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| 'The Trinity (Troitsa),' Andrei Rublev, 15th century. |
THE LORD DESCENDED in a cloud and Moses stood there with
him” (Ex 34:5). There? Where? On Mount Sinai. This is where Moses stood when the
Lord revealed Himself in giving the commandments a second time. But where is “there”
for us? That “place” and “space” upon which we too can encounter God? We don’t
need to climb high to enter the craggy peaks of a lifeless mountain like Moses
in order to encounter God, we need to enter the depths of a living Person, the
One Who climbed down to us.
The first reading for Trinity Sunday (Year A) comes from
the book of Exodus. In holy rage, Moses has destroyed the tablets of the law after
witnessing the idolatry of his people. God calls Moses once again to the top of
the mountain, commanding him to bring a new set of tablets. Moses ascends the
mountain alone and there God reveals Himself as “a God of tenderness and
compassion” (Ex 34:6). This is the context of our selected verse: “The Lord
descended in a cloud and Moses stood there with him” (Ex 34:5).
The Hebrew places greater emphasis on the word translated
“there” (שָׁם) which is placed at the end of the clause.
At the same time seeming to highlight the preposition “with” and its attached pronominal
suffix: “with him” (עִמּוֹ). In wooden English we could thus read: “The
Lord descended in a cloud and Moses stood with him there.”
The first use of the adverb “there” (שָׁם) is in Genesis 2:8:
And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the east and He put the man there whom He had formed.
So far we have two places that constitute “there”. The “there”
of the garden of Eden and the “there” of Mount Sinai. The “there” of the garden
of Eden is descriptive of the beginning of man, the primordial start of humankind,
our original creation. The “there” of Mount Sinai marks the beginning of the
Old Covenant, the creation of God’s Holy Chosen People.
Adam had already received the living power of the breath
of God before being placed in the garden (Gen 2:7-8). But it was “there” in the
garden that Adam received his dual vocation “to till and keep” the garden, and
to abide by God’s Will encapsulated in the command to eat freely of every tree
in the garden, but to not eat from the forbidden tree of the knowledge of good
and evil (Gen 2:15-17). The commandment of God here is not simply negative. We
often forget to notice that Adam is also positively commanded to eat freely of
all that has been allotted to him. The “there” of the garden is the place where
humanity is commissioned for a mission: to serve creation in love, above all in
our fellow brothers and sisters, and to serve God.
So too with the “there” of Mount Sinai. Here Moses received
the commandments of God, the vocation of especial holiness, and the covenantal promise
of God’s abiding Presence. The “there” of the mountain is the place where humanity
in the Nation of Israel is commissioned anew for the mission of loving God and neighbour,
symbolised by the dual tablets of the law.
We have in Christ the New Adam and the New Moses, a fulfilment
of both.
Jesus was crucified on Mount Calvary (“Calvary” from the Latin
Calvariæ Locus, “Place of the Skull,” from the Aramaic Golgotha;
Greek, Kranion Topos). John tells us that “in the place where he was
crucified there was a garden” (19:41). In the “there” of Calvary we find a
fulfillment of the “there” of Eden and the “there” of Mount Sinai.
By approaching Calvary, the Cross of Christ, the
Crucified One, we receive the vocation of communion and the law of love in its
full power, given as the Spirit and grace in place of stone tablets, flowing
out to us as blood and water.
Here at the “there” of Calvary we receive our supreme
vocation, our commissioning for a mission: to join together with Christ Crucified
in death, so that we might join together with the risen Christ and live with
Him in the unity of the Holy Spirit, in the glory of God the Father.[1]
We apprehend this from the words of Christ: “If you want
to follow me, take up your daily cross and follow me” (Lk 9:23) and “I pray that
they all may be one; as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also
may be one in us” (Jn 17:21). There is no other way to this Trinitarian life, admittance
into this oneness between Father and Son in the Holy Spirit, except
through Christ, and Christ Crucified. As Moses on Mount Sinai stood “there with
him,” the Lord, it is in standing “there with him” on Mount Calvary that we become one “with him”—one
with the Son, with the Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit. In the words of
St. Paul, “For if we have died together with him, we shall also live together with
him” (2 Tim 2:11). And if we live together with Him Who is Son, we live together with Them
Who are One.
Literally speaking, we find a garden and a mountain at
Mount Calvary, but our “there” in which and by which we come to live in God is
not a thing but a Person. Mount Calvary the place is only special because of Who
we find “there”. It is not Mount Calvary that transports us into communion with
the living God. It is Christ Jesus, the Son of God—He is our Garden, He is our
Mountain, our “there” where we find God.
In an audience preceding the Angelus on Trinity Sunday St. Pope John Paul II invoked similar imagery (2003):
The Triune nature of God is the principal mystery of the Catholic faith. With it, we come to the end of the journey of revelation which Jesus fulfilled through his Incarnation, Passion, Death and Resurrection. From the summit of the "holy mountain" which is Christ, we contemplate the first and last horizon of the universe and of history: the Love of God, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.[2]
By faith we climb the “holy mountain” who is Christ, entering upon the peak of God’s love for us made flesh in Him. We enter Christ our “holy mountain” when
we put on the faith of the Church and repeat with our hearts, even more than
with our lips: “I believe…” Credo.
