Psalm 86. 8-13; Exodus 3. 1-6, 13-15; John 17. 1-11
‘Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.’
+ In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
On this Trinity Sunday, I’d like to reflect briefly upon the revealed name of God, and how our life of oneness with the Trinitarian God requires of us a particular kind of attention.
The passage from the Book of Exodus which we heard in the first lesson this morning, is one of those great moments in the scriptures. It is a moment of revelation. The ancient Hebrews are trapped in slavery in Egypt, their cries have been heard up in heaven, and so God graciously condescends to his people. He raises up Moses as his servant to lead the people out of slavery, and on Mount Horeb he reveals his name to Moses, ‘I am.’
If the people ask Moses the name of the God on whose behalf he is acting, he is to tell them, ‘I am has sent me to you.’
The great medieval theologian and philosopher, Thomas Aquinas, argued that this name, ‘I am,’ or ‘He who is,’ is the most proper name of God. This name, he argued, does not signify any particular kind of thing, but existence itself. It signifies not a determinate or finite substance, but an absolute and infinite ocean of existence.
What Aquinas was saying is that this name does not give us some kind of handle on God; it does not make God something that we can now comprehend. Rather, this name points to the infinitely mysterious and incomprehensible abundance of God’s life.
But before we explore this point further, there is another feature of the narrative of the burning bush that is worth highlighting.
Moses is busy keeping the flock of his father-in-law, Jethro, when he sees that the bush was ablaze with fire, but was not consumed. He says, ‘I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.’ We are told that the Lord saw that Moses had turned aside to see, and only then does God call to him.
In other words, the name of God is revealed to the one who pays attention. Moses must turn aside from his mundane tasks and preoccupations, and turn towards the divine interruption, if the name of God is to be revealed to him.
This is not about turning away from the world and looking to God in isolation, but about a new way of looking at the world with the kind of attention that sees it as the gift which reveals God.
This is beautifully captured by the Anglican priest and poet, R.S. Thomas, in his poem The Bright Field:
I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
In other words, when we see the world, not as the theatre of our own hurried projects and agendas, but as the gift of God right now in the present – when we truly pay attention – then we begin to glimpse the glory of God.
This is what the disciples discovered on Mount Tabor when Christ was transfigured before them. Peter wanted to build tabernacles for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah – he wanted to capture the moment, commodify it in some way – but the voice from heaven simply tells him, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!’ This is a presence that cannot simply be made into one’s own possession, but must be patiently given attention.
Indeed, in the passage from St John’s Gospel which we heard in the second lesson this morning, we see that the very life of God is one of attention to the other in the circle of self-donating love and the giving of glory to one another.
The Father has given the Son authority over all people. The Son gives eternal life to all those given to him by the Father. The Father has sent the Son and given him work to do on earth. The Father has given the disciples to the Son. The Son has given the disciples the words that the Father gave to the Son. Jesus says that all that is his is the Father’s, and all that belongs to the Father is his, and he asks the Father to protect the disciples in the name which the Father has given to him.
This Trinitarian life is one that is only possessed in being given away to another in love.
As God revealed himself to Moses in the burning bush as ‘I am’, in Jesus Christ, God reveals that this name belongs to the one who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, an infinite ocean of being, which is eternally shared and donated as the life of self-giving love.
Now, we can often approach this mystery of Trinitarian love as a puzzle to be solved, as if it were a burning bush ablaze with fire, which needs to be explained as to why it is not consumed.
But remember, God reveals his name to Moses as ‘I am’, which signifies not one particular thing which we can get inside of our heads - not a concept - but an infinite and absolutely unbounded ocean of existence. This is a reality that utterly exceeds our ability to comprehend it. As Aquinas says, the ability of the creature’s intellect to comprehend the nature of God is like the owl which tries to take in all of the light of the sun – it is completely dazzled!
It is not as if the idea of God is really quite straight-forward, and that the doctrine of the Trinity makes things very confused. Rather, to name God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is to name the God who is an infinite ocean of being as an eternal sharing of love. This will always be a mystery that exceeds our finite minds, but that is the very source of the delightfulness of being drawn into loving union with God, who is infinitely more than we can hope for or imagine.
But perhaps the life of the Trinity is also a puzzle to us in a different kind of way, a puzzle because of the characteristic way in which we use our attention.
If the divine name is revealed to Moses because he turns aside from tending to the tasks at hand, perhaps our sense of God in the world is often so faint because we are so pre-occupied with our own projects and agendas. To use R.S. Thomas’s phrase, we so often spend our time ‘hurrying on to a receding future,’ anxiously fretting over how the things of the world can serve our sense of self. We give attention to things insofar as they can complete us.
But the life of the Trinity – the revelation of the name of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – shows us that the love which is the foundation of all things is a particular kind of attention to the other. It is a love that is enjoyed only by being given away, a life that is possessed only in being laid down, an identity which is articulated only by being spoken in others, a glory that is magnified only by being bestowed upon another.
The psalmist this morning says, ‘Among the gods there is none like unto thee, O Lord…’ And he prays, ‘Teach me thy way, O LORD, and I will walk in thy truth : O knit my heart unto thee, that I may fear thy name.’
I suggest that we will only begin to know the ways of the Lord and fear his name, if we turn aside from the busyness of our self-obsessed world, and listen to the one who calls us to walk the way of the cross by losing our life, so that we may find it in him.