six months of
“ordinary time” that extend until Advent. There is a corresponding transitional Sunday
at the end of this ordinary time, Reign of Christ (formerly Christ the
King).
It has been said that Trinity Sunday focuses on the Being of the holy and
mysterious God whose Actions were revealed in the holy times from Advent to
Pentecost.
Isaiah
6:1-8
The lections for Trinity Sunday begin with the awesome call vision of Isaiah. This was the Biblical text that was evoked for many of us by Rudolph Otto’s classic study The Idea of the Holy. It is the Lord as the “terrible and fascinating” power, overwhelming and annihilating, yet transforming the one human who is singled out for the revelation.
The report of Isaiah’s vision assumes that the speaker is standing in the main hall of Solomon’s temple, though it is transformed into a heavenly court by God’s enthroned presence.
The seraphs were part of the standard imagery of heavenly things, so distant from human experience as to seem alien or bizarre. Like the even more bizarre “living creatures” with wings and faces in Ezekiel’s vision of the enthroned God (Ezekiel 1), the seraphs are associated with God’s throne and its mobility. Here the seraphs are vaguely human creatures with faces and private parts (“feet” in verse 2 is a euphemism), and they have voices, which may roar like thunder, making the building tremble, but which utter articulate words of praise, beginning with the thrice-repeated qādôsh – “holy, holy, holy.”
The human who is confronted
with this is devastated. “Woe is
me! I am lost…” His own condition, which is such a contrast
to this overwhelming holiness, is described as being a person “of unclean lips”
(verse 5,
A marvelous transformation comes about here, when a seraph touches a live coal from the incense altar to the speaker’s lips. He is purified, his power of speech transformed. Now he hears the consultations of the heavenly council and is even able to speak up and say, “Here am I; send me!” (verse 8).
The Holy One overwhelms but transforms and gives mission to the human who has made himself present in God’s temple.
Psalm 29.
The Psalm reading repeats the psalm that is used in Epiphany to celebrate the Spirit of God at Jesus’ baptism (1st Sunday after Epiphany in Year B). The psalm is an astonishing presentation of the Lord of Israel as the Storm God, repeating the phrase “the Voice of the Lord” (thunder) seven times as it tracks a great electrical storm from the Mediterranean Sea across the Lebanon mountains until it dissipates over the desert east of Damascus (verses 3-9).
The outer framework of the storm
passage (verses 1-2, 10-11) is the worship of God as enthroned King in the
heavenly palace, which worship is replicated by devout humans in the
earthly temple. The first word summons
the “heavenly beings” to worship God’s glory (verse 1) and at the end, “in his
temple all say, ‘Glory!’” (verse 9,
Appropriate to Trinity Sunday is the triadic structure of the opening call to worship.
Romans
8:12-17
The reading from the Epistle presents an amazing glimpse into an inner life of God into which humans are drawn.
Those believers who “are led by the Spirit of God are children of God” by adoption. “When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God…” (verses 14-16). When the faithful utter the ecstatic cry of prayer, “O Father!”, it is the Spirit of God addressing God the Father through the prayer of the adopted Spirit-born child of God.
The New Jerusalem
Bible renders it somewhat differently but with the same implications: “…you received the spirit of adoption,
enabling us to cry out, ‘Abba, Father!’
The Spirit himself joins with our spirit to bear witness that we are
children of God” (verses 15-16,
The encompassing God of Paul’s vision works through the redeemed people to converse with God’s own self – a divine inner dialogue carried out by means of salvation history! A remarkable aspect of the divine mystery, and an awesome note to sound about human prayer!
John
3:1-17
The Gospel reading is Jesus’ discussion with the Judean leader Nicodemus about being born again.
As a Trinity Sunday reading, three things stand out: (1) the Spirit of God as the agent of the rebirth (verses 3-8), (2) the Son who descended from heaven and is “lifted up” again so that believers may have eternal life (verses 11-15), and (3) the ending that speaks of what God the Father was up to in all of this, giving us what is probably the world's most famous New Testament quotation: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son..." (John 3:16).
Jesus’ first words
to Nicodemus speak of seeing (or in verse 5 “entering”) the
The phrase “
The answer Jesus gives is that one must be born of the Spirit. There is a sharp distinction between the flesh and the spirit. To be born of flesh is to live by the flesh, that is, to indulge all the bodily desires. To be born of the Spirit is to have one’s own spirit guided into a kind of unpredictable manner of life, later to be characterized as love of God and others.
“The wind [= spirit/Spirit]
blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where
it comes from or where it goes. So it is
with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (verse 8,
There is a spontaneous unpredictability about the works of love inspired by the Holy Spirit that is denied to bondage to the flesh.
If it is the work of the Spirit to inspire a manner of living that gives body to the love of God, it was the Son who opened up such a possibility for humankind. The phrase “Son of Man” in John refers to Jesus as the pre-existent Son of God who became human in order to suffer and be raised up, providing access to eternal life for believers.
The discourse in
What we hear in this
passage are Jesus-believers in dialogue with their Judean opponents. When Jesus is speaking one-to-one with
Nicodemus about the work of the Spirit there could have been some agreement
between them. Jesus implies, at least,
that a “teacher in
In their different experiences of the Holy God, the
Being of God remains an encompassing mystery to people of faith.
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