The Mystery of Light

A Sermon for Trinity Sunday

“Who coverest Thyself with light as with a garment.” — PSALM civ. 2.

THE Psalms of David have two different descriptions of the way in which God offers Himself to the knowledge of man. They are both figurative. Each of them is drawn from one of the two great aspects in which the world of nature stands before men’s eyes. They seem at first to be quite contradictory of one another. But, as so often is the case, the more we think of them the more we see that both are true, and going back to their meeting-point we find, lying there, the deepest and the fullest truth concerning God. In the “eighteenth Psalm David sings of God, “He made darkness His secret place; His pavilion round about Him were dark water and thick clouds of the skies.” And again in the nine ty-seventh Psalm, “Clouds and darkness are round about Him.” And then in this verse of the one hundred and fourth Psalm, which I have quoted for my text, “Who coverest Thyself with light as with a garment.” Darkness and light! The two opposites which divide the world! The two foes which are in perpetual fight throughout all nature! Behold they both are made the mediums of the utterance of God. “Darkness -20 is round about Him;” and yet He stands before the world, “clothed with light as with a garment.”

When we try to reach the ideas which are included in these two pictures, so as to see whether we can hold them both in our minds at once, the first thing of which we wish to be sure is that the difference between them is the difference not between mystery and no mystery, but between two kinds of mystery. It is not that the figure of the darkness presents to us a Being all obscure and hidden, whom no intelligence can understand, and then the figure of the light throws open all the closed doors of this Being’s nature so that whoever will may enter in and understand Him through and through. God is forever mysterious to man. The infinite is for ever infinitely past the comprehension of the finite. None but another God, the equal of Himself, could fathom what God is. He not merely does not, He can not, make to us a revelation of Himself which shall uncover all the secrets of His life and leave us nothing for our wonder, nothing to elude us or bewilder us. What then? What is it that He does do when He changes the figure of His presentation and, instead of standing before our awe-filled vision wrapped in the robes of darkness, stands forth radiant, “clothed with the light as with a garment?” This is one of the questions which lie at the root of any true understanding of revelation; one of the questions men’s confusion with regard to which keeps their whole idea of revelation misty and confused; one of the questions therefore which we want to answer as carefully and truly as we can.

The answer to the question lies in the fact that there are two kinds of mystery, a mystery of darkness and a mystery of light. With the mystery of darkness we are familiar. Of the mystery of light we have not thought, perhaps, so much. Some object which we would like to study is hidden in obscurity. We cannot make out its shape or color. We strain our eyes, but it eludes us still. We know that the way it looks to us may be quite different from the reality. We know that the cloud is jealously hiding some of its features without the knowledge of which no man can truly say that he knows the object. We struggle with our ever baffled vision, saying all the time, “How mysterious!” “What a mystery it is!” But now supposing that the object of our scrutiny, being something really rich and profound, were brought out of the darkness into a sudden flood of sunlight, would it grow less or more mysterious? Suppose it is a jewel, and instead of having to strain your eyes to make out the outline of its shape, you can look now deep into its heart; see depth opening beyond depth, until it looks as if there were no end to the chambers of splendor that are shut up in that little stone; see flake after flake of luminous color floating up out of the unseen fountain which lies somewhere in the jewel’s heart. Is the jewel less or more mysterious than it was when your sight had to struggle to see whether it was a topaz or an emerald? Suppose it is a landscape. One hour all its features are vague and dim in twilight; hill, field, and stream in almost indis tinguishable confusion. Six hours later the whole is glowing in the noonday sun, the streams burning with silvery light, the colors of the fresh spring hillsides striking from far away upon the senses, filling them with delight and wonder. Everything is thrilling and hursting with manifest life. Has not the mystery increased with the ascending sun? Suppose it is a friend. A man about whom you have heard conflicting and bewildering accounts, whom you have been unable to make out as he stood off at a distance, has drawn near and touched your life. You have grown intimate with him. You have traced his ideas and actions back into his character. You have seen him on many sides, and out of many impressions the roundness and completeness of his nature has become clear to you. Is it not true that the more you see of him the more you wonder at him? If you are worthy to see him and he is worthy to be seen, familiarity breeds not contempt but reverence. The more light there is upon the greatest and best men, the more mystery they show to their wondering fellows. There is no mystery of character to any man like that of his father and his mother, whom he has known all his life in the constant clear light of home. And so we might proceed with many illustrations. Is a great idea, a great study, a great cause, more deeply mysterious to the superficial or to the thorough student? Was not the mystery of mathematical truth more truly mysterious to Professor Peirce. than it is to you or me? Does not the mystery of color or the mystery of form grow more intense to Raphael and Michael Angelo as they surpass the mere gazer of the galleries? Africa looks mysterious to the mere tourist who sails into the harbor at Alexandria. Has it lost or deepened its mystery for Livingstone and Stanley when they have toiled up the long nameless rivers into the heart of the dark continent?

