“Created in His image, God calls us to share in His life… We praise you, Our God, Most Holy Trinity! All glory and honor be to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, for ever and ever. Amen!”
We can know certain eternal truths without the light of faith. For example, the greatest truth of all—God exists—is knowable from the light of human reason and the works of creation alone.
But there exist other truths that we cannot discover until God reveals them to us. The doctrine of God as a Trinity of Divine Persons is an example of such a Divinely Revealed truth.
The Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity is celebrated each year on the Sunday following Pentecost Sunday. The Trinity is “the central mystery of Christian faith and life” (CCC 234). It is one of the most fundamental beliefs of Catholics, yet we are not able to fully understand its meaning.
It’s a mystery!
So, does that mean we shouldn’t bother with thinking about the meaning of the Trinity? No, absolutely not!
Frank Sheed, one of the great Catholic apologists of the twentieth century, once described the word mystery this way… a mystery is not a truth about which we cannot know anything; rather a mystery is a truth about which we cannot know everything.
DO NOT BE AFRAID TO ENGAGE THIS MYSTERY
Mysteries are not puzzles to be solved, they are opportunities for us to encounter our God and experience His love and truth. So, let’s see what we can discover in this encounter with the Divine…
This mystery is important because God has called each of us into relationship with Him. He wants us to actually know Him, personally. A central element of knowing Him is to know who He is. The doctrine of the Trinity helps us know who God is.
So, those who wish to know God as He is and experience an ever-deepening relationship with Him must spend time in both prayer and study to embrace and receive this knowledge of His Triune nature. Believe me when I say it is worth the effort.
THE MYSTERY OF THE HOLY TRINITY DEFINED
Three major world religions profess belief that God is One: Judaism, Islam and Christianity. Because of this, we refer to these religions as monotheistic. In this sense, each of these three religions knows something supremely important about God – He is One. We must never lose sight of this truth. But…
Here is the first great truth of this mystery.
Christians know and profess a deeper knowledge of God’s nature—what God is—that extends to His identity—who God is.
This is the mystery of God’s inner life. Pope Benedict XVI said, God “is not infinite solitude, but a communion of light and love” (Angelus, June 11, 2006).
Here, then, is what we can say about the Blessed Trinity:
- God is one nature… that is, there is one God.
- In God there are three distinct persons—Father, Son and Holy Spirit; each is the one God, they are not three gods.
- The three persons of God each possess the one nature of God in totality (God’s nature is indivisible).
- The Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God.
- The Father is not the Son, nor the Holy Spirit. The Son is not the Father, nor the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not the Father, nor the Son.
Our natural reason might cause us to stumble here. Here are two common misconceptions.
- We might look at a family and see a mom, a dad, and a child and think that describes the Trinity. But the mom, dad, and child are three distinct humans, unlike God who is One.
- Or you might look at me and see a husband, father, and son and think that describes the Trinity. But that describes three different ways of seeing one person. God is three persons.
So, how might we describe the inner life of the Trinity?
- God, the Father, in His infinite knowledge, knows Himself perfectly. He is capable of thinking of Himself. And that divine knowledge is so life-giving that the Father’s thought generates the Person of the Son by that knowledge. Theologians call that person—that thought—the Word.
- The infinite love of God is so life-giving that from the perfect, mutual love of the Father and the Son proceeds the Holy Spirit.
So, we begin to glimpse a truth that God is a communion of persons—a divine family. God’s knowledge and love has no beginning and no end, therefore the three persons of God are co-eternal—each without beginning and without end.
THE IMAGE AND LIKENESS OF GOD
So now we come to a second important truth of this doctrine, and it relates to us.
Man and woman were created in the image and likeness of God. Although in one sense we may lose the likeness of God by sin, in another sense we never forfeit the image. Thus, in learning about God and coming to better know who He is through the doctrine of the Trinity, we learn something about ourselves.
We were not made to be solitary beings; we were made to be in community. We were created to live and love as God does.
We all know that God is love. We’ve seen that God’s knowledge and expression of that love is the very inner life of the Holy Trinity. And that teaches us something very important about us—if we are to be true to whom we were made to be, we will live and love as God does and only in doing so we will find joy and peace.
God’s love is life-giving and boundless. “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” (John 3:16).
This is the good news of Jesus Christ and the secret of life! God not only thinks of Himself, He thinks of you. And that thought created you. You exist because God first thought of and formed an image of you. God loves you perfectly and that love sustains your being and now redeems you.
Through the Redemption, He invites you to share in His inner life and become a member of His family. Can you imagine that! Take a moment and let the love of God soak down into your very soul. Share that Good News with your family and friends.
THE FAMILY AS AN IMAGE OF THE TRINITY
Created in His image, God calls us to share in His life and work. The family—father, mother and children—is to be an image of the love shared in the Holy Trinity. In this way, the covenant of marriage is an image of New Covenant mediated by Jesus Christ, the Word, from the Cross. Through unconditional love and sacrifice, man and woman, in marriage, share in God’s work of creation and redemption.
A man loves his wife without condition and expectation. He gives everything to her, holding nothing back, willing to sacrifice even his life for her. A woman loves her husband without condition and expectation, holding nothing back, giving herself fully to her husband, willing even to die for him. This mutual love, sanctified by God, is so life-giving, that from that love pour forth children whose image was first formed in the mind of God… children made for heaven!
PRAISE, GLORY, AND HONOR
We praise you, Our God, Most Holy Trinity! All glory and honor be to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, for ever and ever. Amen!
Into the Deep…
The readings at Mass for the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity (B) are: Deuteronomy 4:32-34, 39-40; | Psalms 33:4-5, 6, 9, 18-19, 20,; | Romans 8:14-17; | Matthew 28:16-20.
Image credit: “The Holy Trinity” (detail) | Antonio de Pereda, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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