We stand on lowly ground, stuck in the mire of our
sins, incapable of rising to greater heights of righteousness because of our ineptitude.
But by faith we enter Christ and rise with Him to the supreme heights of His Righteousness
which He gives to us as our own (2 Cor 5:21). Established in this Righteousness
of the Son we come to share in His right and perfect relation with the Father,
and this right and perfect relation is none other than the Spirit of
Righteousness (Rom 6:11).
On Mount Sinai God established His Chosen People as a
Holy Nation, with the vocation to love Him with unique fervour. In Christ our “holy
mountain” we have been spiritually established as the Chosen People, as the
People of God, a Trinitarian People, a People reborn from the pierced side of Christ,
as Eve was born from Adam’s side. We have been commissioned with the mission of
loving God and neighbour, of serving the world in spite of itself, in loving
enemies even unto death. We have been set apart in Christ our “holy mountain” to
live in the world, but not of the world, to not become sucked-up into the fleshly,
political, ideological modus operandi of the world’s inhabitants, but to
live in the Spirit, the Modus Operandi of God’s Self. It is a mission to
live again the life of the Son in the world, bringing the love of the Father to
all, the love Who is the Spirit of Peace that binds all together (Eph 4:3).
In our summit Who is Christ we find the “holy garden”.
Not where man was first created in flesh, but where man was first recreated in
Spirit—the place of our rebirth. In Christ the “firstborn from the dead” we
were reborn, in Christ we are being reborn, who we really are and were made to
be is a mystery already fulfilled in Christ, through faith it is actualised in
us, through love, it grows (Col 1:18; 1 Pet 1:23). “For [in Christ] you have died, and your life has been hidden with Christ in God” (Col 3:3).
As Adam was created and placed “there” in the garden of
Eden to till it and watch over it, in the “holy garden” who is Christ, “there,”
in Him, we were placed by the Father to live and move and have our being (Acts
17:28).
To be placed in Christ is to be placed in the Church. For the Church is "Christ's body" (1 Cor 12:27). Thus
in Christ our “holy garden” we have received the vocation to serve and watch
over the garden of His Holy Body the Church. To cultivate the life of the
Trinity within, and to watch in holy awe in contemplation beneath, in beatific vision above, and all in the
Communion of the Saints.
The fruits of our “holy garden” are the infinite riches
of Christ, the infinite sum of the merits of the Christus Totus (Christ
the Head in union with all the Saints of His Body), which includes the fruits of
the Holy Spirit. These fruits line the river that gushes in the Sacred Heart of
Christ, borne upon the trees of His Saints that grow there (Jn 4:14; Ez 47; Rev
22). His Godhead is the true “river that flows out of Eden to water the garden”
(Gen 2:10) of His humanity, and from whose pierced side the river of God’s abundant
life divides, while remaining one, as it goes out to water the souls of God’s
Holy People who open their hearts to receive this divine life (Jn 19:34; 10:10).
In Christ we hear repeated the call to eat freely from
the trees of His garden. “Let my beloved come to his garden, and eat its choicest fruits” (Song 4:16c).
Most importantly the command to eat the Fruit of His
Paschal Sacrifice. “Take and eat; this is my body” (Mt 26:26). “Whoever eats
this bread will live forever” (Jn 6:51). For this is the Fruit of the Tree of
Life—Christ’s Holy Cross. Whoever puts forth his hand and eats from it will
live forever (Gen 3:22). The hand is our will, our reaching, our faith-filled
desire.
If we search the Scriptures to find the first use of the preposition
“with” (עִם) we find ourselves in Genesis at the
moment of the sin of Adam. Eve “took of its fruit and ate, and she gave to her
husband also and he ate with her” (Gen 3:6). This was the forbidden pseudo-communion
of sin, an unholy “communion” that fractured Trinitarian love of God and neighbour and self
in man’s heart, and nourished only the self-love of the ego, the love of “I”
cut off from “Other,” in the heart of fallen man.
To restore us to communion with the “Other,” to restore Trinitarian love in the heart of human beings, God in the
Person of the Son instituted the Sacrament of His Body and Blood. A holy
communion meal to undo what the unholy “communion” of our foreparents brought
about. This “fruit of the vine and work of human hands” has become the Blood of
the New Covenant, shed not at the foot of Mount Sinai from bulls and lambs, but
shed on Mount Calvary from the Incarnate Son, the Lamb of God. Shed to wash us
of the power of sin, to cleanse the “I” of its selfishness, and so enable us to enter the Wedding Feast of the Lamb,
the Trinitarian banquet where the “many” are made “one” in the Three Who are
One (Rev 7:14, 19:7; 1 Cor 10:17). A fulfillment of the prayer of Christ that the
Father hears crying out from His Son’s Blood: “Father, forgive them… make
them one, and make them one with us” (Gen 4:10; Lk 23:34; Jn 17).
