Dear Friends,
Today, we celebrate in our Sunday Liturgies the Most Holy Trinity. It is an annual feast in the Church’s calendar. While the Doctrine of the Trinity was solidified at the Council of Nicea in 325, no specific feast was dedicated to the teaching until 1334, when Pope John XXII asked that it be celebrated on the Sunday following Pentecost. The Trinity is a profound mystery revealed in Sacred Scripture that expresses the nature of God as a communion of love. The Father is the Creator, the Son is the Redeemer, and the Holy Spirit is the Sanctifier. Although distinct, they are united in a single divine essence. This unity in diversity reflects the relational nature of God and serves as a model for human relationships, emphasizing love, cooperation, and mutual respect.
While I was in the Seminary, we would joke about students losing their faith while studying the faith. Sometimes, the mystery of what Jesus reveals to us is just so far beyond our human understanding that any attempt to try to explain it leads to frustration and the temptation to walk away from it entirely. The class I took on the Trinity was one such experience.
There is a mental tension in the revealed truth that Jesus is God. It arises from the fact that, if God became human, all sorts of questions arise about the nature of God. Is there one God, truly? Is there some sense in which there is more than one God? Is God divisible? Can we find parts in God? If there is one God, and Christ is truly God, then is Jesus God the Father? Is he also the Holy Spirit? Are the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit different parts of God? Are they different modes that God takes on? Are they different masks that God wears in different situations? What is the relationship between the three? These things were fought over in the early church and at times led to fistfights in the streets.
Maybe the simplest approach is to consider the relationship between the Father and the Son in the context of the Holy Trinity. With this, Christians believe three things about God: 1. There is one God. 2. Jesus Christ is God every bit as much as the Father is God and the Holy Spirit is God. 3. Jesus Christ is not the Father, and he is not the Holy Spirit.
Got it? Maybe we should just say, “It is a mystery!”
A priest friend of mine, who did his PhD work on the relationships in the Trinity, would often suggest we just surrender, have a scotch and ponder what is imponderable. One thing he would conclude: We cannot know the essence of God. God is so different and so transcendent to us that we cannot know “what God is.” And yet, there are three means by which the Tradition said we can know God: We can know God by analogy. We can know God by extension. We can know God by negation.
Scripture uses analogy a lot to describe God. For example, God is king, judge, physician, shepherd, redeemer, mother hen, rock, Creator, and, for Jesus, above all, Abba. But in none of these cases is God’s nature identical to what we see of these roles in our world.
By extension means we take our analogies about God and extend the thought. It is how we can say God is omnipotent and omniscient. We live in time, but we recognize that God is not limited by time, so we say that God is infinite, and so on.
My very smart friend preferred negation – we can say what God is not. When we know all that God is not, then we have some understanding of what God is. He always thought this was the safest of our approaches to God.
What can we say this Sunday? God has entrusted to us a sacred revelation. We cannot know much, but we can know what Jesus revealed. That there is one God, and that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are that one God, but that the Father is not the Son or the Holy Spirit.
God has chosen to reveal to us something that exceeds the capacity of our minds: that God is one and three. Our duty is simply to receive what God has revealed and be transformed by it.
Peace,
Fr. Damian