Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity

May 30, 2010

Prov 8, 22-31
Rom 5, 1-5
Jn 16, 12-15

Oh Lord, why, of all days, did you ask me to write on the Feast of the Blessed Trinity?

This mystery has puzzled the greatest minds without anybody being able to crack it. Isn’t it crazy to think that God is one and three at the same time? No wonder that Jehovah’s witnesses and Dan Brown do away with it saying, “This was all invented by the Roman Emperor Constantine in 313 AD.”

They are wrong, of course. Already St. Ignatius of Antioch wrote seven letters around 110AD in which he called Jesus “God” 16 times.

True, the word “Trinity” is not in the Bible. But everywhere the New Testament refers to three distinct persons who seem to be equally divine, yet one. More than 100 years before Constantine, the Christian writer Tertullian then coined the term “Trinity” as a helpful way to refer to this reality of three distinct, equal persons in one God.

The doctrine of the Trinity is biblical, fine, but is it relevant? Does it really matter?

If Christianity were simply a religion of keeping the law, the inner life of the lawgiver would not matter. But since Christianity is about personal relationship with God, then who God really is matters a lot. Common sense tells us that some supreme being made the universe and that we owe him homage. But that our creator is a trinity of persons who invites us to intimate friendship with himself – we never could have guessed. We only know it because God has revealed it.

Trinitarian traces are everywhere in creation. The atom is proton, neutron, and electron. Our experience if time is triune – past, present, and future. The family too is a reflection of Trinitarian love – the love of husband and wife, distinct and very different persons, generates the child who is from them but is nonetheless distinct from them, indeed absolutely unique. Yes, the whole creation is filled with and proclaims the triune God.

This God is love, the Bible says. Love needs a partner. Who would have been there to love? Jesus reveals a God who is from all eternity a community of three persons pouring themselves out in love to one another.

If we are truly to “know” our God, we must know this. And if we are ever to understand ourselves, we must also know this. For we were made in the image and likeness of God, and God is a community of self-giving love. That means that we can never be happy isolated from others, protecting ourselves from others, holding ourselves back selfishly from others. Unless we give ourselves in love, we can never be fully human. And unless we participate in the life of God’s people, we can never be truly Christian either. If God is Trinity, then there really is no place for freelance, lone-ranger Christians.

As modern society more and more abandons the triune God and his commandments in the name of “choice,” the world is undermining the very foundation of personhood, dignity, individuality, community, and freedom.

I think it becomes quite clear: the Trinity as model does matter a lot for a healthy future of humankind.

Fr. Rudy Horst, SVD
CKMS, Quezon City
The Word in Other Words