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| Holy Trinity, Antonio de Pereda, c. 1611-1678 |
The word “holy” occurs frequently in the Bible: in Hebrew qadosh, in Greek hagios, in Latin sanctus. Yet although we often hear it in church, perhaps we don't give much thought to its meaning. So, on this Trinity Sunday, it seems appropriate to reflect on holiness. What does it mean to say that something or someone is holy?
The simple meaning of the word is “set apart.” The Bible uses the word “holy” in two ways: first, as an attribute of God; and second, as an attribute of certain people, places, and things. Throughout the Bible, God is repeatedly described by such phrases as “the Holy One of Israel.” But what does it mean to say that God is holy?
The answer, I think, is that holiness or “set-apartness” is an attribute of something that lies completely outside the normal range of empirical human knowledge. To call something holy is to say that it has a quality that is not of this world. Used in this sense, the term applies above all to God, who stands entirely above and beyond this world. To call God holy is to point to his infinite perfection, goodness, power, and beauty.
Yet, in the biblical record, God chooses to enter into this world in such a way as to reveal himself and make his presence known and felt. When we human beings experience the holy one present in our midst, our typical reaction is one of amazement, awe, fear, trembling, and often a profound sense of unworthiness. The prophet Isaiah’s immediate reaction to his vision is to cry out, “Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips, for my eyes have seen the king, the Lord of Hosts!”
Such a reaction is the natural human response to what the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth called the infinite qualitative gulf that separates God from his creatures. Yet God himself bridges the gulf by speaking a word of reassurance and forgiveness. In Isaiah’s case, this word comes when one of the seraphim takes a burning coal from the altar and touches it to the prophet’s lips, saying, “Behold … your guilt is taken away, and your sin is forgiven.”
In relation to God, then, the term holiness signifies the divine transcendence, otherness, goodness, purity, and perfection—the experience of which evokes human reactions of awe, fascination, fear, trembling, and unworthiness. But the word is also used of people, places, and things. We speak of people as holy when their relationship with God has become so close that they begin to reflect something of God’s holiness. We speak of places as holy either because they’ve been consecrated to the worship of God, like this church building, or on account of extraordinary manifestations of God’s presence and power that have occurred in those places, such as the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, or the Grotto at Lourdes. Again, we speak of certain objects as holy because they’ve been set apart for God’s service—examples include holy water, the sacred vestments worn at Mass, or the sacred vessels of the altar.
But people, places, and things are holy only in a secondary and derivative sense. They’re holy not in and of themselves but on account of their association with God, who alone is holy in and of himself.
The words of Isaiah’s seraphim—holy, holy, holy—are well familiar to us as the opening line of the Sanctus, said or sung during every Mass just before the Eucharistic Prayer: “Therefore with angels and archangels and with all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify thy glorious name, evermore praising thee, and saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts, heaven and earth are full of thy glory, glory be to thee, O Lord most high!”
Isaiah saw his vision in the context of worship in the Temple. Here at S. Stephen’s, we conduct our worship with all possible reverence and beauty, partly to dispose ourselves to be receptive to the experience of God’s holiness. We cannot manufacture such experiences by our own efforts because they lie beyond our human capabilities and can only be received as gifts from God. But clearly our Anglo-Catholic worship here on earth closely resembles the pattern of the angelic worship in heaven as described in various places in Scripture. Who knows when we might catch an echo of the seraphim singing the Sanctus along with the choir? Who knows when we might even catch a glimpse of the Lord’s train enveloping the temple as the house fills with smoke?
Now, the Sanctus shares with Isaiah’s song of the seraphim the same threefold acclamation—holy, holy, holy. Is this threefold repetition merely a rhetorical device that serves to emphasize God’s holiness, or does it point to some essential characteristic of God himself? The classical Christian answer is that it points to the threefold character of God who has revealed himself to us as one God in three Persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
In sermons on Trinity Sunday in other years, I’ve emphasized that the Church’s doctrine of the Trinity does not really require explanation because it is itself the explanation. The early Christians experienced God as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; the doctrine of the Trinity articulates this experience in a way that makes clear, on one hand, that we do not worship three Gods but one God (we are not tritheists but monotheists); but, on the other hand, that our threefold experience of God corresponds to the deepest reality of God’s own inner nature and being. God does not merely appear to us in the guises of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—that would be the heresy of modalism—but rather at the deepest level of his being really is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
As worked out at the Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople in the fourth century, the doctrine of the Trinity shows how this can be so by distinguishing between God’s divine nature, which is one, and his divine Persons, who are three. Thus God is simultaneously three-in-one and one-in-three: three divine Persons sharing the same divine nature, consubstantial, co-eternal, and co-equal.
This year, I want to emphasize that the Holy Trinity is not so much an intellectual puzzle to be solved, as a mystery to be worshiped and adored. Throughout the year, at every Mass, whenever we join in saying or singing the Sanctus, or whenever we hear it sung by the choir, the threefold repetition of "holy, holy, holy" reminds us that we worship a God who is not only the Holy One, but also the thrice holy: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. To him be glory, worship, adoration, and praise, now and to the ages of ages. Amen.
