My Friend and His Dance: Perichoresis

When my Friend Jesus held out His Hand to me many years ago, He invited me into a Dance that was bigger than I had ever imagined. As a small child, I couldn’t have known or comprehended the depth of it all … this dancing with Jesus.

But it was just in recent years that I discovered what the early church fathers knew and taught. The divine Dance is about the mystery of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And they didn’t understand the Trinity in a static way as we modern Christians tend to do, but in an active way, as a dance. The beautifully descriptive term for this Divine Trinitarian Dance is perichoresis.

If you spell out the … Greek word, peri-choresis, you can hear in English what the word conveys: “peri” (from which we get words such as “perimeter”) and “choresis” (from which we get our word “choreography”) — a dancing circle. The word describes the interrelationships of the persons of the Trinity. That in everything God the Trinity is and does, each of the persons relates to and engages with each of the other persons. Like an eternal dance, the “choreography” of the Divine Being is singular in its diversity and diverse in its unity. And for church fathers, one beautiful way of understanding our salvation is our being invited into this dance.
Rankin Wilbourne, Union with Christ, p.101

Many others through the centuries of the church history have echoed the theme of union and communion with God as the heart of being a Christian. Participation in the divine dance of the Trinity is the heart of the Christian life.

The whole dance, or drama, or pattern of this three-Personal life is to be played out in each one of us: or (putting it the other way round) each one of us has got to enter that pattern, take his place in the dance. There is no other way to the happiness for which we were made … Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever? … But how is he to be united to God? How is it possible for us to be taken into the three-Personal life? … Now the whole offer which Christianity makes is this: that we can, if we let God have His way, come to share in the life of Christ … The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else."
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, IV.4

I am so humbled and amazed that we have been invited into intimacy with the Triune God who is in constant relationship, “dancing” with each other in the Godhead. Now we are in that very “dance,” not as “god” but as new creations in Christ … as unique masterpieces in the body of Christ.

Think about that … deeply!
Look at these Scriptures and thank your amazing God. Amen.

Through these He has granted to us His precious and magnificent promises, so that by them you may become partakers of the divine nature… 2 Peter 1:4a NASB

On that day you will know that I am in My Father, and you are in Me, and I in you…. Jesus answered and said to him, “If anyone loves Me, he will follow My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our dwelling with him.
John 14:20, 23 NASB

 that they may all be one; just as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me….22 The glory which You have given Me I also have given to them, so that they may be one, just as We are one; 23 I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me, and You loved them, just as You loved Me. 24 Father, I desire that they also, whom You have given Me, be with Me where I am, so that they may see My glory which You have given Me, for You loved Me before the foundation of the world. 25 “Righteous Father, although the world has not known You, yet I have known You; and these have known that You sent Me; 26 and I have made Your name known to them, and will make it known, so that the love with which You loved Me may be in them, and I in them.”
John 17:21-26 NASB

For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them. Ephesians 2:10 NASB