A gentle invitation

One of the best known icon of the Eastern Churches is Andrei Rublev's 15th century Old Testament Trinity. The scene is based on the rather mysterious story told in Genesis 18 of Abraham being visited by three men, whom he plied with hospitality and who, subsequently, prophesised that his wife Sara, though beyond childbearing age, would conceive and have a son within a year.

It is a long-standing Christian tradition to interpret the scene as a revelation to Abraham of God the Trinity, thus underlining the point that the doctrine of the Trinity is not an artificial theological construct but a statement about the real, living character of God.

In our contemplation of the Trinity this Sunday it is not 'supernatural facts' in themselves that should be our concern. In today's Gospel, Jesus says to Nicodemus: "God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life." These are the basics of our faith. After Pentecost, today's liturgy proposes the mystery of salvation in a nutshell.

Traditionally, this mystery was presented as arid as possible to emphasise our incapacity to grasp its depth. Our concern today is to grasp the God being revealed and to see, as one theologian put it, that 'God's being is in becoming'. God has a history. He enters our times so that our time may become eternity through the outpouring of His love.

Reading the Bible, one finds that the God depicted there is not some timeless entity, just existing in external bliss, but He is very active, involved with the story of Israel, involved with the world to the point of identifying with history in Jesus Christ.

In the biblical narrative, man's concern was more to find God than to explain Him.

There seems to be a return to this perspective in our faith journeys today when the issue seems no longer to be 'who God is' but rather 'where God is'.

In the first reading from Exodus today, Moses went up the mountain with the tablets of the law. The cloud up there represents the difficulty of knowing God. Yet God speaks from the cloud and, probably against all expectations and beyond any perspective that transpires from the law, manifests Himself as a 'God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in kindness and faithfulness'. God can only be approached in the darkness of silence. But this approach is very distant from the Western mind's approach in theology which sought first and foremost to ascribe qualities and attributes to God.

Let us approach this mystery in silence and in adoration because the revelation that might fulfil our longing for God will always appear as something unexpected and may also open up to discoveries about ourselves we had never even imagined. God infinitely surpasses our powers of understanding and His revelation is always a gentle invitation that puts to rest the heart before the mind.