This is the mystery of light. With all deep things the deeper light brings new mysteriousness. The mystery of light is the privilege and prerogative of the profoundest things. The shallow things are capable only of the mystery of darkness. Of that all things are capable. Nothing is so thin, so light, so small, that if you ever it with clouds and hide it in half-lights it will not seem mysterious. But the most genuine and profound things you may bring forth into the fullest light, and let the sunshine bathe them through and through, and in them there will open ever new wonders of mysteriousness. The mystery of light belongs to them. And how then must it be with God, the Being of all beings, the Being who is Himself essential Being, out of whom all other beings spring and from whom they are continually fed? Surely in Him the law which we have been tracing must find its consummation. Surely of Him it must be supremely true that the more we know of Him, the more He shows Himself to us, the more mysterious He must forever be. The mystery of light must be complete in Him.

Shall the time ever come when God shall be so perfectly understood by man that the mystery shall be gone out of His life, and man feel that he knows Him through and through and can tell his brother-man about Him; as the father stands by the steam-engine and explains it to his boy, so that what used to be a beautiful wonder ful thing which seemed almost alive, becomes only an ingenious arrangement of steel and iron, which the boy goes off to imitate in his workshop, making a little steam-engine which repeats the big one which he has been studying? Shall the time ever come when man shall understand God like that? Men often talk as if such a time would come. Nay, men often talk as if such a time had come; as if their theologies, their descriptions of God, had eliminated mystery from Deity and made the infinite perfectly intelligible to the finite. This is the danger which haunts the popular theology and often makes the devotional meeting and the religious controversy and the revival hymn and the statement of religious experience very unpleasant and some times very harmful. Very many good people seem to think that in order to make God seem dear and capable of being loved and trusted by His children, they must make Him seem perfectly simple and comprehensible; they must take away from the thought of Him all that is awful and mysterious; as if awe and mystery were not essential elements in the highest loveliness; as if our deepest and most trustful love were not always given to the things which are awful and mysterious to us; the love of the little child for his father who embodies for him omniscience and omnipotence; the love of the patriot for his country; of the philanthropist for his race; of the poet for nature. There was a time when men seemed to be so busy in wondering at God that they forgot to love Him. Sometimes now it seems as if they so longed to love Him that they dared not remember how wonderful He is. When the full religion shall have come, men will know that the more wonder ful they find Him to be, the more completely they may love Him; and the more He gives Himself to their love, the more He will be wonderful to them forever.

For to those who stand nearest to Him He is most mysterious. We talk with ready understanding of the death of Christ, before which the angels stand in awe.

“No angel in the sky

Can fully bear that sight,
But downward bends his wondering eye
At mysteries so bright.”

Mysteries so bright! The more bright the more mysterious! Heaven is to be full of mystery. The nearer we stand to the Lamb upon His throne, the deeper depths we can discover in His majesty and love, the more wonderful shall He be to us forever. Revelation — it is a most important thing to know — revelation is not the unveiling of God, but a changing of the veil that covers Him; not the dissipation of mystery, but the transformation of the mystery of darkness into the mystery of light. To the Pagan, God is mysterious because He is hidden in clouds, mysterious like the storm. To the Christian, God is mysterious because He is radiant with infinite truth, mysterious like the sun.

