The novelist, Barbara Pym once wrote that understanding another person is like trying to understand someone else’s filing system. You look where you think you should find things and then discover it is filed under ‘M’ for Miscellaneous.  If that is true of understanding each other, how much more might it be true of understanding God.

On Trinity Sunday we might be helped to understand God better if we did what the Book of Common Prayer bids us to do, which is to recite the Athanasian Creed.  The Creed itself was written some time about the end of the fourth century, rather later than St. Athanasius could have written it but no doubt his name lent it authority. Athanasius was the champion of orthodox belief at a time when the Church doubted that Jesus was true God and seemed to prefer thinking of him as a great human being who was Divinely inspired.  This was the great controversy which led to the formulation of a number of creeds – the sum of which is contained in the one we recite regularly known popularly as the Nicene Creed.  All of them championed Trinitarian belief but none did it so well as the Athanasian Creed – which is a theological treatise on the nature of the Trinity.  If we followed the Prayer Book demand this morning, amongst the things we would say are:

The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible: and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible but also that there are not three incomprehensibles nor three uncreated: but one uncreated and one incomprehensible….and so on.

All very clear, I’m sure – you get the drift. God is One and Three and is …..  incomprehensible!  Perhaps that’s why we have stopped saying that particular Creed – it’s all an unfathomable mystery.  And therein lies the truth -   God is a mystery.

Now that can be a problem because, outside Agatha Christie, the goings on at Midsomer Madness or taking part in Murder Mysteries we aren’t all that keen on mystery.  We prefer to know everything – a bit like a friend of mine who doesn’t like a car journey when he hasn’t studied the map in great detail making sure he knows exactly how to get from A to B. whereas I, on the other hand, don’t mind the odd meander and uncertainty.  But uncertainty is not something we like when we talk about God. We want God to be accessible and just like we imagine him to be. We don’t want to believe  that God is greater than our hearts, or our minds – and yet we know that  if he isn’t he can’t be God.

The 17^th century poet, Henry Vaughan, in a poem called Night meditated on today’s Gospel – in which Nicodemus came to Jesus by night. He says this:

There is in God (some say) a deep but dazzling darkness

The words are a quotation from the writings of a 5^th century Syrian monk, Dionysius, who wrote that just when we think we understand who God is and how he acts, something happens to shake our complacency.  It’s a bit like what the Welsh poet R.S. Thomas means when he says:

Ours is such a fast God
Always before us and leaving as we arrive.

What this means is that, despite our best efforts, we can’t control God. We, who are made in His image, cannot re-make him in ours. Our knowledge of God is too incomplete, too imperfect.  Our minds cannot fathom his vastness.  But how we try!  And we try because humanity has a kind of inbuilt arrogance that we are somehow greater than the rest of Creation.  Hence we dominate and exploit the world rather than act as stewards of the gifts God has put on his planet for the benefit of all – not just humanity.

It is just one short step to believing ourselves greater, or at the very least , equal to the Creator. 

Doom-watchers tell us that we are very close to paying the ultimate price for our arrogance and they may be right, but in spiritual terms it is very dangerous to believe ourselves equal to our Creator.  If we try to make God in our own image the arrogance kicks in at a religious as well as ecological and political level.

At a religious level, thinking that we are God’s equal can  mean that we look to God  for approval for all sorts of ideas, thoughts and opinions we might have. God then becomes the one who undergirds our own prejudices or particular slant on things. The Church has suffered a lot from such an approach but also  individuals, too, have been wounded and hurt and alienated by those who believe that they, and only they, have the truth.  Whereas, as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks once said:  

No one creed has a monopoly on spiritual truth… in heaven there is truth; on earth there are truths. Therefore each culture has something to contribute.

The biggest contributor to truth is God himself and we would be wise not to claim His authority to bolster our own. It is entirely the other way round.  Which is why God has built into his scheme of things this sense of Divine Mystery. Don’t claim to know me, says God, my ways are not your ways nor are my thoughts your thoughts.

