Dear Friends,
Each year, on the Sunday following Pentecost, the church celebrates the feast of the Holy Trinity.
A mystery. A concept that is difficult to understand. Yet, the Trinity is at the very heart of the Christian understanding of God. It is Jesus who reveals the Trinitarian notion of God to us. Our friends who are not Christian could never even begin to approve a notion that God is one and God is three. Perhaps even many Christians do not believe what the Church teaches, but rather have come up with their own version of three gods or one God with no separate persons. The mystery is simply hard to grasp.
Trinity—the very word tends to move us from the everyday world of concrete experience to the world of the eternal and the abstract. For those of you my age, when I mention the Trinity, your thoughts probably summon images of shamrocks and triangles scribbled on blackboards by nuns helping us imagine how three and one could possibly go together. The word “Trinity” evokes some heavy-duty philosophy with big words that make no sense. The word tends to move us from the heart to the head, and away from prayer to the complex teaching of the catechism. But the mystery of the Trinity should instead move us into the wonder of God and into the inner dwelling of God, not away from God.
Christians believe in one God and only one God. But the heart of Christianity is the belief that this one God is three Persons, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. If we are counting, we count only one God, but when we count divine Persons, we count three. You can’t divide the one God into three more fundamental things which make up the one God. God isn’t a compound of anything more fundamental. One is all there is, when it comes to God, but you still have to count three. The three Persons of the Trinity are not anything else. They aren’t roles of God, or modes of God, they are just Persons, and there are three of them.
Jesus is the Word of God. Jesus is what God has to say. Jesus is God’s ultimate act of self-disclosure. Jesus is the true light which enlightens everyone. There is a common icon of Jesus that appears in the Eastern Churches; it is called the Pantokrator. In it, Christ holds a closed bible to say that he is the Word of God. Christ does not read the bible. He is the Bible. “Pantokrator” is the Greek translation of the Hebrew title El Shaddai, meaning “all powerful. This attribution to Jesus was important given the struggles in the early church to understand how Jesus was God. The Christ Pantokrator icons were symbols of the Nicene Council’s decision that Christ was co-equal and co-eternal with God. In some of the Christ Pantokrator icons you’ll notice that the eyes of Christ are asymmetrical. Actually it is more than the eyes – it is two different faces coming together. This icon represents both the humanity and divinity of Jesus. His right hand is raised in a teaching gesture with his fingers separated into a twosome and threesome to command faith in the two natures of Christ and the three persons of the Trinity.
In Jesus, we worship a God whose word is expressed in human flesh. And what is revealed is this: our God is a relational being, a personal reality. In God there is a mutuality of knowing and loving, of being known and being loved. As persons, with our own insatiable desire for knowledge and love, we are adopted into this interpersonal reality of God and called to share it with others.
Peace,
Fr. Damian