Trinity Sunday, Year A
First Reading: Ex 34:4b-6, 8-9
Second Reading: 2 Cor 13:11-13
Gospel Reading: Jn 3:16-18
We often hear the comment that all religions are basically the same. In fact, Pope Benedict XVI warned, there have grown up “theories which seek to justify religious pluralism” as something desirable. New Age is one of them.
However, even when different religions agree on human behaviour, they may not agree about God. For example, Christians believe what we celebrate this Sunday: the fact that God is not a single person, as Muslims and Jews believe, but a family, or trinity, of three Persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. “God is one but not solitary,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
There are not “three gods,” the Catechism says, but “one God in three Persons.” The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are each, “by nature, one God.” They “do not share the one divinity among themselves”; rather, they are “each God, whole and entire.” At the same time, they are distinct from each other: “Father,” “Son,” and “Holy Spirit” are the names of different Persons, not simply different “modalities” of God.
The three Persons “are distinct from one another in their relations of origin,” the Catechism explains: “It is the Father who generates [or begets], the Son who is begotten, and the Holy Spirit who proceeds.” The “divine unity is triune.”
Nevertheless, the distinction of the Persons “does not divide the divine unity,” so we can say that “the Father is wholly in the Son and wholly in the Holy Spirit; the Son is wholly in the Father and wholly in the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit is wholly in the Father and wholly in the Son.”
If all this sounds difficult or even impossible to understand, we should not be surprised, for “the Trinity is a mystery of faith in the strict sense,” the Catechism says: “one of the mysteries that are hidden in God, which can never be known unless they are revealed by God.”
“To be sure, God has left traces of His Trinitarian Being in his work of creation and in his revelation throughout the Old Testament,” the Catechism continues. “But his inmost being as Holy Trinity is a mystery that is inaccessible to reason alone or even to Israel’s faith before the Incarnation of God’s Son and the sending of the Holy Spirit.”
Difficult or even impossible to understand, “the mystery of the most holy Trinity” is nevertheless “the central mystery of Christian faith and life,” the Catechism says. “It is the mystery of God in himself. It is therefore the source of all the other mysteries of faith, the light that enlightens them. It is the most fundamental and essential teaching in the hierarchy of the truths of faith.”
In fact, the Catechism says, the whole of salvation history is nothing more or less than “the history of the way and the means by which the one true God—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—reveals himself to humans and reconciles and unites with himself those who turn away from sin.”
“The faith of all Christians rests on the Trinity,” the Catechism says; that is why we begin and end all our prayers “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” That is why “Christians are baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”
Never think that the doctrine of the holy Trinity is irrelevant to us. All love, good, and happiness come from God, and God created us to share them by sharing his nature. Our vocation is to live forever in the heart of the holy Trinity.
Meditate on it. Pray for the grace to understand it more fully. Think of what you are saying when you say “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” and say it clearly and carefully.
Father Hawkswell has now finished teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English. However, the course will remain available, in both print and YouTube form, at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course, until next September. At that time, he will teach it again, with new insights, both online and in person:, on Sundays from 2 to 4 p.m. at the John Paul II Pastoral Centre (4885 Saint John Paul II Way, 33rd Avenue and Willow Street, Vancouver) and on Mondays from 10 a.m. to noon in St. Anthony’s Church Hall, 2347 Inglewood Avenue, West Vancouver.