Last year I had the very good fortune to visit Malta on holiday with my wife. It was a place we had never been to before and we loved it. The history, the scenery, the warm Mediterranean Sea in which we swam every day, the food. It was all magnificent.  We enjoyed visiting the Churches – and if you’ve ever been to Malta, you’ll know there are a lot of them!  There is even an Anglican pro-Cathedral which was built in the early 19th Century.  When it was built its tallest spire stood higher than any other in that part of the island. It is a spire that looks out of place, because it’s definitely in an English style of architecture.  After the last war, when the Maltese were rebuilding their churches which had been devastated by bomb damage, they made sure that the dome on the nearby Roman Catholic Church was just a bit higher above sea level.  Now, I can hear you ask yourselves, why is Tim telling you all about his holiday? Let me explain!

It just so happened that our visit coincided with Trinity Sunday. We heard not one, but two, sermons on the Trinity. The one on Trinity Sunday in the Anglican pro-Cathedral was a perfectly good, if a little workaday, exploration of the mystery of the three in one and the one in three. Not three gods, but one God with three persons.  Even as I describe it I can feel the fog descending as we struggle to make sense of this mathematical conundrum: how can something  – even as awesome and majestic as God – be three and one at the same time. We went to the Roman Catholic Cathedral the night before Trinity Sunday so we heard a Trinity sermon there as well.  The contrast between the two Cathedrals is extraordinary: there is a typical Anglican restraint in a classically styled building that wouldn’t be out of place anywhere in England.  This contrasts strongly with the florid and exuberant decoration of the Catholic Cathedral where many of the Grand Masters of the Knights of St John are buried. There was also quite a contrast between the two sermons. The preacher at the Catholic Mass was the Cardinal Archbishop of Malta, who was one of the cardinals who might have been elected as pope just a month before we got to Malta. The Italians have a wonderful word for such people: papabile.

The Cardinal preached a sermon on the Trinity which I will never forget – but for all the wrong reasons. It was utterly and completely impenetrable and I literally only understood four words from it.  To be fair, the reason it was so entirely incomprehensible was that it was preached in fluent and mellifluous Maltese – a language of which I am entirely ignorant. It is a beautiful language which has Arabic and Italian sounds in it – reflecting its strategic place in the Mediterranean: half way between Africa and Europe. The four words I  understood were: Facebook. Question Mark – illustrated with an elegant gesture: loneliness and solitude. I have no idea of the context of any of the words!  And the whole sermon was otherwise utterly baffling.

But, as I reflected on the experience I wondered if those four words might tell us something about the nature of the God whom we know as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  How you connect Facebook with the holy Trinity is beyond me, so I dismissed that straight away. I couldn’t see a link – other than that Facebook has a complicated algorithm which connects people in cleverly and sometimes unexpected ways. The three persons of the Trinity are certainly connected; you can’t have a Trinity unless all three persons are related and connect  – and presumably in ways that are far more advanced and mysterious than Facebook’s most complicated programme.

And what about loneliness and solitude?  I am guessing that they were being used to show some characteristic distinction in the persons of  Holy Trinity. Each is distinct and separate, in solitude, perhaps, but they are never lonely because they are so well integrated.  As I say, I am only really guessing. Rather like trying to work out the question from the answer that you have it’s not straightforward. And we know that God is far from straightforward, but we do know from the Trinity that the persons are in relationship with each other and therefore cannot be isolated in a way that leads to loneliness.

So that leaves us with the question mark. And this seems absolutely entirely appropriate when we are trying to understand the God who made the universe, the sun, the stars and the galaxies and even our small planet earth. Of course we end up with a question mark, because God is ultimately a mystery. If we, with our puny minds, imagine for a moment that we can begin to grasp what God is like, then we are deluded. If we think we have understood God, then the answer we come up with is most definitely not God. We still strive and try to understand who God is, but ultimately we know that this a futile exercise because we are not meant to be able to comprehend the length and depth and height and breadth of the enormity of God.  The creature is not meant to be able to understand the Creator.  We can know that our Creator exists, but we can never know more than a glimpse of this Creator; He is too big and our minds are too small.  A minnow in the vast Pacific Ocean cannot begin to comprehend the size of the sea.  Ultimately God is a giant question mark. We know something of his power and his love, but we can never really know God. It is not unlike the third person of the Trinity, the holy Spirit, being compared to the wind; we can see its effect without ever seeing the wind itself.

I like the story of St Augustine, the great doctor of the Church who was walking on the sea shore in North Africa contemplating the mystery of the Trinity when he encountered a small child digging in the sand.  The theologian broke off his train of thinking and asked the child what he was doing. The child said he was trying to empty the contents of the sea into his hole in the sand. St Augustine laughed patronisingly and told the child that this was impossible. At which point the child – who it turns out was an angel in disguise – said: And neither can you understand the Holy Trinity. That is also impossible.

I don’t pretend to have done more than skate round the edges of the unfathomable mystery of God as he as revealed himself in the persons of the holy Trinity. When all is said, each time we encounter the living God who made the universe and all that is in it, our only appropriate response is to acknowledge his awe and majesty and to bow our faces as we say Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God almighty. Heaven and earth are full of the majesty of your glory. Hosannah in the highest.

Reading: Matthew 28:16-20

Preacher: Canon Tim Alban Jones

Location: St John’s Church Peterborough UK