The Most Holy Trinity (Year A)
Commentary on Exodus 34:4-6,8-9; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13; John 3:16-18
We have now come to the end of the many weeks which were taken up with the celebration of and reflection on the ‘Paschal Mystery’. It began with Ash Wednesday, went through Lent, the celebration of Holy Week and Easter, the weeks following Easter and culminating in Pentecost and the handing on of Jesus’ mission to his Church.
We return now for the rest of the liturgical year—the ‘Ordinary’ Sundays of the year—and they will bring us right up to Advent and the beginning of another liturgical cycle. But traditionally this transition is commemorated each year by our celebration of the Feast of the Holy Trinity.
The doctrine of the Trinity is one of the most fundamental in our Christian faith, but it is also a doctrine which many of us have difficulty coming to terms with. We often refer to it as a ‘mystery’ and therefore something which can be affirmed, but is not to be understood and need not be explained. “Just believe it,” is something people may be told.
In the New Testament, the word ‘mystery’ (Greek, mysterion) refers primarily to some truth which God has made known to us and which we otherwise would not have discovered. The Trinity, that in God there are three Persons, really is a mystery in this sense. It is also, of course, difficult for us to understand how one being can be three persons just as it is difficult for us to understand how Jesus can be both God and human (the mystery of the Incarnation).
Three possible reactions
We can react to this situation in three ways:
- by saying it is all rubbish anyway;
- by not thinking about these things at all;
- by trying to reduce them to categories which are within our human comprehension.
None of these approaches is very helpful. Rather, we should try to understand as much as we can, and say as much as we can while acknowledging that we can only go a certain distance. However, we can go far enough to satisfy our hunger for truth and to have some understanding of our God. One thing we can say right at the beginning. We are not dealing with outright contradictions or trying to believe the impossible. We are not being asked to believe that 3=1.
We are asked to believe that in the one being we call God, there are three Persons, who are, in the words of today’s Preface to the Eucharistic Prayer,
…three Persons equal in majesty, undivided in splendour, yet one Lord, one God, ever to be adored.
Rather than getting ourselves tied up in theological knots, we would do far better by reading prayerfully over the beautiful Scripture readings of today’s Mass. Here there are no abstruse theological explanations or speculations. Rather the emphasis is not on what, or how, or why, but in very practical language, on the tangible way the Persons in the Trinity relate to us.
A God who is very close
The message coming loud and clear through these readings is that our God is not far away, that he is not ‘up there somewhere’, a kind of scary, long-bearded policeman in the sky. The message coming through is that our God is close by and he cares. In the First Reading (from Exodus) Moses is told that God is:
The Lord, the Lord,
a God merciful and gracious,
slow to anger,
and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness…
Oh, we really need to hear that and to become utterly convinced of it, especially when we find times rough and painful.
In Greek drama of classical times, one could recognise the character being played by the mask the actor wore. As well, in Chinese opera, there is something similar where the faces of the players are elaborately painted so that one can know which role is being played—a king, a general, a concubine, a soldier and such. The mask was called a prosopon. In Latin this word was translated as persona.
Even today in programmes of plays we may still see the actors listed under the heading dramatis personae, the characters or the roles in the drama. So in a certain sense, there are three personae or roles in our one God. The difference is that in a play, the role is assumed for the duration of the drama, while in God, the roles are permanently identified with God himself.
It might be helpful to us to look at these three roles of God as they are presented to us in Scripture.
God the Father*
While traditionally Scripture speaks of God as Father, we know that in God there can be no gender differences. We call God Father in the sense of the Parent who gives life and nurture. God as Father is the originator, the source, the conserver of all life, of all that exists. The Acts of the Apostles explains:
In him we live and move and have our being… (Acts 17:28)
God as Father is no puppet operator in the clouds, but an indwelling Lord. God is in all his creation, but is not identified with it. The Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins said that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God”. Through the Father, our God is to be sought and found in all things, which he has created and keeps in being. These go from the simplest minerals which are alive with atomic energy, to the most gifted and creative human being, to the outermost galaxy. And so we have the lovely prayer of Moses in today’s First Reading:
…I pray, let my Lord go with us.
God the Son*
If we can speak of God as Father or Mother, then the ‘only begotten son’ must equally be spoken of as Son or Daughter. The ‘only begotten’ as such, can be neither male nor female even though incarnation de facto took place in a male. However, the Creed which we will soon recite says of the Son or Daughter that homo factus est. This should be translated as “was made human” or “became human”. The word homo- in Latin, like anthropus in Greek, does not specify gender; both men and women are homo.
