The Most Holy Trinity - Year C - Three and One, Three but One! & “Holy Holy Holy”
When you go to Mass on Trinity Sunday, there’s a very good chance that you will hear the word “mystery.” What does that word “mystery” mean? When we’re talking about a mystery of faith, it doesn’t mean a detective story. A mystery of faith is something we can always understand more deeply, something we can never reach the end of, something that never gets old. No matter how many times you see the sunset across the ocean, the beauty of it is always new, the colors always a little different each time.
Trinity Sunday is a celebration of the mystery of God. To be more precise, it’s a celebration of the fact that God has given us a starting point to discover Him, to know Him, and to be united with Him. God is so different than anything we know; without His help, we could say almost nothing about Him. God is not a very big thing. He’s not like a gas that gets into the nooks and crannies of everything. He’s not nature and the universe. We know he’s the Creator of the universe because the universe exists, but nothing in the universe is capable of creating the universe.
At this point, you may be scratching your head. If we didn’t have help understanding God, then when we talked about Him, that’s all we would be able to do—scratch our heads. But God has given us a way to understand the mystery, even to start to move from our way of being into His way of being. The Gospel tells us how: “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.” So when we say the word “God,” we mean “Father” and “Son.”
Note that John describes the Father as giving. What does a Father give? Today we might talk about a father passing on or giving his chromosomes to a son. Sometimes we express the idea with the phrase, “He’s a chip off the old block.” What a phrase like that hints at is that, before anything else, what a father gives to his son is his own self. When we talk about God in the Creed, we say that the Father gives the Son his own substance, that they are “consubstantial.”
When we say “Father and Son,” then, those words mean that there is a relationship, a relationship of self-giving. And what’s another word for a relationship of self-giving? Love. So when we say God, we also mean a Spirit of love. When we say God we mean Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The life of God’s only Son, Jesus, makes God–the Creator of the universe–visible to us. Because Jesus comes from the Father, when we see him, we know who the Father is. When we perceive the love proceeding from the Father and the Son, we know the Holy Spirit. The mystery of the Trinity is infinite—we can always go deeper. So just remember what we are celebrating: we have a way of talking about God that he himself has revealed to us. He is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and this mystery gives us a beginning for understanding and entering into a love and a life that is undivided, infinite, and eternal.
Holy, Holy, Holy! | Video can be watched by clicking here.
