Tracks of charged particles in a cloud chamber
Ever since I was a schoolboy, I’ve been fascinated by the pictures taken by particle physicists of the tracks of sub-atomic particles in cloud chambers.
The particles are smashed into each other in accelerators. By studying and measuring the patterns they make as they split and decay, scientists can see traces of the underlying structure of matter. The results confirm or disprove elegant theories – mathematical models - constructed by theorists.
I’m looking forward this Summer to the first results from the Large Hadron Collider experiment. Built in a circular tunnel 17 miles in circumference under the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, it will accelerate beams of charged particles to almost the speed of light and smash them together head on. Among the things scientists hope to discover are traces of a weird particle called the Higgs boson, the last undiscovered particle predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. Some people jokingly call it the God particle, because it gives mass to all other particles!
In much the same way, I think, as particle physicists search their cloud chambers for events that reveal the nature of matter, Christian theologians have searched the Bible for passages which reveal something of the nature of God.
The Greek word ἐπιφάνεια (epiphaneia), from which our word epiphany comes, literally means a showing forth or a manifestation. And it is during Epiphany that we are invited through the chosen readings to reflect on how God reveals himself to us, how he is shown forth, made manifest. In the Church callendar, Epiphany begins on Jan 6th, when the focus is on the story of the Magi, when the Christ-child is first shown to the gentiles. But on this and the next 3 Sundays in the season of Epiphany, until Candlemas on 2 Feb, the set readings present us with many other epiphanies, many other stories that reveal something of the nature of God.
So today I invite you to reflect on how God is revealed to us in today's readings as a Trinity - Father, Son and Holy Spirit – and what this means for us.
Psalm 29 presents us with an epiphany of God the Creator.
From time immemorial human beings have seen traces of the majesty of God the Creator in the natural world, and in the awesome power of natural forces.
Psalm 29 captures this kind of epiphany in these words:
The voice of the Lord splits the flash of lightning;
the voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness;
the Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh.
The voice of the Lord makes the oak trees writhe
and strips the forests bare;
I think we’ve all experienced this sense of awe when confronted by the great forces of nature, and by wild and desolate landscapes. They make us feel small and insignificant.
But this is a rather primitive idea of the nature of God, isn’t it? If this were all we knew of God, no doubt we would still be sacrificing our children to appease such a terrifying presence, as many primitive cultures have done, and as it seems the Hebrew patriarch Abraham planned to do with his son Isaac, before the angel prevented him.
Over the long centuries of OT time, the Hebrews came to see themselves as having a covenant with this powerful God, who promised to protect, strengthen and nurture them, so that Psalm 29 can finish with these words:
The Lord shall give strength to his people;
the Lord shall give his people the blessing of peace.
By the time of Jesus, Jews had begun to think of God the Creator as loving his children - the Children of Israel - as a father does. And of course Jesus built on this in his teaching. He himself clearly experienced God as like a loving Father, and he taught his disciples – and through them us - to pray to Our Father in Heaven.
God the terrible creator is transformed into God the loving Father.
The 1st reading from Acts (19:1-7) is about an epiphany of God’s Holy Spirit
The dozen or so disciples that Paul met in the great pagan city of Ephesus were followers of John the Baptist. They had been baptized into John’s baptism of repentance, but they had not been baptised or initiated as Christians. They knew nothing of the Holy Spirit, which the disciples in Jerusalem had experienced after the Ascension.
Paul explained to them that John himself had taught his disciples ‘to believe in the one who was to come after him, that is, in Jesus’. And they accepted baptism from Paul, not ‘in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit’, the Trinitarian words we use now, but ‘in the name of the Lord Jesus’. Perhaps the earliest baptismal words were changed as later theologians began to understand the nature of God as a Trinity.
Only then, when Paul laid his hands on them, did they experience the Holy Spirit. We are told they spoke in tongues and prophesied, just as the disciples in Jerusalem had done. We are not much given in the Church of Ireland to speaking in tongues and prophesying, are we? – in fact we are rather afraid of the idea! I hate to think what the Rector and Bishop Trevor would do if I started to speak in tongues from this pulpit! But if we interpret this phrase as how the early Christians described their sense of being empowered, empowered by Jesus to do the work of God, perhaps we would do well to be more open to the idea.
The 2nd reading from the beginning of Mark’s Gospel (1:4-11) describes an epiphany in which Jesus is revealed as the Son of God at his baptism by John.
‘Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptised by John in the Jordan’, Mark tells us. ‘And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart, and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven,’ – from God – ‘“You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased”’. What an amazing vision Mark conjures up with so few words! It has inspired so many artists over the centuries to paint beautiful images.
The Baptism of Christ, by Andrea del Verrocchio, 1475, in the Uffizi, Florence
But who saw the dove, and who heard the voice from heaven? I don’t think it can have been the crowd down by Jordan’s banks, because Matthew uses the pronoun ‘he’: this vision is surely a private not a public experience. The pronoun is ambiguous. Is it Jesus who sees the vision? Possibly. Perhaps this is the very moment when Jesus the man realises his own significance as the Son of God. But perhaps more likely it is the Baptist who sees the vision. For the writer of John’s Gospel tells us that John the Baptist testified: “I saw the spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptise with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptises with the Holy Spirit.’”
Whichever it is, this passage is very important for all Christians who see the nature of God as the Trinity. This is the only place in the Gospels where we find all three persons of the Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit - together at the same time. It is the defining vision of the Trinity.
The Church teaches that God is a Trinity – a Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit
After analysing these and other Bible passages for a long time, around 3 centuries, Christian theologians achieved a high degree, though not complete, unanimity on this. And they expressed it in the historic creeds which we still say together.
But do we have to rely entirely on the authority of ancient scriptures and long-dead theologians to reach this understanding?
I wonder if, like the particle physicists probing the nature of matter with their cloud chambers and experiments, we can ourselves come to understand God as Trinity, by probing our own hearts and spiritual lives, and the hearts and spiritual lives of those about us? I rather think we can.
All around I see faint but unmistakeable traces of a God like a loving Father, of a Son that shows people how to relate in love to all about us, and of a Spirit that animates all creation!
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