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When I was studying for my ‘A’ Level English Literature Exam the syllabus included a study of English poets of the 17th century and many of them have become firm favourites as a result. Poets like George Herbert, some of whose poems we sing as hymns; and John Donne who was Dean of St. Pauls and whose poetry is a mixture of the sensual and the sacred. One poet I studied was Henry Vaughan whose poem The Night, is regarded by many as his greatest poem. It is inspired by the visit of Nicodemus to Jesus which is our Gospel for today.
Vaughan had a fascination with the two seemingly opposite, contrasting images of darkness and light – something which also deeply pre-occupied St. John who records Nicodemus’s visit. Nicodemus was the Night Visitor who slipped out to see Jesus when all the world was hushed and presumably, also, because as a respected leading Pharisee, he didn’t want his colleagues to know that he was consorting with Jesus whom they despised. But Henry Vaughan, like St. John himself, wasn’t just concerned with the physical darkness of night. He drew from this image the deeper darkness of the unbeliever who becomes fascinated by the light which flows from Jesus and wants to know its source. Nicodemus was a searcher who came to Jesus seeking to know what Jesus could really tell him about God. As is so often the case with Jesus, he uses the meeting with Nicodemus to make a teaching point about the Kingdom of God and how we can reach it. By the time Jesus has finished we have forgotten about Nicodemus and we do not know whether he changed as a result of what Jesus said nor whether he came to believe in him.
We have to wait until almost the end of the Gospel to meet him again when, with Joseph of Arimathea he took care of the body of Jesus after the Crucifixion and laid him in the tomb. It seems odd that it was two respected Jewish leaders who performed this funeral act and not any of our Lord’s closest followers. Maybe it was because the seed of faith had taken root after all. Their importance in our Lord’s story is commemorated in the Tweed Window in the South Aisle.
But I want to return to Henry Vaughan’s poem Night because, towards the end of it there is this thought:
There is in God (some say)
A deep but dazzling darkness.
I once preached on those words in the College Chapel where I was chaplain and afterwards, two of the students came to tell me that they thought I was preaching blasphemy. How could God be spoken of as being dark when he was pure light? Wasn’t darkness more akin to the devil and wasn’t it darkness that Jesus had come to defeat? Well, I had to admit that in the way they were using darkness they were quite correct but there is another kind of darkness – and one that characterised Vaughan’s poetry – which is the darkness suggesting not evil but mystery.
God is in many ways mysterious. If he were not, he would not be God. We cannot really fathom him because He must be greater than our hearts and minds - but this need not worry us. I don’t know how a microwave works, or even a computer, though I am happy to use both. Most of us use things about which we know very little beyond how to push the right button but if they go wrong we are mystified. These might seem trite examples when we are speaking about the otherness of God but they remind us that it is not too hard for us to live with mystery. Again – it depends on what we mean. There is mystery which leaves us baffled and there is mystery which draws us to search for the answer.
The mystery of God belongs to the second – we are drawn to try and find out more about him. It’s as if we are reading a good mystery book which keeps us gripped because we want to get to the end and solve the puzzle. To find out about God we have to take a spiritual journey – a kind of prayerful quest.
One such spiritual journey has been described as the Dark Night of the Soul. It has come to mean a time of despair when faith is at its lowest ebb and we seem to feel a total absence of God in our lives. This can be seen as an attack by the devil who wants to destroy our faith. It may be triggered by life’s circumstance or simply a slow growth of neglect when we have slowly but surely abandoned God or worse, feel that God has abandoned us. We get to thinking that God doesn’t really care about us and we lose all spiritual energy as despair overwhelms us. An example of this is what sometimes happens to mountaineers as they struggle up a mountain side. A sudden attack of inertia comes over the mountaineer and, exhausted, there is a temptation to give up and simply sit down in the snow. To do so, of course, could result in death. Spiritual inertia is like that and it draws heavily on the imagery of the darkness of night when there is an absence of light.
