It’s one of the fundamental mysteries of our faith. How do Christians manage to worship one God who is yet three persons?
I recently came across an image 14 centuries old, which I found both helpful and beautiful: Our Father God is the sun, with Jesus as the sun’s rays, and the Holy Spirit as light itself.
God the Father is like our sun; too bright for us to look into it straight, it cannot be observed directly. Such immense power puts it beyond our ‘comprehension’, and yet we see its effects daily and depend upon it utterly.
Jesus is like the sun’s rays, the sudden shaft of sunlight which touches the earth, catching our eye with its beauty as we walk through a wood, a beam of light suddenly pouring through a break in the clouds. Jesus, who came into our world in a particular place, at a particular moment, cast a bright light, which has never been quite lost since; a vivid revelation of what God is truly like, which our eyes can comprehend and our minds can seek to follow.
And God the Holy Spirit, the daylight in which we all move, the light which surrounds and warms us every day, without us even noticing it moment to moment, the ‘light of day’ which illuminates everything. In God’s Spirit we ‘live and move and have our being’, just as we live and move in the light of each day.
This is something of what we are proclaiming when we say those words, we know so well: ‘The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all’. We are reminding one another of the light by which, and in which, we live – the powerful love of the Father; Jesus, the radiating shaft of light revealing God’s kindness to the world; and the Spirit’s daily renewed companionship, like daylight itself, all around us here and now.
I pray this summer, as we enjoy the sunshine and long days, that we might especially notice and treasure the light and learn from it something of God.
Let us see in the sunlight the love and the power of God.
Let us rest and draw strength from that light;
and through us,
may God’s light shine more warmly for others.
Revd Kate McFarlane