The knowledge of the Holy Trinity

The lectionary prescribed Luke 10:21-24 as part of the reading yesterday, and I'm struck by how beautifully trinitarian this passage is.  It begins with the Lord Jesus rejoicing in the Holy Spirit and praising the Father - so there already you have the three divine Persons.  Why is the Lord rejoicing?  At first glance it appears to be because God has concealed the truth from the wise and intelligent and revealed it to those who are, metaphorically, infants - the low status folk, the ones with nothing special to offer.  And that is surely part of it: God's plan is playing out, as the disciples see the Kingdom drawing near in Christ and their eyes begin to be opened to his identity and what that means, whilst other seemingly more likely candidates see nothing.  So Jesus praises his Father.

But as the passage goes on a deeper foundation is revealed.  How is it that God is made known through Jesus?  It is because all things have been entrusted to him by the Father, and "no knows who the Son is except the Father, and who the Father is except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son desires to reveal him."  The foundation of the revelation of God accomplished in Jesus is the relationship between the Father and the Son from eternity.  Because the Father knows the Son, and the Son knows the Father, the Son is really able to make the Father known, and it is the Father's good pleasure that he do so.

To put it another way, nobody truly knows God except God - how can a creature really know the Creator?  But God really does know God - the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit know one another, and know in one another the fullness of Deity which they equally and together possess and are.  God knows God.  But in the incarnation, that divine knowledge of God - the only knowledge of God which can be true - has been repeated as human knowledge.  The Son knows the Father now as a human being knows, but as the same Person and in the same relationship of total knowledge that he always had.  And when anyone else comes to know the Father through Jesus, or to see who Jesus is in relation to the Father, it is the opening up of that relationship of knowledge through the Holy Spirit so that more human beings can now truly say they know God - not in themselves, but by virtue of and in dependence on the human knowledge of the Father incarnate in the Son.

Jesus tells his disciples - just one verse before this passage - not to rejoice in the success of their mission but in the deeper truth that they belong to the kingdom.  I think here, perhaps, we see the Lord rejoicing not just in the fact that God is being made known, but in the deeper truth of his relationship with the Father - and therefore truly rejoicing in the Holy Spirit, the Person who represents most deeply the communion of Father and Son within the Godhead.  And how we should rejoice when we realise just what relationship of knowledge and love it is that we are drawn into when we glimpse something of the glory of God in the fact of Jesus Christ.

Celebrating hungrily

The celebration of Pentecost is a bit different from all the other gospel feasts that make up the church year. Like all those feasts - Christmas, Easter, Ascension - Pentecost looks back to something that happened, a foundational event in the ministry of Christ for his church. In this case, we recall the way in which the ascended Lord Jesus poured out the Holy Spirit on his followers in Jerusalem, thus constituting them his new earthly body, his witnesses. We remember, and we celebrate with gratitude because without that event the good news of Jesus would never have reached us, the community of the church would never have come to be.

But the difference lies in this: Pentecost is celebrated with an edge of hunger and desire to it. That first giving of the Spirit is an unrepeatable, unique event, in one sense, but in another sense as we read the narrative and remember the event we are caused to long that it might happen again. Of course it can never happen again for the first time, in the foundational way in which it happened there and then; but because the outpouring of the Spirit is an ongoing ministry of Christ, there is a definite sense in which it could happen today, here and now. In some way it definitely is happening - otherwise the church would long since have died out of the world - but don't we want to see it happen in power, as it did? Wouldn't we love to see the Spirit at work bringing thousands at once to new life through the gospel? Don't we want the dramatic transformation which came over the Lord's fearful disciples? 

So we celebrate the then-and-there with a distinct eye on the here-and-now, and pray: come, Creator Spirit.