At the heart of it, our religion is a mystery, both in revelation, on God’s part, and in our faith response. Neither God’s action nor our own can ever be satisfactorily laid out in logical, reasonably proven formulas.

The mystery of the Trinity is really the heart of what God reveals to us. Anyone who hopes to approach God as God really is, must approach Him as Trinity, as three is one.

The three-ness of God is more than just three different roles played out by one Being. God would have always been perfectly the Father, the Creator, even if God had never re-entered the world as Redeemer. God would have always been perfectly the Son, who re-created the world in God’s image, even if the Son had never agreed to stick around as sustainer, supporter of life, in the Spirit.

In the Father, God perfectly manifests the qualities of power, creation, life-giving, the qualities of majesty and transcendence, the otherness of God. That calls from us a response of awe, of acceptance, of obedience, of humility, as our lives are in God’s hands, that God’s power is unassailable, and that to reject God is inevitably self-destructive.

In the Son, God perfectly manifests the qualities of the Redeemer, as one who has allowed himself to be formed by the Father, the qualities of infinite fidelity, of perseverance, self-giving, forgiveness. The Son becomes like us precisely to show us what people formed by the Father must be.

So, if our faith is to be truly in God’s control, we too must be faithful, forgiving, and we must persevere as servants of one another, without exception or compromise.

Finally, as the Spirit, God binds together the Father, the Son, and humankind into an eternal community. It is true to say that we are constantly re-made by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, that when the Father looks at us, God sees the Son.

Pentecost is the final fulfilment of the ancient promise in the book of Genesis that speaks of God creating us in His own image and likeness. God has created us, has redeemed us, and has bound himself to us for all eternity. God has made himself known as Father, Son and Spirit.

God has named himself at the same time One and Many. And it is in that name that we believe.

Fr Andrew