The Trinity Sunday, Year A
“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Love of God and the fellowship of the Holy spirit be with you all!” In the name of the father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit: Amen.
Good morning my dear people of God. Today we celebrate; perhaps what is the most difficult but the central and the most basic truth of our Christian faith -The mystery of the blessed Trinity: God the father, God the son and God the Holy Spirit. If you want the summary of what we celebrate today, it is that there is one God in whom dwells three persons, all bonded together in Love.
It is a difficult concept if we seek to reason or understand it fully. This is how Augustine found himself. There is a story that St. Augustine the famous African Saint in trying to understand the mystery of the Trinity decided to read all the books he could find on this topic. The more he read the more puzzled he grew. In anger one day he left and went to take a walk on the sea shore. There, Augustine saw a small boy busy at work; the boy had dug a hole in the sand and was getting water from the sea and pouring it into the hole. At the beginning Augustine took it to be a child play but as time went on, it became obvious to him that this is more than a child play. So he decided to engage the child with a question. “What are you doing, my son? I am pouring the sea into a hole. Augustine then told him that that was impossible because you can not put the mighty ocean into a little hole and the child said to him in reply and you why do you want to put almighty God who created this ocean that you call mighty into your little head? The fact that we cannot explain or comprehend fully does not mean that we can not say anything about it at all. We can say a lot about the trinity.
We Catholics have the custom of beginning and ending all important actions by blessing ourselves in the name of the Trinity when we say: in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Another way in which we express our faith in the blessed trinity is the blessing with which the celebrant [The Bishop or Priest] sometimes greets us at the beginning of Mass: The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Love of God and fellowship of the holy Spirit be with you all! Which is taken from the second reading of today’s liturgy (2 Corinthians. 13:13). When we pronounce these familiar names we are affirming our belief that God is not a solitary being, dwelling by himself in splendid isolation, but a community or family of persons.So important is the doctrine of the blessed trinity to our Christian faith that when we admit someone into the Christian fold, we baptize the person in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit: The Trinitarian rite. In fact the trinity is so important in our Christian faith that it is impossible to be a Christian unless one accepts the doctrine of the Trinity.
Some non-Christians have been known to accuse us Christians of professing our belief in three gods. That is not true, even a smallest child in primary school knows that is not the case. Christianity accepts only one God, not two or any other multiple numbers. Our Christian faith tells us that there are three persons in the one God. But where is it in the Bible? In truth, our faith in the blessed Trinity finds its solid basis in the Bible.
From the first book in the Bible, that is Genesis chapter 1:26 we read that “God said: Let us make man in our image and likeness”. Most theologians in their interpretation of this text accept that it is referred to Blessed Trinity: God the father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. Also the Gospel of John Chapter 16:13-15 speaks implicitly about the trinity. “When the spirit of truth comes, he will lead you to the complete truth… He will glorify me (Jesus) since all he tells you will be taken from what is mine… Every thing the Father (God) has is mine.” The doctrine of the Trinity is more vividly presented in St. Matthew’s Gospel 28:19, where Jesus instructed the apostles: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”
In this passage, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are said to share one name (notice that the term “name” is singular, not plural), and that name is almost certainly Yahweh, the personal name of God in the Bible. We know this because the name Yahweh is applied to both the Father and the Son in the New Testament.
Peter tells us, “David did not ascend into the heavens; but he himself says, `The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand, till I make thy enemies a stool for your feet.’ Let all the house of Israel therefore, know as surely that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:34-36). Here God is “the Lord” who speaks to “my Lord,” Jesus. When one looks at the Old Testament quotation, one finds, “Yahweh says to my Lord: ‘Sit at my right hand, till I make your enemies your footstool’“ (Ps. 110:1), so here the Father is termed Yahweh.In Philippians 2:10-11, we read: “At the name of Jesus every knee shall bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord.” This is a reference to Isaiah 45:19-24, which tells us: “I Yahweh speak the truth . . . I am God, and there is no other. By myself, I have sworn . . . To me every knee shall bow, every tongue confesses. ‘Only in Yahweh,’ it shall be said of me, ‘are righteousness and strength.’“ Here Paul applies the prophecy of every knee bending and tongue confessing to Jesus, resulting in the prophecy that they will “confess that Jesus Christ is God.”
