"God from God, light from light, true God from true God."
John 16: 12-15
The Word: https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/061222.cfm
“In the name of the Father + and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.” How often have we proclaimed our faith in the Trinity by the sign of the cross we make to begin and close a prayer but given little thought to its implication? Familiar practices of our faith become routine at times. I think we often don’t appreciate the depth and significance of such mysteries of faith as the Trinity.
If you’ve ever had the experience of driving in dense fog
you know how stressful that can be. To do so at night would be particularly a
time to be on edge. It may have been fog
not especially thick but still giving little visibility ahead of you. Or, if it is especially that type of “pea
soup” as it is called you may find yourself nearly disoriented moving very slowly and especially attentive
to indicators near your car or truck such as the line along the edges of the
road or certainly any indicator of vehicles ahead of you or coming towards you.
Our Christian belief in God as three yet one may seem somewhat similar.
While we know that fog is basically a cloud much lower
than it should be on this Feast of the Most Holy Trinity it might be good to
try and clear away the darkness. We know from Jesus teaching that he never
explicitly stated that “God is a Trinity of Persons, yet one only God.” If he had the Apostles as well as anyone who
heard this would have scratched their heads and wondered, “What does that mean?”
It makes no sense at all.
The Jewish understanding in the mind of the disciples of Jesus would have no place to imagine that God is any more than one and only. So, Jesus needed to imply how God operates in those three persons. Whether that added to any confusion or not was one of those truths that needed time to percolate and be revealed through the lived experience of the Christian faith. To embrace this great and central mystery of our faith we must put aside our natural tendency to scientific logic or research. God cannot be contained in any formula or hypothesis or set of tangible verifiable facts.
Our poetic first reading from Proverbs illustrates the Spirit as Wisdom. Here we understand that God’s Spirit was active and present from before the moment of creation: “. . . from of old I was poured forth at the first, before the earth. . . “
God created all that we experience and breathed is life,
his Spirit, into all that is and in a singular way to humankind: “. . . I found
delight in the human race.” So God remains hidden from our eyes and
understanding yet very present and engaged at the same time.
In the lived experience of the Christian faith, as
believers populated the early Church and beyond in the first several centuries,
over time the truth was uncovered. Jesus states in our Gospel
this Sunday that “I have much more to tell you but you cannot bear it now . .
.” But the Spirit, “will guide you to all truth.”
So over the early centuries through the battle of
heresies principally concerning the nature of Jesus in relation to God the
Church was brought to see who Jesus is, who God the Father is and how the
Spirit operates through them. St. Paul in the first century describes in our
second reading from Romans: “. . . the love of God has been poured into our
hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” In the first one
hundred years of Christian life, the operation of God in human history is
becoming more clarified. Yet it took another progression on up to the early
fourth century to finally codify the dogma of the Holy Trinity. In 325 the
Council of Nicea formed the Creed we continue to proclaim. Not a single word of
it has ever been changed in its original form.
The Nicene Creed we recite each Sunday is the definitive proclamation of our belief in God in Christian understanding: “I believe in God, the Father almighty Creator of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord . . . God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, consubstantial (of the same divine substance) with the Father . . . I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son . . . “Read that beautiful Creed in its fullness, or certainly think it through this Sunday and you have a precise definition of the Holy Trinity. https://www.usccb.org/prayers/nicene-creed
Clear?
Fully no longer somewhat of a mystery?
Likely not.
Still, although limited in our full understanding, we
believe God is three yet one; three divine persons yet one in their unity:
Father, Son and Holy Spirit - One eternal God. Our Jewish brethren, while
joining with us in belief that there is only One true God, see him as totally Other and single in Person. This is the same God yet Christianity has come to a fuller definition.
All the prayers of the Mass, the calling down of the Holy
Spirit upon the gifts of bread and wine, our personal prayer, our sacraments
such as when we are baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
the prayer of absolution as our sin is forgiven in penance, and each time we
make the sign of the cross we proclaim this core belief of the Christian faith
as we do in the profession of the Creed at Mass. When baptized, we were claimed
for Christ by the sign of the cross made on our foreheads. We carry that “tattoo” everywhere we go, we
are God’s children not just in name but in fact through the waters of baptism.
One far more succinct statement of the Trinitarian God we
find in the familiar passage from the Gospel of John as Jesus met with
Nicodemus to help bring him to a deeper understanding: “God so loved the world
that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not
perish but might have eternal life.” (Jn
3:16). John tells us: God “loved” and God “sent.” Those two words to love and to send imply an
active God. A God who reaches out, who
extends himself not out of vengeance or punishment but out of love and mercy
towards those he reaches to. He communicates with us as a living being. His Son
is his Word. Like a hand stretched out
to rescue a drowning man God has extended himself out to us in love to rescue
us from our own sin.
Therefore we might say that God in his unity is a
community of persons whose very nature is to love us into life. This unity in community is the great
understanding for how we are to live and in eternity where God desires we dwell
in him. If we as Christians live as God
desires then our own lives will promote unity and not division; faithfulness
and not selfishness; love and not violence; inclusiveness and not prejudice;
forgiveness and not judgment. The
potential for human society is unlimited if we were to follow the way Christ
has shown us.
A unity in community is a model for marriage and family
life, for the diverse collection of parishioners in any parish, in our own
personal prayer to desire a deeper knowledge of God as we experience his
presence in our life.
How blessed are we in our Catholic life which promotes
community of persons united by one faith around a common word and his
altar. May that unity in community
reflect the true nature of this God who loves and reaches out to us consistently.
In the Holy Eucharist we see God
revealed to us as he gathers us as one around his altar to feed and unite us in
his mercy, kindness, graciousness and forgiveness.
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