“How can these things be?” (NRSV, John 3: 9)

Last Sunday we were paying especial honour to the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth whom Jesus promised would lead us into all truth and who, as the Proper Preface declared has, by the Gospel which he has inspired, brought us “out of darkness and error into the clear light and true knowledge” of God the Father and of his Son Jesus Christ. (1) And now immediately afterwards we are confronted with the humanly unfathomable mystery of the Holy Trinity.

This seeming contradiction illustrates what kind of enlightenment it is which we are given by the Christian Faith.  It draws our attention to the fact that we, with our tiny limited minds, are as incapable of understanding the Being and Nature of God, as the lowliest insect is incapable of understanding us.  Thus as Pentecost is followed by the Feast of the Holy Trinity, so the light of the Gospel, while it reveals to us much that otherwise we could not know, does not remove mysteries in religion.