Trinity Sunday is one of the very few times in the Christian calendar that a Sunday is named for a doctrine, rather than for a biblical story (Easter, Pentecost, Christmas, and the like). The passages are chosen to encourage us to reflect on the doctrine of the Trinity, as a doctrine that is central to our faith, through selected biblical passages; this year, sections of Isaiah, John, and Romans (with a Psalm chosen to complement these selections).
So this Sunday we are being asked to approach scripture in a way quite different from many other Sundays, when biblical texts are offered for us to consider in their own right. Trinity Sunday, by contrast, pays scant attention to the historical and literary contexts of the chosen texts. Rather, they are selected as isolated “bites” that can be woven together to provide “a biblical basis” for a doctrine that was developed and expressed a number of centuries later.
In this regard, it has similarities with the way that we are encouraged to read selections from the prophets of ancient Israel—taking particular passages which are placed alongside certain Gospel stories because they “illuminate” or “complement” these later texts. The birth of Jesus at Christmas and the death of Jesus at Easter—and the weeks leading up to these days, in the seasons of Advent and Lent, respectively—are the times when this process is most evident.
So the choice of Isaiah 6:1–8 as the First Reading for this coming Sunday, Trinity Sunday, has both of those pressures running in parallel. First, this text is intended to speak from six centuries before Jesus about what people four centuries after Jesus thought about him, God, and the Spirit. That’s a leapfrog over a whole millennium!!
And second, this text is intended to focus our thoughts on the threefold nature of God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—through the somewhat fortuitous chanting of “holy, holy, holy” by seraphim in the smoke-filled temple atop Mount Zion (Isa 6:3). The only other place in scripture where this threefold acclamation of divine holiness appears is in the extravagantly symbolic visions of the spirit-infused prophet of Revelation, as he “sees things” in his old age (Rev 4:8).
The chanting of the seraphim in the former book, Isaiah, is the first articulation of a chant which, millennia later, became associated with the triune God, worshipped in Christian liturgies. In my own church, after the presiding minster prompts with the words: “And so we praise you with the faithful of every time and place, joining with the choirs of angels and the whole creation in the eternal hymn”, the people respond, “Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might, heaven and earth are full of your glory. Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest.” (quoted from The Service of the Lord’s Day in Uniting in Worship 2; Assembly of the Uniting Church in Australia, 2005).
This song has an integral place in the liturgy, not just of the Uniting Church, but of numerous liturgical denominations around the world. It is sung or spoken in the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving, as people offer thanks to God and prepare to receive the sacrament. Its location within the Christian liturgy means that, in the minds of many believers, it is thoroughly Christianised.
And I suspect that the threefold expression, “holy, holy, holy”, is intended to evoke the three-in-one nature of God, as understood in classic Christian theology. Perhaps it is intended to be a subconscious evocation of “Holy God, Holy Son, Holy Spirit” — even though the song itself says nothing about the unity of those three elements?
The author of the latter book, Revelation, quotes this chant in the long sequence of visions that he reports in this book. He says that he was “in the spirit” (1:10; 4:2; 17:3; 21:10), hearing “the voice of many angels” (5:11–12), as four living creatures sing without ceasing, “Holy, holy, holy, the Lord God the Almighty, who was and is and is to come” (4:8). That’s a multiplying of the threefold aspect of God—three times holy, over three eras of time.
The creatures singing this song are “full of eyes in front and behind”, and they variously appear like a lion, an ox, a creature with a face like a human face, and a flying eagle (4:6–7). These strange creatures appear before the prophet then sees “a lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered, having seven horns and seven eyes” (5:6). The scene is quite fantastical.
There follows further, increasingly bizarre, visions: “the lamb” opens a series of seals with associated dramatic events (6:1–17; 8:1), angels are seen to be hold back nature (7:1), one angel speaks forth (7:2–3) and then seven angels each blow their trumpets (8:6—9:14) before another four angels who were “bound at the great river Euphrates” are released in order to wreak vengeance on the earth and on humanity (9:15–21). We are well and truly into the vividly creative inner mind of the prophet, surely.
After all of this, the prophet is offered a scroll by an angel “wrapped in a cloud, with a rainbow over his head; his face was like the sun, and his legs like pillars of fire” (10:1–2). The prophet takes the scroll and eats it (10:8–10); “it was sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it, my stomach was made bitter” (10:10). That should hardly have been a surprise; the human digestive system is not intended for such a diet!
