Trinity Sunday, Year B
First Reading: Dt 4:32-34, 39-40
Second Reading: Rom 8:14-17
Gospel Reading: Mt 28:16-20
This Sunday the Church proclaims that the one God is three Persons: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.
The Trinity is “a mystery of faith in the strict sense,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church: something we could not know except by God’s revelation, at which Moses marvelled.
Many people, including Jews, call God our Father, for he creates everything and cares for everything. However, unlike any other Jew, Jesus addressed God as “Father,” thus revealing himself as God’s Son: begotten, not made, by God the Father, and therefore possessing God’s nature. This revelation was something completely new: “We have our law,” the Jews said, “and according to that law he must die because he made himself God’s son.”
The truth of the Trinity “is the central mystery of Christian faith and life,” the mystery of God “in himself,” the Catechism says. It is therefore “the source” of all other mysteries and “the light that enlightens them.”
Why is it so important? The answer is that God wants us – creatures he makes, not begets – to share “the glory of his blessed life,” says the Catechism.
In fact, “the ultimate end” of all God’s work is our entry “into the perfect unity” of the Trinity, not just as his artifacts but as his children, sharing his divinity by adoption as Jesus shares it by nature.
To achieve this destiny, we must be reborn and “conformed to the image” of God’s begotten Son. God accomplishes this rebirth in baptism by giving us his Holy Spirit, the third Person of the Trinity, whom Jesus also revealed.
“All who are led by the Spirit of God” are God’s “sons and daughters,” St. Paul says. When we address him as “Father!” it is “that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.”
“At the heart of the divine act of creation is the divine desire to make room for created persons in the communion of the uncreated Persons” of the Trinity, says the International Theological Commission. This is what motivates God “in the work of creation, the whole history of salvation after the fall, and the missions of the Son and the Spirit, which are continued in the mission of the Church,” says the Catechism.
Before our baptism “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” as Christ commanded, we or our godparents state our faith in the Trinity, contained in the Apostles’ Creed.
In blessing the baptismal water, the Church prays, “We ask you, Father, with your Son to send the Holy Spirit upon the waters of this font.”
We pray always “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” for prayer is “the living relationship of God’s children with their Father, with his Son Jesus Christ, and with the Holy Spirit,” says the Catechism.
Even on earth, the “grace of the Kingdom” is “the union of the entire holy and royal Trinity” with “the whole human spirit,” says the Catechism. “If a man loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him, and make our home with him,” Jesus promised.
As we die, the Church speaks with confidence: “Go forth, Christian soul, from this world, in the name of God the almighty Father, who created you; in the name of Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, who suffered for you; in the name of the Holy Spirit, who was poured out upon you.”
Therefore, as we say in this Sunday’s Preface, “we joyfully proclaim our faith in the mystery of Your Godhead … three Persons equal in majesty, undivided in splendour, yet one Lord, one God, ever to be adored in your everlasting glory.”
Father Hawkswell's course, “The Catholic Faith in Plain English,” has now ended, but all the materials (video and print) will remain available online free of charge at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course until the end of August.