I have dwelt long on this because I wanted to make it as clear as I could, and because it seems to me to be what we want first and most of all to remember when we are thinking of the New Testament revelation of God, which we call the doctrine of the Trinity. To us to whom that revelation seems to be clear, God stands forth in it with amazing light. Behold He who hid Himself in darkness has come forth into the region which our most dear affections and our loftiest thoughts keep forever flooded with brightness. He is our Father, our Brother, our Inspiring Friend. Father, Brother, Friend! These are words of light. In the clear atmosphere of the relations which those words represent our life is lived, our most familiar interests and hopes and occupations go their way, walk up and down, and do their several business. When God then sheds around Himself the revelation of these three relationships, and declares Himself to be Father and Son and Spirit, it is surely a vast access of light. We know Him as we have not known Him before, while our whole knowledge of Him was wrapped up in the undefined, unopened majesty of that one name, GOD. And what then? In the new light of this great revelation has the mystery of God grown less or greater? Surely not less but greater. Nothing could be more misleading than for the believer or for the doubter of the doctrine of the Trinity to talk about that doctrine as if it claimed to be the solution, the dissipation, of the mystery of God. I say “God” to the religious heathen who has gone so far as to believe that there is one God and not many gods in the universe; I say “God” to him and he gazes into the darkness of that great idea and says, “I do not know what God is; I do not dare to ask. A million questions come buffeting me like bats out of the darkness the moment that I dare even to turn my face that way. Let me hear His commandments and go and do them. For Himself I dare not even ask what He is.” That is the mystery of darkness. That is Moses on Mount Sinai. That is the Egyptian in the desert. That is the pure worshipper of the one unknown godhood everywhere. Then I say “God” to the Christian and he looks up and says, “Yes, I know; Father, Son, and Spirit; my Father, my Brother, my inspiring Friend. I know Him, what He is, for He has shown Himself to me.” But with each word, Father, Brother, Friend, there come flocking new questions, not like bats out of the darkness, but like sunbeams out of the light, bewildering the believing soul with guesses and insoluble suggestions and intangible visions of the love, the truth, the glory of God, which were impossible until this clothing by God of Himself with radiance in Christ had come. That is the mystery of light. That is St. John in Patmos. That is the Christian saint and thinker and questioner of all the ages standing before “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”

I am anxious to assert that the revelation of God in Jesus Christ is not the dissipation but the change, the transfiguration of mystery. The doctrine of the Trinity is not an easy, ready-made, satisfactory explanation of God, in which the inmost chambers of His life are unlocked and thrown wide open that whoso will may walk there and understand Him through and through. Often men’s disappointment comes just here. The believer in the doctrine of the Trinity says, “I thought that with my acceptance of this truth all doubt, all questioning would be over. But lo I the questions which I knew before were nothing to the questions that come flocking around me now. My heart is full of wonder. Christ, who reveals God to me, seems to escape me and elude me. The mystery of my religion is increased a hundredfold since God shone on me in the light of the gospel revelation.” It is often an anxious and discouraging discovery. There is a strange confused consciousness that all is right, and yet a haunting suspicion that something is wrong, when the humble, puzzled believer thus declares the perplexity of his faith. And on the other hand the doubter and denier of the Trinity declares, “See how simple my pure doctrine is, and how complicated and hard to understand your teaching makes the nature and life of God. It has lost simplicity and clearness.” There is no answer to either of them, my friends, save the one great sufficient answer which lies in the truth of the mystery of light. There is a mystery concerning God to him who sees the richness of the Divine life in the threefold unity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, which no man feels to whom God does not seem to stand forth from the pages of his Testament in that completeness. Not as the answer to a riddle, which leaves all things clear, but as the deeper sight of God, prolific with a thousand novel questions which were never known before, clothed in a wonder which only in that larger light displayed itself, offering new worlds for faith and reverence to wander in, — so must the New Testament revelation, the truth of Father, Son, and Spirit, one perfect God, offer itself to man.

The figure of our Psalmist’s verse seems to me to be full of beauty and significance in connection with what I am now saying. “Thou coverest Thyself with light as with a garment,” he cries to God. The garment at once hides and reveals the form it clothes. The man among men puts on the king’s robe, and the purple which he wears at once declares his dignity and starts a hundred new questions concerning him. So when God tells us any new thing about Himself, that new revelation, that new light, is like a garment. It utters and it hides His majesty. Through it we see what He is; and yet a hundred new questions about how He can be that, and what it means for us that He should be that, and what more which He must also be His being that involves, come crowding on us.

Think how it must have been in the disciples’ inter course with Jesus. Their earliest life with Him was very simple. They seemed to understand Him wholly. They thought that they knew perfectly what He was and what He had come to do. They learned to love Him dearly and intimately in this familiarity. Now and then in those first chapters of the gospels He says some deep word or does some unexpected action which seems to startle them and brings a puzzled question which is like the first drop before the tempest of puzzled questions concerning Christ which has come since and which is still raging around us, but generally in those earliest days they have very few questions to ask; they seem to understand Him easily. By and by, how ever, to any one who reads the Gospels thoughtfully, there seems to come a gradual change. Jesus does not withdraw Himself from them. He comes nearer and nearer to them constantly. He tells them deeper and deeper truths about Himself. He opens remoter and remoter chambers of His history. “Before Abraham was, I am,” He says. “I and my Father are one,” He says. As He speaks, He is ever growing more and more wonderful to His simple-hearted followers. The love which they had given Him in those first bright transparent days is not taken back or lessened; it is ever deepening and increasing; but it is also ever being filled with mystery and awe. By and by comes the night of the Passover with its abundant revelation. As we watch Jesus sitting there and telling the disciples truth after truth about Himself, what words like the old words of the Psalmist describe the scene, He is “clothing Himself with light as with a garment.” We can seem to see the lustrous raiment of truth gathered about His familiar form, at once revealing it to, and hiding it from, His amazed disciples; revealing it to their love, hiding it from their understanding. He grows dearer and more mysterious to them every moment as He speaks. Then comes Gethsemane, and then the Cross, and then the Resurrection, and then the Pentecost. He, their Lord, is “clothing Himself with light as with a garment,” all the while; more light and more mystery and withal more love perpetually, until at last the John who had once questioned Jesus as if He were a scribe or teacher, “Master, where dwellest Thou?” is seen writing His reminiscence of it all in words that burn with mysterious reverence, words that make us think He wrote them on His knees. “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we be held His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father.”

