Trinity Sunday June 3, 2007

Proverbs 8:2‑-31 Psalm 8 Romans 5: 1-5 John 16:12‑-15

“In the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit”

1. A Muslim friend once said to me, “You have God the Father, you have God the Son, you have God the Holy Spirit. You have three gods !” I started to explain and stopped. For one who does believe in the Trinity, no explanation would be ever enough, for one who believes, no explanation is necessary. Theologians through the centuries have written books on the Trinity. The most recent one is a reprint of a Jesuit Theologian, Fr. Bernard Lonergan. It is 822 pages long. At the end of his course on the Trinity, he was said to have told his class. This book can be summarized as follows: The Trinity is Four relationships, Three Persons, Two natures, One God and No explanation.

Having said that, each Trinity Sunday, we try to explain the Trinity just one more time. When will we ever realise that the Trinity is not a mathematical problem to be solved, but a Mystery of Love to be lived. It is like watching a sunset and trying to explain its beauty until someone says, “hush, just try and enjoy the gift.” As Christians we were all taken up into the Mystery of the Trinity, when we were baptised in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

2. We were baptised in the name of

the Father, who has loved us from the beginning of all time,

the Father who has carved us on the Palm of God’s hand.

In our first reading we have the narration from Proverbs which is a description of a period before that described in the book of Genesis. God is creating with a female worker at God’s side. This is not the basis of the theology of the Trinity, but the emphasis is on the fact that God is communitarian in nature. The very nature of God involves “relationships”.

God creates us. It is the Wisdom of the Father that has made us with different talents. Some have the genius to do things of beauty which make us gasp with astonishment, while others have talents barely to feed, clothe and shelter ourselves. Yet we are precious in God’s sight. Made in every shade of the rainbow, one cannot help being wide-eyed like a little child before a magician who pulls a rabbit out of a hat or makes things disappear into thin air. The only difference is that the magician’s tricks are an illusion. God’s works are real and with love. In the responsorial psalm we said: “when I consider the works of your hands, the moon and the stars that you have made.” We enjoy a total security of God the Father, when all the world around us is falling apart in greed, in anger and in the desire for revenge.

In the Letter to the Romans, from which the Second Reading is taken, Paul describes this chaos in our world. Abstract Trinitarian theology will evolve through the centuries that follow. In this letter, Paul describes a lived experience of believers drawn into community by the power of God’s action through Jesus Christ. This recreation of humankind is sustained through the recreating work of the Holy Spirit. The sin of man splits us into isolation and alienation while the action of the Trinity draws us into a community of Love.

3. We were baptised in the name of the Son. This is God’s “piece de resistance”. The height of the love of God for us is the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. The Word of God came unto this World. This Wisdom was with God from the beginning delighting in God’s creation. The responsorial psalm: Psalm 8 picks up the marvels of God’s creation. There is the sun to rule by day, the moon and the stars to delight heart of humankind. Wisdom was there when the birds in the air, the animals on land, and the fish in the sea were created into the beauty we see today. We often take this gift for granted. Sometimes we even think we have a right to them.

Jesus Christ reminds us that we were made in innocence, we were made in the image and likeness of God. Our purpose was to become holy as our Heavenly Father is holy. However, we are caught up in the cycle of greed, anger, jealousy and revenge. And so the Word of God becomes flesh to be one like us in all things but sin. This Only begotten Son of God would show us once again the Way to God. He would tell Philip “To know me is to know the Father.” But we are hard of heart and slow to believe and so when the time came to return to the Father, the Word of God promised us the Holy Spirit who would be our Advocate.

 

And so we were baptised in the name of the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit would teach us everything and remind us of all the Son had taught us.

The Holy Spirit would recreate the face of the Earth.

The Holy spirit would turn us in the right direction and like Moses we would desire to see God “face to face.”

So we would be suffering from unwanted verbiage if we try to explain the Trinity with the age old images: the Irish Clover, or Thomas Aquinas’ powers of the Mind: memory understanding and will, or the Sun, its rays and heat. All these images try to depict the Trinity of Persons, but one God. They are helpful but fall so far - far short of the reality. The richness of our feast today - is to stand back and let the

Father astound us with Love

Son astound us with Salvation

Spirit astound us with recreating us - again and again and again, as often as we need that Love.

This is the Mystery we live out, we who were baptised in the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Appendix

The five affirmations of Lonergan:

1. God the Father neither made his own and only son from some preexisting material nor created the Son from nothing, but from eternity out of his own substance generated the Son as consubstantial to the Father.

2. The Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of Life, proceeding from the Father, who spoke through the prophets, is to be adored and glorified with the Father and the Son.

3. Therefore, one is the divinity, the power, and the substance of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, but three are the persons or hypostases distinguished from one another by their proper characteristics, which are all in the order of relation; hence in God everything is one, except where the opposition of the relation dictates otherwise.

4. The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son as from one principal and by one spiration.

5. The dogma of the Trinity, which is mystery properly so called, cannot by principles natural to us be either understood in itself or be demonstrated by its effects; this remains true even after revelation, when, however, reason illumined by faith can proceeds, with God’s help, to an analogical and imperfect understand of this mystery.