“I was beside him, like a master worker,
and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his
inhabited world and delighting in the human race.” From the Book of the
Proverbs, chapter 8, verses 30 and 31.
In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit. Amen.
Today is Trinity Sunday, the First Sunday
after Pentecost, a day on which preachers typically protest that they are not
up to the task of understanding, never mind talking about, the Trinity. You’ll
be relieved to hear, no doubt, that I’m not going to make any such protest.
Today’s reading from Proverbs, which I just quoted, encourages us rather to
rejoice before God, which means, to rejoice in his revelation to us of his true
nature, and our true nature in relation to him and each other. God is always our
subject, in every homily and prayer and act of worship. To be reluctant to
think about, to talk about, the Trinity, is to be reluctant to open ourselves
up to the real nature of God and to his saving work in us. To be uneasy in
considering the Trinity is to be uneasy in our faith, to put ourselves in a
contradictory position in which we implicitly, or maybe even explicitly, deny
the faith we say we believe in every time we recite the Creed.
Today’s readings portray the Trinity at
work, so to speak. The Trinity is not an abstraction, an ethereal concept
remote from actual experience. Rather, it is a revelation of who God is and
what he is doing in us and in the rest of creation. And since we are created in
God’s image and likeness, we discover a Trinitarian structure in our own
nature. God, far from being remote from us in his nature, has actually created
in us the means by which we can share in his life, and he can share in ours.
The reading from Proverbs reveals to us
God as Creator and Lord, the Father, the first person of the Trinity. But at
the same time, Wisdom is beside the Father from the beginning, participating,
as it were, in every act of creation, as a master worker. This reminds us of the opening of John’s
Gospel, where the Evangelist says of the Son, “All things came into being
through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” In this chapter of
Proverbs, we hear the beginning (but only the beginning) of the revelation of
the second person of the Trinity, the Son, through whom all things came to be.
John’s Gospel makes explicit what the writer of Proverbs is beginning to reveal
of the role of the Son, although in Proverbs he is called Wisdom. But we cannot
identify the Son with Wisdom exactly, because in verse 22 it says “The Lord
created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago.” We
know from John’s Gospel that the Son is God, and is uncreated, begotten, not
made, as we recite in the Creed. The writer of Proverbs begins to understand
what John’s Gospel, and the New Testament as a whole, fully reveal.
But also in this passage, Wisdom sounds
like another word for the Holy Spirit, although they aren’t exactly equivalent.
Like the Holy Spirit, Wisdom leads humans to understanding. Today’s reading
omits some lines that would make this clearer. Verses 6 and 7, not included in
today’s selection, say “Hear, for I will speak noble things, and from my lips
will come what is right, for my mouth will utter truth.” Jesus recalls this
when he says in John’s Gospel, “When the Spirit of Truth comes, he will guide
you into all the truth.” It is the work of the Holy Spirit, as it is the work
of Wisdom, to lead us to every noble thing, to every truth.
There is more to discover in Proverbs,
chapter 8, than the concepts of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit implicit in the
words Lord and Wisdom. There is the relationship between the Lord and Wisdom. Wisdom is there from the beginning,
accompanying the Lord in his work of creation, and participating in it as the
master worker. Wisdom is participant, witness, and, finally (if I dare put it
this way) admirer of the creation. Wisdom says, “I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in
the human race.” In other words, the relationship among the Lord and Wisdom
and creation is personal. And it is
this understanding of the nature of God as personal, which is the clue to the
real nature of the Trinity, and to our own nature. The writer of Proverbs has
revealed something of the nature of God; this revelation is fully developed in
the Christian revelation of God as Trinity, as the relationship of the three
persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
It seems to me that the writer of Proverbs
makes it clear that the Lord could not have created if Wisdom had not been
there from the beginning. There is an almost reciprocal character in this
connection between the Creator and Wisdom. It is as though the Creator needs
Wisdom to be there, to complete his work. Creation, in other words, is not the
work of an isolated divine individual, working alone in the depths of his own
glory, but is rather the work of a God who has an inner life, an inner life
which he wants to communicate to his creation, and to us. God is, in effect, an
eternal, timeless process of communication. And the nature of that
communication is delight, a delight which is personal.
To be a person is to be in relationship. We
probably tend to think of ‘person’ as ‘an individual,’ forgetting to realize
that it is in our relationships that we become fully personal. The word has
come a long way from its meaning in the ancient classical theater, when the
word ‘persona’ meant ‘mask,’ the mask of the actor. The word actually means
‘through-sounding,’ and of course that is exact, since the actor had to speak
through his mask. When the Church used the word to refer to persons of the
Trinity, its meaning of ‘mask’ was dropped, and it came to signify the relations among the persons of the
Trinity, and the relations of the Trinity with us. In other words, God dropped
his mask of remote, unapproachable divinity, utterly different from ourselves,
speaking through prophets, or hidden in clouds, or thundering from mountain
tops. Instead, he became incarnate in the Son, and proceeded into the world in
the Spirit. In his humanity he became as
we are, so that we may become like him.
And God made us personal as well, that is,
able to relate to each other and to him. We all seek that community with
Wisdom, who is with us as we create, as we do the work in the world which God
has given us to do. We all lead each other, like the Holy Spirit, when we allow
ourselves to do it, into the truth. We are all, like Wisdom, made to “rejoice
before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world, and delighting in the
human race.”
In
the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
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