“Trinity Sunday,” the old adage runs, “is the one Sunday on which no clergyman should be allowed to preach!” As with every pithy saying, there’s more than a kernel of truth to this old bon mot. It’s certainly true that no one can grasp the truths it proclaims and few preachers, ancient or modern, up to the challenges it presents.
Nonetheless, in many parishes tomorrow, the stately and intricate phrases of the Athanasian Creed will be recited. Though it’s lacking in the American Book of Common Prayer, the American Church is singular among Anglicans in not printing this ancient version of the Creed in its Prayer Book. In spite of that, for generations many American parishes have sung it on this day.
In younger years, I spent Trinity Sunday engrossed in the wonderfully obscure repetitions and delightful Latinisms of the Creed. “Which Faith except everyone do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly…we worship God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons nor dividing the Substance.” And so on it rolls, if not tripping off the tongue, at least tantalizing to the mind.
And yet, if we allow ourselves to fall into its phrases we can find ourselves instructed beyond its words. Its repetitions and reiterations draw us in like a Bach fugue, the verbal interplay teaching us a Truth beyond words.
The Creeds that are our daily teachers, the Apostles’ Creed of the Office and the Nicene at the Mass, are happy anchors of our Faith. While the words are pregnant with meaning, they’re straightforward in their presentation. Not so the Athanasian. It reminds us of an essential but sometimes shaded aspect of our Faith: the Athanasian Creed helps us to hold on to essentials of the Faith by telling us not only what we do believe, but also by insisting there are things we do not believe—and even more importantly—insisting that much of the Truth about God is completely and forever beyond us.
“The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, the Holy Ghost incomprehensible…and yet there are not three incomprehensibles…but one incomprehensible.”
God, St Athanasius’ Creed ponderously but enticingly insists, is utterly beyond us. We cannot understand Him and we never will. He is, the Creed proclaims, “uncreated,” “eternal,” “incomprehensible,” “almighty”: and we are not. We never will be. Even in Heaven, we will ever remain created, contingent and limited. “He became like us,” St Athanasius says, “to make us like Him,” but not by nature—by grace. Through God’s saving acts we become like God because God recreates who we are.
The more we allow God to draw us to Himself, to renew His image and re-shape His likeness in us, the more we rest happily in the Complete Difference between He Who Is and we who are His creatures. Every sin I commit and every corruption I cherish distorts the likeness He’s planted in me. That’s why sin is so bad, demanding our contempt and combat. It keeps me from God because it convinces me, as the Serpent so long ago hissed: “Do what you want and you’ll be like God.”
The Truth of Trinity Sunday, the Truth of the Athanasian Creed, is that God does want us to be like Him. But to really enter into the Trinity Truth, we have to spend the rest of the year, day by day, embracing the Truths we recite on this day.—Fr Gregory Wilcox
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