There is in God (some say) a deep but dazzling darkness, and yet it is not a darkness that is quite as incomprehensible as the Athanasian Creed would have us believe.  If we go back to today’s Gospel we find Nicodemus coming to Jesus by Night – always a symbol of darkness in biblical terms.  Perhaps he came by night because, as a Jewish leader he did not want his co-leaders to know that he was consorting with a known rebel who was increasingly a threat to the cosy religious life they were leading.  Or perhaps it was something more. John’s Gospel has a pre-occupation with Darkness and Light.  Nicodemus came in spiritual darkness but he sought enlightenment. He recognised Jesus as a teacher sent from God. You couldn’t get much closer to an admission of our Lord’s divine authority than that.

Even so, Nicodemus still had his misconceptions and Jesus taunts him a little because of them – Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things.  Later he told him that he was too earthbound to understand heavenly things.  What seems evident, however, is that Nicodemus was prepared to embrace the darkness of his unbelief because he saw something in Jesus that was going to change him.  What he saw was a God he didn’t understand but also that same God was offering him a way forward – Jesus had been sent by The Father to bring eternal life. The darkness may not be as dense as Nicodemus first thought because hidden within it was something dazzling, radiant.

And that’s the thing about God. He may be outside our understanding but within each of us He has placed a divine spark – a bit of himself - the darkness dazzles.  One of the properties of darkness is that it always contains the promise of light. As night progresses on its course, it is slowly destroyed by the coming of the dawn.  For Nicodemus this was a spiritual rather than physical experience. I can say this because when we next meet him in Chapter 7 of John’s Gospel, he is defending Jesus before the antipathy of the other Jewish Leaders. Don’t judge him, Nicodemus says, before you hear what he has to say.

This was a heart on the turn. When we next meet him, it is another night, but his action helps to bring the dawn not just of a new day but a new way of life. For Nicodemus is with Joseph of Arimathea, carrying our Lord’s body to the tomb.

What changed for Nicodemus is that all the certainties of his old belief were challenged and shaken to the core.  Now he was going to be  made in God’s image.  Hitherto he had found comfort and a sense that God was somehow containable through his religion. It’s easy for that to happen. We become more concerned with rule keeping and with a kind of self-righteousness that builds up a defence against anything that might challenge our religious observances. But the thing is such defences might also keep out God.

A man used to batter regularly on the door of a church and seek admittance but he wasn’t allowed in because he didn’t fit in with the image they had of themselves. One day God turned up and the man complained that they were keeping him out. “I know what you mean” said God, “they keep me out too.”  If we are to go anywhere near to understanding God we have to allow him to re-make us, again and again.  That’s what Nicodemus had to discover and so do we.  Only so will we progress from darkness to light or, to put it another way – only so will we enter into a living relationship with a Living God.

One of the classic illustrations of the Trinity is an Icon painted by the Russian Icon painter, Andrei Rublev in the 15^th century.  The Icon shows the three angels who visited Abraham at the Oak of Mamre in Genesis 18.  Abraham offered them hospitality and Rublev painted them seated around a table. In front of them is a cup of wine – a sign of hospitality.  The significant thing for the viewer is that the space in front of the table is empty and there is a sense in which we are not just looking at the figures but rather, of them looking at us. There is an openness as they seem to look towards us the viewer and invite us to join them.

I have seen a re-working of this image by a monk of the Abbey of Bec (the same community where our own Icon of St. John the Baptist was painted) In the Icon the three figures are those of Christ and the two disciples at Emmaus. As with Rublev’s icon there is a cup on the table but it is clearly a chalice as used in the Holy Eucharist. As in Rublev’s icon the space in front of them is an open and  the invitation to join them is clear.  We take up this invitation every time we approach the altar to receive Holy Communion – for we not only receive Jesus under the form of Bread and Wine, but are also drawn more and more into a relationship with the Trinity.

The message I take from this is that only by participating in the life of God will we come close to fathoming his mystery – but also, the only way that can truly happen is by God’s invitation.  When He is ready to reveal Himself fully – or rather, when he thinks we are ready to understand his revelation – when we are in such a state of openness to his dazzling love, then, like Isaiah we shall be given a glimpse of His glory – and it will be enough for us – at least this side of eternity.