The Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity
Fr Dominic’s Homily
Over the past few weeks we have been celebrating everything that God has done for us. How he died for us and rose again on the third day. But today we celebrate simply who God is. Today we celebrate God in a different way.
Today we celebrate God as being the Trinity: God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And this is actually the most important mystery of our Catholic Faith.
You might say that surely the incarnation – God becoming Man – is the most important mystery of our faith. Or the Holy Eucharist is the most important. But the trinity actually gives rise to all these other mysteries of our faith.
Now all of us try to make sense of God in our various different ways. We have to in order to try and understand who and what he is. We try and put him into a box of our own understanding.
But this is difficult because from our human understanding God is quite a paradox:
He is both hidden and revealed at the same time.
He is three persons but one God at the same time.
And he has existed for all eternity and always will.
These mysteries are impossible for our brains to fully grasp. So we can never really describe him. But the Trinity isn’t a problem to be solved but a mystery to be loved!
When we think about ourselves we might ask the question: what are we? Well the answer to that would be: human beings. But then if we ask: who are we? I would answer Fr Dominic.
Now with God if we were to ask what is he? The answer would be a divine being. And then if we ask who is he? The answer would be Father, Son and Holy Spirit. So God is in himself a family.
So you could say that he is one “what” and three “who’s!” in other words one being and three persons.
When we sign ourselves at the beginning of Mass notice that we say in the Name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Not in the names of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. One God, Three persons.
Over the ages people have used many images to try and explain the Blessed Trinity and how there could be Three Divine Presences but only One God but none of them have really succeeded. The shamrock of St Patrick was basic but ok. The medieval image of the egg – shell (Jesus – the part you can see), white (Holy Spirit – goes between the Father and Son) and the inner yolk (God the Father).
A more modern day analogy is:
Ice
Water
Steam
All the same water – but in different forms. Also H2O! A kind of trinity (parishioner)
Ultimately, however, no language is really adequate when speaking about God. God is ineffable which means that God is beyond any image or description that we can give him. (Doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t swear about him!)
Out of the three faiths that arise from Abraham – it’s only Christianity that believes in a trinity.
We might think of God the Father simply as the creator of everything. And that is true and we say this in the creed together a little later on.
But that simply describes what he does for us in this world. It doesn’t address who he really is.
Jesus the son of God is the second person of the trinity. That doesn’t mean that he is younger than the Father. It’s just that at a certain point in human time Jesus was born into the world and so acquired a human nature.
Then we have the Holy Spirit who is often referred to as the will or intention of God. We can think of him as the love that exists between the Father and the Son.
In a little while we will be offering Jesus, as the son, to God the Father, through the Holy Spirit, when the bread is consecrated and truly becomes the body of Christ.
Let us make sure that we have hearts that are truly ready to participate in this mystery. And may we grow in the love of God not just because of what he has done for us in our lives, but for the great mystery of who he actually is.