Then the prophet is instructed to “prophesy again about many peoples and nations and languages and kings” (10:11)—and he does so in a series of increasingly dramatic, vivid, and bizarre prophecies (chs. 11—22). It’s hardly the stuff that encourages me to think that the vision which included the threefold acclamation of God (4:8) was being considered in a rational way and employed in a constructive process of building a doctrine that would serve the church well over time!
Quite surprisingly, in the midst of this extravagant revelatory exotica, there is a little scene that is strongly reminiscent of the scene in the temple on Mount Zion that Isaiah had described centuries beforehand. An angel with a golden censer “came and stood at the altar; he was given a great quantity of incense to offer with the prayers of all the saints on the golden altar that is before the throne” (Rev 8:3). After this, “the smoke of the incense, with the prayers of the saints, rose before God from the hand of the angel” (8:4) before the angel took the censer and filled it with fire from the altar and “threw it on the earth; and there were peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning, and an earthquake” (8:5).
The scene that is narrated in Revelation, therefore, might have certain resonances with the scene when the thresholds of the doorway to the Temple building “shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke” (Isa 6:4). However, the creative imagination of the later prophet on Patmos (Rev 1:9) has taken him far, far away from the scene of the earlier prophet, Isaiah, in Jerusalem. And he ends up even further away from the process of vigorous debate and philosophical disputation which was the context within which the doctrine of the Trinity was formulated.
Isaiah locates the moment when he sensed his calling to be a prophet precisely when those seraphs sang their song, “holy, holy, holy” (Isa 6:3). “Woe is me”, he cries, explaining that “I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips” (6:5a). An intense sense of personal and communal inadequacy grips the prophet.
“Yet”, he continues, “my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” (6:5b). This is far from an exposition of the inner nature of God; there is nothing to provide a hint of the doctrine of the Trinity, to be sure. In fact, this vision is similar to that seen by the prophets Amos during the time of Uzziah of Judah and Jeroboam of Israel (Amos 9:1) and Micaiah during the time of Jehoshaphat of Judah and Ahab of Israel (1 Ki 22:19; 2 Chron 18:18), when “coals of fire flamed forth” from the brightness before the Lord God.
In what Isaiah sees in this vision of “the King, the Lord of hosts”, he reports that “one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs; the seraph touched my mouth with it” (6:7) and uttered words of cleansing and forgiveness (6:8), followed by a word of commissioning (6:8). The coals are reminiscent of David’s vision of the Lord in his prayer calling for help, as “smoke went up from his nostrils, and devouring fire from his mouth; glowing coals flamed forth from him” (Ps 18:8, 12; 2 Sam 22:9, 13).
This moment during the visionary experience in the smoke-filled Temple grounds the prophet in the realities of his earthly life. The seraphs fly from the envisioned presence of the Lord God to touch the prophet directly in his physical state. There is nothing speculative or metaphysical involved in this sixth century BCE experience, such as we find in the expressions of Trinity that have been formulated since the fourth century CE.
It is noteworthy that the content of the commissioning that Isaiah then hears (6:9–13) is omitted from the verses suggested by the lectionary for Trinity Sunday. This severs the scene in the middle; the charge given to Isaiah is integral to the scene, and should not be omitted! Granted, the words which Isaiah hears are challenging and complex, for he is to “listen, but not comprehend; keep looking, but not understand” (6:9); indeed, he is to “make the mind of this people dull, and stop their ears, and shut their eyes, so that they may not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and comprehend with their minds, and turn and be healed” (6:10).
This is sobering. It is also material which could have been considered—indeed, should have been considered—in the process of exploring the essence of God, and articulating the nature of the divine—which is precisely what the doctrine of the Trinity is attempting to do. The God who cleanses and calls (6:7–8) is the same God who challenges and convicts (6:9–10), and who then judges with a ferocious intensity which is born out of a deep integrity (6:11–13).
How long is Isaiah to prophesy his words of challenge? “Until cities lie waste without inhabitant, and houses without people”, the answer comes (6:11); until “vast is the emptiness in the midst of the land” (6:12). For better or worse, we need to reckon with this dimension of God’s nature—and this coming Sunday would have been as good a time as any to ponder it!
So on Sunday during worship, ignore the lectionary, don’t stop at verse 8, and keep reading to the end of the chapter; and then reflect on who this God whom we worship really is.
See also
An Informed Faith 