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Most Holy Trinity Sunday (Year A)

Pope John XXII (1316-1334) ordered that the entire church celebrate the feast for the Holy Trinity on the Sunday after Pentecost Sunday, and Pope St. Pius X raised the event to the dignity of a solemnity in the beginning of the Twentieth Century.

On this great solemnity, we focus upon and jubilantly celebrate the central truth of our shared faith: that God, in and of himself, from all of eternity, is not a solitude, but a divine family of persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If we were to imagine revealed truth in the image of a spider web, the Trinity is at the very center.

Lest we be misunderstood, we believe in only one God. Yet, this one God is dynamic. This one God is a Trinity: an eternal life composed of three persons sharing this divine life. With feeble intellects, it’s extremely difficult to imagine three persons sharing one nature… a nature that is invisible, spiritual, and uncreated. Yet, it’s difficult to imagine how our bodies are composed of trillions of atoms – electrons spinning around nuclei. We know the latter by means of science. The former is known by divine revelation.

Before God created, before God redeemed, & before God sanctified, God was not Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. These terms describe God’s relation to creation, but not who God is in and of himself. Before, during and after these events, God is eternally Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Hence, we pray: “Glory be to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning is now and will be forever. Amen!” In this prayer, we echo the praise of Shadrach, Meshach, & Abednego in today’s psalm (cf. Dn 52-56).

God the Father eternally begets God the Son. Today, the Son is begotten, and tomorrow, the Son will be begotten. This “sonship” is outside of time and is fiercely real. This begetting is not physical, and there is no sexuality within God. To think that God is a male because we call him “Father” is just as much of a heresy as to think that God is female.

The Father eternally loves the Son, giving him all but his fatherhood. Likewise, for all eternity, the Son returns this act of divine love by mirroring the Father. He offers himself in a complete self-gift of love back to the Father. This love is so intense, so real, that it isn’t simply an impersonal force, but a person equal to the Father and to the Son: the Holy Spirit. This divine life is mirrored in Holy Matrimony wherein the love of two is so real that 9 months later, we give it a name.

In the Incarnation, the Son took on our humanity so that we may become children of God – sons in the Son as St. Thomas Aquinas put it. In baptism, we are born into the supernatural family of the Holy Trinity!