Doing some research on images of angels in biblical texts, I came across the captivating icon painted by Russian Andrei Rublev around 1410. Men, angels, or God? The peculiar story of Abraham and Sarah’s visitors in Gen 18 uses a constellation of Hebrew vocabulary that has intriguing theological implications.
For Rublev, it afforded an opportunity to meditate on the Christian mystery of the Trinity. In this icon depicting Gen 18, Rublev gives the messengers halos and wings. Not only that, but although the story appears in the Hebrew Bible (and predates Jesus by centuries), its interpretation in Rublev’s hands is an exquisite representation of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
This makes me think about the business of taking texts out of context. We are right to be anxious about such practice, but can there be a place for it, too? Maybe it’s a little like grammar — once you know the rules, you can break them. So long as you know about the Bible well enough to know that Gen 18 is not “about the Trinity,” you can go ahead and meditate on how it could be about the Trinity.
Although scholars debate whether the figure on the left or center is Jesus or God the Father, it would seem that the central figure is Jesus — the color and style of his clothes are typically used in this form of art for Jesus. The meal they share is at once the meal prepared by Sarah, who hurries to bring the best (and hears from the visitors that finally she’s to have a son), and the Eucharist, commemorating Jesus’ sacrificial death and resurrection. Rublev’s Three-in-One God is both host and guest — a gracious image of profound hospitality, simulataneously communicating paradoxical ideas, as art so richly enables us to do.