Of course, we know the Son best through Jesus, born of Mary in Bethlehem. In him, there was the mysterious combination of the divine and the human in one Person. Jesus was totally God and totally human—not half and half. This is a truth as far beyond our comprehension as the Trinity itself.
Jesus is the revelation—unveiled in human form—of our God. The message of this revelation is purely and simply to let us know that God, that the Father, loves us with an overwhelming love. John tells us in today’s Gospel passage:
For God [Father] so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God [Father] did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved through him.
In this manner, God is not concealed behind the humanity of Jesus, but is seen precisely in that humanity. When is Jesus most clearly revealing of the Father? In his miracles? Certainly, but surely Jesus is most clearly revealing the heart of the Father when he is at his most human. We see the Father God most clearly in Jesus in his compassion for the weak, the needy, the sinner; in forgiving the sinner and his enemies; in healing the physically and mentally sick; in integrating the social outcast back into the community; and in his unconditional acceptance of all irrespective of class, religion, or gender. Yes, our Father God really loves the world and that has been shown to us by the ‘Only Begotten’ in Jesus.
God the Spirit
Finally, we see God as indwelling Spirit. The Spirit is described first as the subsisting Love that is generated between the Father and the Son. Again, of course, we cannot speak of either ‘he’ or ‘she’, still less of this Love as ‘it’.
The meaning of the Spirit in practice means that God is indwelling in all creation and revealing himself through it. Wherever there is Truth or Love or Beauty, there is God. Every act of truth and integrity, every act of love and compassion, every act of human empathy, every act of solidarity, forgiveness, acceptance or justice in people is the Spirit of God working in and through us.
When such actions appear in us, they are a sign that we are open to the Spirit and that he is working in us and through us. Let us pray today with Paul in the Second Reading:
Try to grow perfect; help one another. Be united; live in peace, and the God of love and peace will be with you…
And Paul concludes with the lovely greeting we often use at the beginning of the Eucharist:
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God [Father], and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.
One last word
The two great mysteries of our faith are the Trinity and the Incarnation. They are combined in a marvellous simplicity in the Sign of the Cross with its accompanying words. Let us try to say this simple prayer with ever greater meaning and awareness and form the cross on our bodies with care and dignity.
St Ignatius of Loyola had such a love of the Trinity (as the result of some mystical experiences) that every time he began celebrating the Eucharist with the Sign of the Cross he broke down in tears and could hardly go on. Let us, too, rediscover the Sign of the Cross as a means of getting in touch with the God who loves us so much that he sent his Son and fills us with his Spirit.
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*There is no sexual differentiation in God, so we can speak with equal validity of the First Person as Father or Mother and of the Second as Son or Daughter. The Spirit, too, is both male and female. This is the language of the Scripture texts reflecting the times in which they were written. It is not the words that are important, but their meaning.
The Holy Trinity (Years ABC)
TODAY’S FEAST is one which many preachers would prefer not to have to talk about. What can one say that is meaningful about such an abstract concept as the Holy Trinity? In one sense, of course, they are right. It was the great St Thomas Aquinas who said that it was much easier to say what God was not than what he is. In other words, every positive statement made about God has to be immediately denied. If we say God is “good”, it is obviously true but our concept of “goodness”, however exalted, is so limited that God’s “goodness” cannot remotely correspond to our limited concept of it. And so of every other attribute applied to God.
When it comes, then, to speaking of the meaning and inner relationship of three “Persons” in one God we are floundering in territory where ordinary human language is totally inadequate to express the reality. Our God can only be reached in the “cloud of unknowing”, as Julian of Norwich so beautifully expressed it. God is not any of the things we say he is. It is, as Fr Anthony de Mello used to put it, something like trying to explain the colour green to a person who has been totally blind since birth.
No getting off the hook
However, we should not try to get off the hook too easily and decide to speak or think about something altogether different on this Sunday. Provided we are aware of God’s basic unknowability by our limited minds, there are still many helpful things we can consider about our God and the inner relationships which are part of his* being.
While it is of the utmost importance that we realise this, there are many statements we can make which will help in our relationships with God.
To go back to Thomas Aquinas again, one of his basic principles was that “Behaviour is determined by the nature of things” (Agere sequitur esse). From the way things act we know something about what they are. We can thus distinguish the different natures of minerals and other non-living substances, plant life, bacterial and viral life, animal life, human life from the different ways in which each is able to function and react. We normally will not confuse a cow and a horse, a bird or a bat, a shark or a whale, a gorilla or a human being. It is not simply their appearances that are different. We realise that each has certain capabilities and that those capabilities arise from the way they are essentially constituted in their inner being. We don’t expect animals to talk as humans do, except in TV cartoons. We don’t expect snails to run in the Derby or the Grand National or horses to fly.
