“…You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy” (NRSV, Leviticus 19:2)

Trinity Sunday turns our minds to the ultimate mystery of the Universe, to the nature and being of the Eternal God.  This is the most fundamental fact in religion and one which more than any other determines the kind of person each of us is and the kind of life he or she leads.  For we shall never strive to reach beyond the highest we know.

If our ideas of what God is like are crude and unworthy, then our ideas of what we ourselves ought to be like will be no different.  No one attempts to be better than he or she believes God to be.  But when we have caught a vision of God’s real nature, however incomplete that vision may be, then we shall reach out for his perfection which, even though it seems beyond our grasp, alone will satisfy us.

The two essential facts about the character of God are his holiness and his love.  His holiness is beyond our power, not merely to understand, but even to imagine; for it is complete separateness from the faintest shadow of evil such as we can never attain to in this life.  For even when we are not committing actual sin in thought, word or deed, we have an inner disposition towards it.

St John says that “…God is light and in him there is no darkness at all” (NRSV, 1 John 1:5) and those who have seen the vision of God in this life have been conscious, above anything else, of light – blinding in its streaming purity.

But to mortals and sinners like ourselves such a sight would be too dazzling for us to see anything except our own failings and defects.  We need to have the nature and being of God screened by human flesh and lived out in a human life; and all that we have in the Person and life of Our Lord Jesus Christ, God the Son made man.

In Jesus we see both the holiness and the love of God expressed, in a way we can understand.  His teaching set before human beings perfection itself: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (NRSV, Matthew 5:48) and his own example conformed to that in every respect, without a single failing.  And in his ministry he also showed his Divine love for humanity by his miracles of healing and of mercy.

We have only to recall the multitude of sick people who, as a matter of course, were laid out in long lines filling the streets, and how he healed everyone as he picked his way between them; or again his compassion for the hungry crowd whom he fed with the loaves and fishes.

Indeed, we see his holiness and love all through his earthly life, but above all at its end.  He had come from the glory and the unity of Heaven into this world of misery and conflict, “…for us men and for our salvation…” (1): to deliver us from the control and grip of our personal sins.  That in itself revealed his attitude to sin, for unless it was utterly loathsome to him he would not have given up of his own free will the bliss of eternity in order to save us from our own sins.

But to understand fully the attitude of the Divine mind to our sins, we have to turn to the Crucifixion.  There we see how the eternal God preferred to be pegged out on the Cross to die, rather than allow us to remain the helpless victims of our sins.

For his mission to the world was inspired by the active hostility to evil of absolute holiness, holiness that cannot rest until everything that defiles is swept away.

Yet equally it was inspired by his infinite love for the sinner, love that also cannot rest until you and I are holy as he is.  If he loved us half-heartedly he would not bother to save us from that complete separation from him and that utter misery, to which sin inevitably leads if it is not eradicated from the soul.  The actual depth of his love, however, may be measured by that horrible Crucifixion which he willingly accepted – indeed embraced – for our sakes.

And that same holiness and love he is striving to reproduce in each member of his Church by the inward working of his Holy Spirit.  “…You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy” (NRSV, Leviticus 19:2, our emphasis).  And so, in one way or another, in the depths of the soul and by his holy Sacraments, he ceaselessly endeavours to complete within us that total separateness from every taint and that union with himself which is perfection.

And this growth in holiness will be matched by a growth both in one’s love for God, and also in that active goodwill towards one’s fellow human beings which is set before us in the Sermon on the Mount and the Parable of the Good Samaritan, and which in its perfect form becomes a permanent disposition towards all and sundry.

For, as holiness and love are the two essential features in the nature and being of God, so, if we are ever to share his life, they must also be reproduced within ourselves.

That is our goal.  To achieve it we not only have Our Lord’s example: we also have his life and power within his Church.  Only one thing more is needed, that we should also have the will to do it.

Reference

1. © Archbishops' Council of the Church of England (2000) Common Worship Order One in Traditional Language: Nicene Creed.  Available from:
http://www.churchofengland.org/prayer-worship/worship/texts/principal-services/holy-communion/orderonetrad.aspx (Accessed 21 May 2013) (Internet).