But actually to understand the Dark Night of the Soul in this way is the opposite of what it can mean. The one thing that is certain about night is that at a certain point – the midway point – the darkness slowly gives way to light. If you work through the darkness of night you will reach the dawn of a new day. Being drawn into the mystery of God is to be drawn not into darkness alone but eventually light.
The exciting thing about our Mysterious God is that he lures us into the dazzling darkness of faith – and faith, after all, is about believing even when the evidence is slender – indeed it is at such times that our faith is tested and tried. Is it authentic enough not to give up even when the odds are against us? To enter this kind of Night, we have to abandon everything that is not of God and concentrate wholly on him. This means letting go of all our perceptions about God and all the things that preoccupy us in life and stand in naked faith before his mystery. Going into the Night of faith we are left only with God as He truly is. It is a bit like leaving the bustle of the town and stand gazing at the stars and the vastness of space. It’s an exhilarating experience for some but others are just plain scared of it. We see ourselves as so small against the vastness of the Universe and that can be very frightening, making us quite insecure. That can be so true about looking at God. He is so vast and we are so small. The more we acknowledge His greatness and vastness the more we feel cut down to size. Why should he even bother with us. He doesn’t really need us. He can exist without us. It’s all a mystery. We prefer a more intimate and much smaller God which is why we have a tendency to make him in our own image and why we aren’t that keen to face the reality of his greatness. Maybe that’s why we don’t really like Trinity Sunday because unlike all the other Festival days – this one really is about God in his total vastness. Yet Trinity Sunday also holds all the clues for solving the mystery of God’s relationship with us.
He very helpfully shows himself to us in the form of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Each of the Three persons offers us a way of relating to God which is manageable. We can relate to God as Creator and so discover him in Creation; we can relate to God as Jesus who became human as we are and who, in his life and teaching, reveals His Father to us and in his death and resurrection opens for us a way to eternal love; and we can relate to the Holy Spirit who is the very breath of God enlivening and filling the Church and our personal lives with energy and spiritual power flowing into us as love. Probably, like me, you have related to each of the Three in different ways at different stages of your faith journey. Sometimes the Father is closest to your image of God and other times it is Jesus or the Spirit.
There have been various movements which have highlighted one or other of the Trinity – the Charismatic Movement which concentrates on the Spirit, The Jesus Movement rooted in the person of our Lord and the emphasis on Creation which has been popularised by what is called Celtic spirituality and which concentrates on God’s nearness to us in the world around us. All have their place and all are valid. All give us a clue about Who God is and how we can relate to him. But Trinity Sunday gives us the biggest clue of all.
If you go to an Art Gallery and see a painting you like you can look at it in two ways. One is to peer at the detail of part of the painting and the other is to stand back and let the whole picture speak to you. Concentrating on the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is to look at the detail. Trinity Sunday asks you to step back and see the whole picture and when you do there is a clue which solves not only the mystery of God but how He reaches out to us and how we can get to know Him in all his glory. The clue is to be found in today’s Gospel and is spelt out elsewhere in John’s Gospel in the long section before Jesus is arrested, when he is talking to the disciples about the relationship He has with His Father and the role of the Spirit. But it’s right there in the conversation Jesus has with Nicodemus and it is, if you like, the signature, at the corner of the painting which ensures its authenticity.
For God so loved the world…
God so loved is the clue. What unites the Three persons of the Trinity – and what therefore unites us to them - is Love. The Trinity shows us how love is the dynamic which holds everything together. It is the energy which unites Father with Son with Holy Spirit. Their relationship with each other is that they are united in Divine Love and the love which flows between them flows out from them towards us. If you want to solve the mystery of God then you must understand what Julian of Norwich kept insisting in her writing – Love is His meaning. Love which draws us deeper and deeper into God’s heart – another way of seeing His Kingdom.
You want to know God? Then let him LOVE YOU.
You really want to know God – then LOVE HIM
You really, really want to know God – then LOVE EACH OTHER because we are all bound together in and through God’s Love.
These three aspects of Love are themselves a Trinity. Mystery solved! - and so we can re-write Henry Vaughan’s quotation:
There is in God a deep and dazzling Love
and it is available for any who seek it.