And, in our daily rubbing shoulders with other people, the only way we can know them is by what they reveal of themselves through their behaviour and interactions. We say they ARE kind, because they consistently behave in a way that is kind. Or they ARE cruel, again because of what is perceived as consistently cruel behaviour. “By their fruits you will know them,” said Jesus. “A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, or a bad tree good fruit” – because agere sequitur esse.
A level of unknowability
At the same time, while we may feel we can know a lot about people from their behaviour (and do not hesitate to pass judgement!), we can by no means know everything. Every human being, indeed as science constantly discovers, every created thing is a mystery whose innermost reality is really impossible for us to penetrate totally. And that even applies to our own selves. We do not know ourselves totally. We are a mystery to ourselves – and, a fortiori, to others!
If this is true of created reality, we should not be surprised to face the same dilemma with the Creator. God, in his deepest being, is a mystery we cannot ever fathom. This is not just a “cop out”; it is a fact. Nevertheless on the basis of what God DOES we do get some very clear indications of what he IS. Agere sequitur esse applies to God also.
What the Scripture tells us
And it is in the Christian (New) Testament especially that it has been revealed to us that there are three Persons in our one God. What it means to have three Persons in one Being is something we do not even try to understand. But we can get some inkling if we confine ourselves to seeing what each of the persons DOES as a clue to what they ARE.
In Greek classical drama in the time of Jesus and earlier, the actors put on a mask to indicate the role they were playing (not unlike the elaborate painting of the face in Chinese opera). The Greek word for this mask was prosopon (proswpon, literally, ‘in front of the face’) and the Latin translation was persona (that through which the sound of the speaker’s voice came).
So, speaking analogically, we can say that in our God there are three masks, three personae, three roles pointing to three separate sources of action. This is not an explanation. It is a groping effort to get some understanding. Those three roles are that of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit acting from one single Source.
Father
We see God as Father, a loving and compassionate Father. Not a daunting patriarchal figure but one that is easily approached and who can be addressed by the familiar and intimate term Abba (Abba, compare the English ‘Papa’ or ‘Ah Ba’ in Chinese and other languages). He is the creator and giver of all life. Everything good that can be discerned in the world around us comes from him and through him. In him, through him and with him all things exist.
He is the one who cares, the one who waits for the Prodigal to return and forgives completely and immediately. He is the Father of truth, the Father of love and compassion, the Father of justice. The whole of this beautiful world in which we lives is a testimony and, at the same time, only a faint indication of what he really is. If we really look at the world he has made (and not at the one we have unmade), our hearts can only be overcome with praise and thanks.
Son
We see God as Son, who in an extraordinary way came to live among us, and whom, in a paradox beyond all understanding, we humans killed.
In the Son as a human being, we can see, hear and touch God. We see something of the nature of our God as Jesus heals the sick, identifies with the weak and socialises with the sinful. We see him challenge the dehumanising values that form the fabric of most of our lives and, in the process, he is rejected by those he loves. Though he is God, he empties himself of all human dignity that he might open for us the way to true and unending life.
Spirit
We see God as Spirit, becoming, as it were, the soul of his people. All the good that we do, all our evangelising work, our hospitals, schools, works of social development and social welfare, our care of the sick, the weak, the oppressed and the outcast – all are the work of God’s Spirit working in and through us. Wherever there is genuine loving there is the Spirit of God at work.
Growing into his likeness
And yet, being aware of all this, we still cannot say that we know our God. But there is enough here – if we pray and reflect on it – that is already overpowering in its significance.
We need to remember that we have been called to be and to grow into the image of God himself. In what has been revealed to us through Jesus and the Scriptures, we have more than enough to challenge us and to help us to approach closer to our God. Our ultimate goal, and it is the only goal for all living, is to achieve perfect union with him. We do that, above all, by loving as he loved, by loving unconditionally and continuing to love where no love, and even hate, is returned.
For this we need the creative power of the Father, the compassion of the Son, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. They are all available to anyone who opens their heart to receive.
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*Although God has been referred to here in male terms, we need to remind ourselves that the three persons of the Trinity are sexually inclusive of both male and female.
We need also to remember that, although Jesus as the incarnate Son is male, our Creed professes that the Second Person of the Trinity became primarily a human being (et homo factus est). The word ‘homo’, although grammatically masculine, refers to any human being: man, woman or child.
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