THE SUNDAY AFTER WHITSUNDAY · PRINCIPAL FEAST
Trinity Sunday
The Feast of the Most Holy Trinity · The Mystery that Names the Season · The God Who Is Love
Trinity — TRIN-ih-tee · Quicunque vult — kwih-KUN-kweh VULT · perichoresis — per-ih-koh-REE-sis · Richard of St Victor — love requires three · Rublev — ROO-blef
Almighty and everlasting God, who hast given unto us thy servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of the Divine Majesty to worship the Unity; We beseech thee, that thou wouldest keep us stedfast in this faith, and evermore defend us from all adversities, who livest and reignest, one God, world without end.
Trinity Sunday is the only feast in the entire Christian Calendar that celebrates a doctrine rather than an event. Christmas is the Nativity; Easter is the Resurrection; Pentecost is the descent of the Spirit. Trinity Sunday is the feast of the truth that those three events together disclose: that the God who acted in them is not a monad but a communion, not a solitary absolute but an eternal relationship of love between three Persons who are one God. The feast was established in the West by the eleventh century and placed by the BCP in its current position — the Sunday after Whitsunday, the day after the Church has received the Spirit and can now confess the full name of the God who sent the Son and sent the Spirit — and it gives its name to the entire second half of the liturgical year. Twenty-five or twenty-six Sundays are counted after Trinity, and in those Sundays the Church lives out in ordinary time the implications of what it confessed on this single extraordinary day.
The Athanasian Creed — the Quicunque vult (kwih-KUN-kweh VULT), appointed in the BCP for Trinity Sunday — is the most precise and most demanding theological statement in the Anglican liturgy: its clauses parse the doctrine of the Trinity with a rigour that was forged in the Arian controversy and hardened by the Cappadocian settlement, and its opening condemnation reminds the congregation that the doctrine of the Trinity is not a speculative luxury but the irreducible minimum of the Christian confession. The Patristic series has traced in detail the theological battles that produced this precision: the homoousios at Nicaea, the Cappadocian distinction of person and substance, Cyril’s defence of the Theotokos, the Chalcedonian definition. Trinity Sunday gathers all of that into a single feast and says: this is what we believe. Not approximately, not poetically, not metaphorically. The Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Ghost is God — and yet there are not three Gods but one God.
The theology of the Trinity reaches its devotional height in the icon of Andrei Rublev (ROO-blef), painted around 1410 for the monastery of the Trinity and St Sergius: three angelic figures seated around a table on which stands a chalice, leaning toward one another in a posture of infinite mutual attention, their bodies forming an unbroken circle with an opening at the front inviting the viewer to enter. The perichoresis (per-ih-koh-REE-sis) — the mutual indwelling of the Persons, the eternal dance of love within the Godhead — is what Rublev painted, and it is the theology that Richard of St Victor had articulated in the twelfth century: that love in its fullest form requires not two but three, because love between two can become self-enclosed, but love that overflows to a third is the love that gives without reserve. The Trinity is not a mathematical puzzle but a portrait of the God who is love itself — love as an eternal act, not a property but a relationship, not an attribute but the very life of the three who are one.
Trinity Sunday closes the great feasts of the Christian year — after it comes the long green season in which the Church simply lives. But the living is Trinitarian: every prayer is addressed to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit; every Eucharist enacts the love of the Father who gives the Son who sends the Spirit; every act of charity is a participation in the perichoresis, the eternal exchange of love that is the inner life of God. The twenty-five Sundays after Trinity are the Church living from the inside of the mystery it has confessed, inhabiting the life of the God it has named, becoming by grace what the Trinity is by nature: a community of love in which each person exists entirely for the others, in which self-gift is the only mode of existence, in which the distinction of persons does not fracture the unity but expresses it. The Church does not merely believe in the Trinity; it is called to embody it.
O Almighty and everlasting God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, three Persons and one God, whose inner life is the eternal exchange of love; Grant that thy Church, confessing this mystery with its lips, may embody it in its life, that the community of the baptised may reflect the communion of the Trinity, and that the love we have received may overflow to every third and fourth and further person, until the whole creation is drawn into the dance; who art one God, world without end.
Amen.