HOMILY FOR THE SOLEMNITY OF THE HOLY TRINITY.
THEME: Holy Trinity, the Mystery of God Himself.
BY: Fr. Anthony O. Ezeaputa, MA.
The doctrine of the Most Holy Trinity is the most fundamental and essential teaching in the “hierarchy of the truths of faith” (CCC 234). It is the foundation of the whole Christian faith, and other truths of faith are built on it and illuminated by it (Unitatis Redintegratio, no. 11).
The belief in One God—the Creator, the Redeemer, and the Sanctifier—builds and illuminates all other truths of faith. After all, we were baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to become Christians. You cannot be a Christian if you do not believe in the triune God.
God has left traces of this mystery in both his creation and the Holy Scriptures, as well as through the mission of the Son and Holy Spirit. However, the essence of God—what God is all about—transcends everything we can ever imagine about him.
The mystery of the Blessed Trinity is, in the strictest sense, a mystery of faith (Dei Filius 4). Because the mystery of the triune God transcends the human intellect, we want to understand it. There is a perennial human temptation to box and label God, reduce the divine to a manageable size, and contain God in the human worldview.
Pope Benedict XVI used what the Israelites did at Mount Sinai, as related in Exodus 32, to show how restless people can be in the face of a mystery beyond them. The Israelites asked for a golden calf.
While Moses ascended Mount Sinai to receive God’s law, the Israelites grew restless and impatient. They persuaded Aaron to make an image for them to worship. They wanted a god they could see and touch because they found the God of Israel to be so mysterious. So, Aaron fashioned for them a golden calf.
Pope Benedict XVI concludes, “The people cannot cope with the invisible, remote, and mysterious God. They want to bring him down into their own world, into what they can see and understand.” What the Israelites did is a classic example of a persistent human temptation that persists even today.
According to Saint Augustine, “Si comprehendis, non est Deus”—if you comprehend, it isn’t God. If we believe we understand the essence of God, whatever we believe we have understood is not God. God is greater than anything we can imagine; the sooner we realize this, the better.
For example, we are often tempted to point out to God people we believe are bad or have wronged us and demand that he deal with them as we see fit. But God loves all his children unconditionally, including the seemingly evil ones and those who have wronged us.
Does it make sense that God does not see things like we do? No, it’s a mystery! God would rather that evil people repent than die in their evil. It’s a mystery! Let us acknowledge today that God’s sense of justice transcends our own.
We believe that God is eternally “one Being in three Persons,” says Tertullian, even before the Son took flesh in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the sending of the Holy Spirit. Karl Rahner says it best: “The Economic Trinity is the Immanent Trinity and Vice Versa.”
But what does it mean for God to be “one Being in three Persons”? The first step to attempting to understand the doctrine of the three-in-one God is to understand the concepts of nature (being) and person.
The nature of a thing tells “what a thing is” and “what it does.” In other words, to know the nature of God is to ask, “Who is God?” and “What does God do?” Simply put, God is holy and does only holy things. God alone is the Holy One. All other holiness is derived from God by sharing in his holiness.
To bless, consecrate, or sanctify something or someone is to remove the object or person from human affairs and dedicate them to God. This is accomplished by imparting the divine nature in them, which transforms them into a holy rosary or a baptized Christian, nun, priest, etc.
So, to bless, consecrate, or sanctify something or somebody is to take the object or the person out of human affairs and insert the object, say, a rosary, or the person, like a catechumen, into the divine nature so that it becomes a holy rosary or a baptized Christian.
In addition, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one because they all possess the divine nature; they are consubstantial. It means that Jesus Christ is God in every single way that the Father is God, and the Holy Spirit is God. And the Holy Spirit is God in every single way that the Father is God, and the Son is God.
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Furthermore, God is also three “whos” or three persons. “Person” is a “relational term” and expresses the idea of dialogue. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are actual relations, or dialogical Being.
The relation is what distinguishes in God, and the person is what is distinguished. So, there are three Persons in God, and they are, by their very nature, relations.
Today, let us acknowledge that God is a mystery that is greater than everything we can imagine God to be.
Let’s let God be God and try to follow the Spirit of God, for those who follow the Spirit are God’s children (Romans 8:14).
May our lives give glory to the Father, who, by His almighty power and love, created us, making us in his image and likeness.
May our lives give glory to the Son, who, by His Precious Blood delivered us from eternal damnation and opened for us the gates of heaven.
May our lives give glory to the Holy Spirit, who has sanctified us in the Sacrament of Baptism and continues to sanctify us by the graces we receive daily from His bounty.
And may all glory be to the Three adorable Persons of the Holy Trinity, now and forever. Amen.
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