Men sometimes shrink from following the disciples of Jesus in this developing apprehension and adoration of their Lord. There are some readers of the New Testament who cling to its first chapters, and love to picture to themselves over and over again the scenes in which Christ, sitting on the mountain or wandering by the lake, talked like a gentle, noble master to the simple-hearted men who never dreamed of the majesty which they were dealing with. Before such readers the last deep chapters of St. John and the expanse of the epistles seem to stretch like a great ocean, over which hang thick clouds, from which come solemn sounds that distress and frighten them, and on which they do not like to launch away. And yet the epistles are a true part of the same revelation with the gospels. The fact is clear beyond all doubt that the disciples who had walked with Jesus by Gennesaret were the same disciples who preached throughout Judea and far abroad the power of the Son of God, the mysterious salvation by the life and death of Christ, the crucified and risen Savior. Such change, beyond all doubt, came to those men as Jesus revealed Himself before them, as in their presence He clothed Himself with light as with a garment.

And is a progress such as theirs, a deepened knowledge of the mystery of Christ such as was given to them, possible for men to-day? Indeed it is! If there is any man or woman here this morning who has honored Jesus Christ, loved Him, believed Him, called Him the noblest of men, the perfect man perhaps; and taken pride in the simplicity, the definiteness, the completeness of such a notion of Christ; pointed to it and said, “Behold how clear it is; how free from all bewildering mystery;” if there is any such Christian here to-day to whom it can be made known that absence of mystery may be a sign not of abundance but of lack of light, to whom then his Christ, his teacher, his model man, may open the depths of His life and manifest the higher nature on which the perfection of His humanity rested; if there is any Christian who, ready and glad to see his Christ become more mysterious before his eyes as He robes Himself in fuller light, can take with joy the word of that Christ as He declares Himself the Son of God, to such a Christian the exact experience of the disciples may be repeated. Such repetitions are not rare. Continually Christ, trusted in His humanity, is making known His divinity. It is the effort, the tendency, of His whole nature to do that if men will let Him, if only they do not, fascinated with the simplicity of His manhood, refuse to go on and in into the deeper truth which He has to give them about Himself.

I have dwelt to-day on this one point. I have tried to show that there is such a thing as a mystery of light, and what is its true nature. I have tried to show that if God shows man new and more profound truth regarding Himself the result will certainly be a deepened mysteriousness and a growth of many questions too hard to answer; and therefore that the fact that the doctrine of the Trinity is full of mystery and overruns with questions before which the mind stands helpless, is not an objection to its truth, but is rather what man ought to look for in any revelation which proceeds from God.

And now in one last word, dear friends, what will this be to us? Only, I hope, a new encouragement to trust ourselves frankly and gladly to whatever revelation God may have to make to us. I am afraid that there are many Trinitarians who, in all their faith, are yet staggered and troubled because of its mysteriousness. I am afraid that there are many Unitarians who close their eyes to the deepest words of the New Testament because they too distrust the presence of mystery in the conception of God. I am not pleading with you now to believe this or that concerning God, but only, without prejudice or prepossession, to be willing to be lieve whatever He shall show you of Himself. Be sure that for such as we are to know such as God is, must be for us to enter into a realm where mystery shall fill the air. Above all, be sure that it is only by completest willingness to know His completest truth that we can rightly know anything regarding His surpassing nature.

With such convictions fastened in your souls, 0 give yourselves, my friends, to Him. Ask Him to be your Savior. Ask Him to forgive your sins. Ask Him to take your sins out of you and make you pure. Ask Him to show you His holiness so that you shall love it and make it your own, growing holy like Him. Ask Him to save you in all the unknown wants of your poor broken life, where you are not even able now to know that you need salvation. Ask Him to do this and He will do it all. And as He does it, let yourself be lieve, without a hesitation; let yourself believe in the divinity of Him who alone could do so divine a work as the forgiveness and salvation of a soul. That is the only way in which men ever come really and truly to believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ.