If you know the musical Godspell or at least its songs you will recall that the final number is called, “Long Live God.” As the play is usually staged the rigid body of Jesus – his arms stretched out as if on a cross – is held aloft on the shoulders of a chorus singing the honorific chant, “Long Live God.” At first the theology strikes you as bad since the New Testament nowhere calls Jesus God. When a strong tendency in the fifth century did so without enough reference to his being a human being, a Galilean Jew, it was stigmatized at the Council of Chalcedon as the Monophysite heresy: belief that Jesus had one nature only and that nature overwhelmingly divine. But on second thought the theology of the conclusion of Godspell can be seen to be like that of St. John’s gospel. There, you remember, Thomas the doubter is invited to put his finger into Jesus’ nail-prints and his hand in his side. Upon doing so he cries out in belief, “My lord and my God!” (20:28). This is of a piece with the earlier statement of Jesus in the same gospel, “Philip….Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father.’” (14:9). For this evangelist the man Jesus is the revelation of God. To experience him is to know something of the God no eye has seen. He is the chief sacrament, the primary symbol of God. To be a Christian is to come to know God in Jesus Christ.
Well, do we have in Sunday’s feast of the Holy Trinity a feast of the unique divine nature in the spirit of Godspell – “Long Live God”? “Praise God above ye heavenly host, praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.” If we had such a feast it would be unique in the Christian calendar. Our greatest feasts are Christ-feasts – after them come feasts of Mary, the angels, and the saints. To pray as believers is to celebrate the way God has shown us the divine power in the only Son, Jesus, and in the Spirit-filled community which we ourselves are. So the celebration is not primarily a matter of God made known to us in Christ, or through him, in Peter and Paul or Anthony of Padua or Juliana of Norwich. It is a celebration of God revealed to us in us. God is triune in the measure that we bear the stamp of the Jesus raised up for our salvation and the Spirit breathing in the Church that we are.
In his letter to the Romans, St. Paul says that we are God’s children, heirs by adoption of all God has to give, sons and daughters with Christ the primary son (chapter 8).
Childhood is the one “state in life” that every human being has shared. Each of us knows that there are two persons, living or dead, whose child we are. The dynamics of our relation with that particular man and woman are at work for much of our lives; even if we did not know the one or the other the genetic bond is there. Not all of these relationships with parents are neat and tidy. They evoke strong and often conflicting emotions. Another way of saying this is, it is very hard to imagine being the child of someone other than your own father and mother.
What we are invited to do throughout our lives as believers is to intensify our awareness of what it is to be God’s children. This calls us to complete dependence yet without a loss of our independence. It can give us total security in a love that will never be withdrawn. This experience of the power and solicitude of the One whose child we are is as intense as our experience of self. We come to know a source where we can be nurtured, nourished, and strengthened without losing our adulthood and self-sufficiency. For it is God who begot us, made us the children of God and did it through Jesus Christ in the power of the Spirit. We bear the stamp, the imprint irrevocably of the God whose children we are just as much as we do of our natural parents. That is why the feast of the Trinity is not the feast of the triune God but of us in whom the Father dwells, of whom we would know nothing apart from the Son whom we encounter in a Spirit-filled community. For on our day of baptism we did not receive an incomprehensible formula of words out of Matthew’s gospel; we received a literal parenting. With it came an irreversible set of resemblances to the God who begot us.
That is really what the feast is about. What must this God not be like, the early Church asked itself, who achieved in us the marvel of grace that he did? God went out to us twice out of love, once in the man Jesus, becoming the Son we are called to be like, and again in the community that we go to make up as informing breath or Spirit. In what way should we then be consecrated if not “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit”? It is the name we bear. The triad of love is the only origin we have. And, as with any family, it is the home to which we hope to return.
Kevin+
Recent Comments