Jesus himself declares that he is Yahweh (“I AM,” in English translation). In John 8:58, when questioning about how he has special knowledge of Abraham, Jesus replies, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I AM.” His audience understood exactly what he was claiming about himself. “So they took up stones to throw at him; but Jesus hid himself, and went out of the temple” (John 8:59). With the personal name of God, Yahweh, being applied to both the Father and the Son, it is almost certainly applied to the Spirit, and thus to all three members of the Trinity. The parallelism of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit is not unique to Matthew’s gospel, but it appears elsewhere in the New Testament (e.g., 2 Cor. 13:14, Heb. 9:14), as well as the writings of the earliest Christians, who clearly understood them in the sense that we do today–that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are three divine Persons who are one divine Being (God).
The trouble with us Christians today is that we want to understand how can three persons be in one divine God? The term person is not only for human being. There are other beings outside of human persons, e.g. God is person, and Angels are persons. We say that with God all things are possible; it means that God can be one and the same time three persons. Through out history, there are many examples used in church history to explain the doctrine of the trinity. Those ones, that appeal to me mostly the shamrock leaf clover that St. Patrick used to explain the Blessed Trinity to the people of Ireland, Frank Sheed in the Hyde Park, London, used water to explain the unity in diversity of the Blessed Trinity: He said something like this: “The water that is falling is water, but it can exist in three different forms: gas, solid, and liquid- that is, in steam, in ice, and in falling rain.” Of course, an analogy like this falls short of the reality. But it offers an insight into the Trinity. As there are not three different kinds of water but only water in three different forms, so there is only one God and the image of Fire which has been used by so many that it has lost the original author. Fire is the component of three things taking place, Light, Smoke and heat. We can speak of these individually and we can speak of them as one thing just like the mystery of the blessed trinity.
My dear brothers and sisters, after all said and done, the Blessed Trinity remains a mystery that our limited intellects will never unravel or disclose. God is the deepest mystery of our lives and is infinitely more expansive than our tiny minds are capable of imagining. We should never look on the Trinity as a problem to be solved, a puzzle to be worked out or something simply to test our faith. Rather we should seize the opportunities that such a generous revelation of God himself offers to us. We can only believe it with deep faith, reverence and love. For those who believe, no explanation is necessary. For those who do not believe, no explanation is possible. The doctrine of the Blessed Trinity did not originate as a theory or system of thought, but as a blessing. It did not even come as a result of controversies and heresies about the doctrine or its formulation. It came out of the disciples’ threefold experience of God in life and worship. Lessons are simple and clear: God is community not pure solitude. The community that is God is founded on love. Jesus wants his church to be a community and is also founded on love. This means that we must work hard to ensure that the Church of Christ, be it parish, diocese, chaplaincy, Seminary, religious houses or Christian families should be a community. Then, it should be a community based on love. Love is the only valid basis for community within the Church. And not laws, constitutions or hierarchy. If we try to base any of our communities outside love, it will never be a Christian community. It may be a corporation, an institution or a bureaucracy. But it will not be a Christian community that the trinity represents.
For us Christians, therefore, to live in God therefore means to share in the Trinitarian life. Trinity is an existential reality, a mystery that is meant to be lived with faith and not an idea, which is meant to be speculated on. God is with us, God is within us, God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, are active within us, sharing their divine life with us and making it possible for us to lead a Christian life and to aspire to that complete union with God when we shall see Him face to face and will be made like Him in the heavenly Kingdom.
Have a wonderful Trinity Sunday!
+Ab Matthew AUDU Jos