THE MOST HOLY TRINITY C

[cappie]

We celebrate two of the most significant feasts in the Church’s year over the next week: Trinity Sunday; followed by Corpus Christi on Thursday. It is no mistake or coincidence that they follow on so closely from each other.

On Trinity Sunday we celebrate the fact that God has revealed himself to us as a divine community of persons, one in substance, splendour, and purpose. The feast of the Trinity is not just a statement of credal faith, however. It is also a celebration of the ways in which we ourselves participate in God’s divine life. We are made one with Christ as a part of his Body in Baptism.    

The word Community comes from the Latin “communitas,” commonly referring to an unstructured community in which people are equal. An understanding of community then is an unstructured group in which the people, or in the case of the Trinity, the personae, are equal. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, then, can be seen as such a family or community in which the essence of the community is that the three are equal.

Those third- and fourth-century Christians  referred to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as personae, as in a Greek play in which a single actor assumes the persona of two, or three, or more characters simply by changing masks. Those hammering out the creeds adopted as a metaphor the language of the theatre. 

So here, in our creeds and our theology, the single actor (God) is capable and has been perceived, and experienced in history, as having three basic, somewhat distinct personae or characteristics: that of a nurturing Father; a Son who lives and acts among us as a representative of the essence of the Father; the Holy Spirit which sustains the actions of the Son as an ongoing essence of who we are, both as individuals and as a community of the Father and the Son.

St Paul, in his letter to the church in Rome, recognizes this when writing that the peace,  in Christ, we become a community of God’s love in all that we say and all that we do. In this sense, what we call Trinity is the work of Christ and the Holy Spirit infusing those of us who dare to call ourselves Christian with the Love of God. At the same time, these personae of God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – are, in a sense, a communitas, or family of three.

    For us, the revelation of God is a person – Jesus Christ, a person whose every story and teaching gives us some deep truth about the life, love, and will of our God. Jesus reflects the very truth of creation – creation that is not static but ever unfolding with newness and more diversity. Things yet unseen come into being. And if we let ourselves enter into the diversity of God’s Triune Being, we learn that we are ever-changing, just as the whole universe constantly coming into being. 

Paul tries to sum this up when he writes, “We have... the love of God   poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Romans 5:1-5). This gift of the very Spirit of God’s love constantly transforms us into a community that reflects God’s love.

This year,  I had a little better insight to the Trinity by reading "Quest for the Living God." by Sister Elizabeth Johnson, CSJ, Distinguished Professor Emerita at Fordham University. Sr Elizabeth Johnson offers the most down-to-earth explanation of the Trinity I’ve ever encountered.

And I selected those words “down-to-earth” specifically. Most of the language that I’ve ever heard about the Trinity is always abstract, philosophical, other-worldly. Johnson, however, critiques those kind of images and ideas in favour of  describing the importance of the Trinity image because of its engagement with the world, not  its separateness from it. The point is   to describe how much and how powerfully God wants and acts to save us. 

Johnson rounds out her study of the Trinity by calling on the church to mirror the salvific dimension of the triune model, as well as its equality:

“Called to be a sacrament of the world’s salvation, the church is to be a living symbol of divine communion turned toward the world in inclusive and compassionate love. Only a community of equal persons related in profound mutuality, pouring out praise of God and care for the world in need, only such a church corresponds to the triune God it purports to serve.”

Today’s second reading from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans offers a wonderful passage for meditation.

“But that is not all we can boast about; we can boast about our sufferings. These sufferings bring patience, as we know, and patience brings perseverance, and perseverance brings hope, and this hope is not deceptive, because the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given us.”

We remember afflictions from the past, but we know that what those afflictions produced was not disaster, but endurance. And endurance has helped to build character. If hope is in the salvific action of a triune God, who is beyond us, with us, within us,  it will certainly not disappoint.

To me, that’s an even better idea to celebrate , like the Trinity, ever-changing, yet the same, as a community of love. Forever and ever. Amen.