Three in one: the mystery at the heart of our faith

Trinity Sunday, Year C
First Reading: Prv 8:22-31
Second Reading: Rom 5:1-5
Gospel Reading: Jn 16:12-15

This Sunday, the Church celebrates the fact that there is one God, but three divine Persons: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. It is a “mystery of faith” in the strict sense: something we could never have known on our own.

Jesus revealed it; he said that “all that the Father has is mine” and that “the Spirit of truth” will “take what is mine and declare it to you.”

We can never know everything about this mystery, but we should not stop trying to know something. “Father, you sent your Word to bring us truth and your Spirit to make us holy,” the Church prays. “Through them may we come to know the mystery of your life.”

Working hard, and guided by the Holy Spirit, the early Church gradually understood that God the Son is “consubstantial” or “one in being” with the Father, possessing the same nature, for he is “eternally begotten of the Father,” “true God from true God.” She also came to realize that “the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son,” is also “God, one and equal with the Father and the Son,” of “the same nature.”

The three divine Persons do not share the divine nature: They each possess it totally; they use the one divine mind for knowing and the one divine will for loving.

In contrast, humans share human nature. No one has the whole of it; we each have some human characteristics, but not others. We cannot think with someone else’s mind or love with someone else’s will. However, the Father, who is God, and therefore infinite, cannot lack anything; neither can the Son or the Holy Spirit. Each has the divine nature in its entirety.

Accordingly, there is one God, not three, for the divine Persons are not separate. However, they are distinct.

Now the only distinction there can be among three Persons who each possess the whole of the same nature is a distinction of relations.

The Second Person is related to the First as Son to Father: by being begotten. Now what someone begets (a child) has the same nature as he does; what he makes (a portrait) does not. God the Son, begotten by God the Father, has the same nature as his Father. That nature is infinite, so the two Persons are equal.

However, the Second Person is also related to the First as Word to Speaker. When God speaks, his Word reflects what he is thinking about perfectly. When he speaks of himself, his Word is his perfect image: a Person equal to himself in all perfections. “In the beginning was the Word,” St. John says; “the Word was in God’s presence, and the Word was God.”

Now between Father and Son, or Speaker and Word, there is Love. Just as the Father’s Word is a Person equal to himself, so the Love between the Father and the Son is a Person equal to them both: the Third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit,” St. Paul says in the Second Reading.

God the Father is the source and origin of the whole divinity, the Church says. This might sound as though the Father is superior to the Son and both to the Holy Spirit, but “none of the Persons precedes any of the others in eternity, nor does any have greater immensity or greater power,” the Church says.

The explanation is that a source, or origin, or cause does not have to exist before its effect or result. Anything God does or is, he does or is eternally, without beginning or end.

Meditate on all this, for God’s plan is “to make room for created persons in the communion of the uncreated Persons” of the Holy Trinity.

Father Hawkswell has now finished  teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English for the summer. However, the whole course will remain available in written form and YouTube form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course until he starts again, with new insights, September 7. After that, he will again teach it in personas well: on Sundays at 2:00 pm in the John Paul II Pastoral Centre, 4885 St John Paul II Way, Vancouver (33rd and Willow); and on Mondays at 10:00 am in St. Anthony’s Church hall, 2347 Inglewood Avenue, West Vancouver. The first session will be an introduction to the course. 

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