The Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity
About the Holy Trinity - be silent or speak?
“Dear brothers and sisters. Today we are celebrating the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity. What can I tell you about the Trinity? Hmm ... Trinity is a mystery, a great mystery of faith. Amen". It was the shortest sermon I ever heard in my youth. The faithful in the church were surprised. Some positively, because the sermon was exceptionally short, others irritated because they had not yet managed to settle down comfortably on the pew. Then the questions came to my mind: Can we not say anything about the Holy Trinity? Why then do we confess that God is One in the Trinity? How do we know about this?
Talking about the Trinity is not easy. The expression of trinity is always difficult to understand, because according to our natural way of thinking, 3 never equals 1, and "one" does not equal "three". In the case of science about God, however, it is not about a mathematical and logical problem, but about the formulation of the truth of faith, which cannot be confined within the limits of human logic.
Christians profess faith in one God in Three Persons. For many, however, this confession is of not great importance in the life. In a world where there are many "ideas for God", we Christians should remember that we do not invent God, we only discover and get to know Him, because He Himself wanted to come to us and show Himself to us. He did so especially through the Incarnation of the Son of God. It is thanks to Him that we know that God is a Community of Three Persons who live in perfect unity with each other. “The Trinity is One. We do not confess three Gods, but one God in three persons, the "consubstantial Trinity". The divine persons do not share the one divinity among themselves but each of them is God whole and entire: The Father is that which the Son is, the Son that which the Father is, the Father and the Son that which the Holy Spirit is, i.e. by nature one God” (CCC 253). A man of faith does not invent the truth, but accepts it. He reflects on it, taking up the centuries-old experience of the Church, which has always explained it in the light of Revelation.
Why the truth about the Trinity was not revealed in the Old Testament? Because these are the customs of the Lord God - this question is answered by the great theologian from the fourth century, St. Gregory of Nazianzus –“first He gives us and only then we begin to understand His gifts”. According to this logic, the Eternal Father gave us his Son first, and then - fifty days after his resurrection - the Holy Spirit. Only then, already endowed, we, as a Church, begin to understand what all this means: that he who came to us from the Father is true God and he is one with the Father; that the Holy Spirit, equal to them in Divinity, whose temple are all who live in God's grace, is the personal Love of the Father and the Son. The truth has not yet been revealed in the Old Testament, because then neither the Holy Spirit has yet been given to us, nor even the Son of God was yet one of us and has not completed His saving work. At the same time, it is the true God - the one who is Father and Son and Holy Spirit - who prepared for us all that we were to be blessed with in Jesus Christ, and that is why we do not find so many glimpses of the Trinitarian truth in the Old Testament.
In the New Testament, biblical descriptions of the revelation of the Holy Trinity (Trinitarian theophany) can be found, among others at the event of Jesus' baptism in Jordan (Mt 3: 13-17) and during his transfiguration on Mount Tabor (Mt 17: 1-8). These texts emphasize the divinity of Christ who is in union with the Father and the Holy Spirit. Other texts emphasize the divinity of the Holy Spirit, who is closely related to the Father and the Son (Jn 15:26; 1 Cor 2:10).
But, can limited human knowledge speak of the unlimited mystery of the Trinity at all? St. Cyril of Jerusalem (4th century) gave us the answer: “Although I cannot drink the entire river, am I not allowed to draw as much water as I need? Although I am not able to eat all the fruit from the garden, do I have to go hungry? Can I not gaze at the sun because my eyes will not be able to embrace it completely? ”
Many Christians believe that the truth about Trinity should be kept silent rather than spoken of, because human language is simply inadequate to say something meaningful about such an amazing mystery. In this way they suggest that God is a great question mark, an incomprehensible mystery, that is, something that cannot be understood. St. Augustine never defined a mystery as something that cannot be understood, but as something that a man will never come to fully understand, and that is entirely different matter. God introduces us to his mystery. If we are to become like Him, then we must get to know Him. Although the Holy Trinity is beyond our understanding, it does not mean that we should be silent. In the Church's Tradition we find many texts which, by analogy, bring us closer to the truth about the Holy Trinity. St. Athanasius, in the fourth century, wrote: “The Father is light, sun, fire; The Son is the radiance, the glow of the fire; The Holy Spirit is enlightenment. The Son is in the Father, like radiance in the light, where is radiance, there is light”. In this way, he expressed the unity of essence and, at the same time, the independence of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. St. Augustine saw an analogy in the structure of human spiritual life to express the triune nature of God: Spirit - Self-knowledge - Love. The image of the Trinity is also a tree: the root shows God the Father, the trunk shows the Son coming from the Father, and the flowers and fruits show the Holy Spirit. In Christian iconography, numerous symbols and images were used to present the mystery of God in Three Persons. We also know the pictures in which God the Father is presented in the form of an old man with gray hair, the Son of God as a younger man with dark hair, and the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove.
Such representations, if taken as a source of knowing of the essence of God, can lead to a deformation of the truths of faith without theological explanation. We must be aware that such images are far from expressing all the riches of the truth about God. "Ultimately, only God himself can let us know him as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" (CCC 261).
Finally, let us ask: What does this mean for us? Huge, because a Christian's life is realized in the sign and presence of the Trinity. At the beginning of our lives, we received the sacrament of baptism. "In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit," and at the end of our lives, prayers will be said in the name of the Holy Trinity. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; the same way the spouses are united in marriage and the priests are ordained. We begin and end the day in the name of the Holy Trinity. The Trinity, then, is the "port" where everything flows and the "ocean" from which everything flows out, where everything goes.
St. Augustine at the beginning of the 5th century wrote in his monumental work "On the Holy Trinity", and Benedict XVI at the beginning of the 21st century recalled in the encyclical "Deus caritas est" that faith, sustained and animated by love, opens access to the contemplation of the Holy Trinity: "If you see love, you see the Trinity”. The Persons of the Trinity are in themselves love relations, this is Community. God is a Community of Love, and man was created as the image of God in order to reveal this image more and more clearly in himself. We are therefore called to become who God is: a Community of Love, to participate in the perfect communion of the Triune God in eternity.
Until Tomorrow
fr. george