What is the Blood of Christ but the life of Christ. “For
the life of the flesh is in the blood. And I have given it to you,” says the
Lord, “upon the altar to make atonement for your souls. For the blood,” the
Blood of Christ, “it makes atonement for the soul” (Lev 17:11). “The cup of
blessing that we bless,” writes Paul, “is it not a communion in the blood of Christ?” (1 Cor
10:16). To put the two verses together: 'The cup of
blessing that we bless, is it not a communion in the Life of Christ?'
What then does it mean to drink and partake of the Blood
of Christ, but to drink His Life. The Life of Christ is not mortal, but immortal,
not merely human, but divine. The Life of Christ is not His own, but He shares
One Life with the Father in the Spirit. Their Life is One. The Trinitarian Life
flows in the Blood of Christ. When we drink Christ’s Blood we drink the Mystery
of the Holy Trinity, the Life of the Godhead. ‘The cup of blessing that we bless
is it not a communion in the life of the Holy Trinity?’
Eve “took of its fruit and ate. She gave to her husband
also and he ate with her” (Gen 3:6). Now instead of Eve, in holy reparation, in
a sharing of Holy Communion, it is the Church who takes “the fruit of the vine,”
transubstantiated into Christ’s Blood, and gives it to her children who suck
from the overflowing abundance of her breasts, “carried upon her hip, and
dandled upon her knees” (Is 66:11-12).
The Virgin Mary is the preeminent instrument of Holy
Church. The Blood of Christ which Christ out-pours, which the Church receives
and distributes, flows through the Virgin Mary from Christ the Head, as She
once gave it to Him in the womb; and now the Church through Mary gives the Blood of Christ to Christ
again, but this time to the members of His Body. The ministerial priests, in
communion with the episcopate, like Adam in the garden of Eden, are the ones charged
with cultivating this Holy Fruit of the Vine from above, and in safeguarding it.
Having received it in persona Christi the New Adam, through
Mary the New Eve, they are commissioned to share the Blood, the Life of God,
with all the People of God.
Once we have received the Blood of Christ, the Life of the
Holy Trinity, it is not as if it dissipates completely unless this Life is
killed through mortal sin, and even then, the Life of Christ’s Blood is poured
out anew in the Confessional. Since even when the accidents of the Body and
Blood of Christ are gone from our bodily systems, through faith, by hope, the Life
we have received in the form of bread and wine remains in our souls. The Life we receive from without is already within. The Life already in us is thus nurtured
by our communion with His Blood so that His Life in us increases. Life receiving Life.
Faith can even reach for the Cup of the Lord when it
remains beyond our sensory grasp. The martyrs did not receive viaticum from a
priest before they died, and yet, their final breath was a draught from the
Blood of the Son of God, from the wellspring of Life Itself. This privilege is
not reserved to the martyrs alone but to all the faithful in the secret
sanctuary of the heart where only God ministers. There are no
obstacles to the one who has been placed “there” in Christ the “holy mountain,”
the “holy garden.” “Let anyone who desires drink freely from the water of life”
(Rev 22:17). The invitation is explicit. Faith makes present the Life of God to
be possessed, hope takes possession, and love is the power that possesses this
Life and makes one possessed by It.
“The Lord descended in a cloud and Moses stood there with him” (Ex 34:5).
“And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the east and He put the man there whom He had formed” (Gen 2:8).
Our “there” is Christ, we have been put “there” by the
Father, placed into His Son to share His Life. In this Life of the Son we encounter
not a solitary life but a Holy Communion. We live this Life “in a cloud,” that is, through faith, without the capacity to see clearly the Trinity whose Life we share.
Nevertheless, in Christ we discover the Loving Father who
has placed us “there” in Him, His Son, and we discover this by Their Same Spirit, for “the
Spirit is the witness, because the Spirit is the truth” (1 Jn 5:7), and this Spirit sent into our hearts makes
us cry out “Abba, Father” just as it makes us acknowledge at once that Christ Jesus
is His Only-Begotten Son (Gal 4:6; Rom 8:15; 1 Jn 4:2). The “holy mountain” of
the Son, the “holy garden” of Christ our Lord, is “there” “where” we receive this
Spirit from the Father, the Spirit who brings His Relatio to us in the
form of a vocatio amoris, a vocation of love, to be one “with Him” who
is Three Persons in One God. To join the Life of the Loving Father, with the
Beloved Son, in the Holy Spirit - Who is Their One Love, Their One Life.
“What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils
under the sun?” “Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All
is vanity” in this life, when lived apart from the Life of the Triune God (Ecc
1:1-2).
‘What does man gain by all the toil of Christ at which He
toiled under the beam of the Cross?’ “Wonder of wonders, says the Preacher, wonder
of wonders! All is wonder” in this life when lived in God the Son, for the
Father, in the Holy Spirit—Their Communion of Love and Life.
The testimony of the Son is sure. “Whatever you ask in
prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours” (Mk 11:24) and
“How much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask
him” (Lk 11:13), a share in the Life of the Triune God to those who ask Him?
[1]
Lumen Gentium, 39-41; see also CCC 201.
[2]
John Paul II, Angelus Audience, Solemnity of the Blessed Trinity, 15 June 2003,
http://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/angelus/2003/documents/hf_jp-ii_ang_20030615.html
