One of the forces over the long history of Revelation that gave shape and character to the Hebrew people was a strong sense of their own uniqueness.  Unlike the religions that sprung up around the nature gods of other cultures, the worship of the Hebrews was a free response to a God who freely revealed himself, who drew close to his people.  Slowly, really, very slowly, over centuries, the people began to realise that at the heart of their uniqueness lay the fact that they didn’t have to guess.  They knew their God, and he knew them.  One of the most fundamental credal formulas for the Hebrews was the phrase, “Our God is a God who speaks, who makes himself known.”

And this revelation gave rise to something else new and unique.  It fostered a quality of bond between God and his people that no other people had ever experienced … a relationship with God based on trust, confidence, truth, and strangest of all, on affection.  The people were beginning to realise that their God was acting toward them and asking for their response in a way that could be best described as love.

So, a God who spoke, who generated and sent out his word and, simply in doing that, gave rise to a third reality, a bond, a relationship because of that word.  A bond of love.

But that tentative insight was only a beginning.  It took the revealing presence of Christ to give fullness to the great mystery of the Trinity.  Actually, even Christ’s own human language fell short of this mystery.  It was St Augustine who gave us the formula we use most commonly: Three persons in one nature.  Those words are a help, but they are not perfect.  They don’t truly lay open the mystery of the Trinity.  Strictly speaking, we shouldn’t say that God is three persons in one nature. 

It would be more accurate to say that God is something like Three persons in one nature.

But the inadequacy of language doesn’t really matter.  The truth is that the constant flow of life, of creative power, of love, that makes up the inner nature of God is not a closed circle.  It has been broken open, and all of humankind has been included in it.  We are not only God’s creatures, we are his sons and daughters, we share in his own life. 

And that means that it is not only God’s nature to know and to love creatively, it is our nature as well.  If humankind is ever to become fully itself, fully what the Father intended it to be, then we must live out our likeness to God.  We must become a true community, in which each member both creates and is created by the others, a community in which each member sees in others the perfection of God, so perfectly reflected that love is the only possible bond.

Fr Andrew