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The Catholic Telegraph
June 16, 2000Before the Lectionary brings us back to its semi-continuous readings of the New Testament’s live letters in the readings for the Sundays in Ordinary Time, we have two "special interest" Sundays: the feast of the Holy Trinity and (next Sunday) the feast of the Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi). These are liturgical observances of two matters of fundamental doctrinal importance that would never be highlighted if the reading cycle confined itself exclusively to events in the life of Christ or the Church.
The Trinity is the center of everything in our Catholic Christian faith. It is the source of creation and redemption, the goal toward which our existence is directed. It gives sense and meaning to all that is and constitutes the final happiness toward which we struggle.
Yet the Trinity as such was not a major item in the teaching of Jesus. Although He spoke often of the Father and of the Spirit (the Paraclete) He never sat His followers down and said, "Now I’m going to tell you about the triune God, one divine nature in three Persons." He preferred to have them experience the Persons of the Trinity through their relationship with Him.
It was the same with the Church. From the very beginning, the Church’s teachers spoke quite familiarly about Father, Son, and Spirit, but it took three or four hundred years of hard intellectual struggle for the Church to be able to set down in clear propositional form the theological truths that Jesus and His first followers proclaimed and that are found implicitly in the writings of the New Testament. God’s providence seems to have called for us to know the Trinity before being able to know about It.
The second reading for Trinity Sunday in year B is from Paul’s letter to the Romans. He has been talking about the tensions between flesh and spirit in our human existence. Then he tells the Romans that they live in the spirit if the Spirit of God dwells in them. The indwelling of God’s Spirit gives them a new life.
This is where our reading begins. It’s not just a new kind of life that we receive from the Spirit, Paul says, but a whole new relationship with God, a relationship of filiation, of being sons and daughters of God. This new life is not a matter of different rules to follow in order to please God, but of being related to God in such a way that we can call God "Abba, Father, Dad." (Jesus seems to have used the word Abba as His own special term for addressing His Father, a term that now becomes appropriate for us to use thanks to our life in Christ.) But there’s more. If we are children of God, as the Spirit assures us, then we are also heirs just as Christ is God’s heir. (Note that heir in this context does not signify somebody who comes into property when somebody else dies, but somebody who belongs to the household and has a right to share in the family’s life even now. Being heirs with Christ means that we belong to the life of God just as Christ does.) This relationship may call for our suffering as Christ suffered, not in order for us to earn our participation in God’s life but to demonstrate that we really belong.
This reading from Romans teaches us about the Holy Trinity by teaching us how God relates to us. The Spirit that unites Father and Son also unites us with Christ, the Son (by making us co-heirs with Him), and so makes us children of the Father, family members of God, as it were. We are participants in the community that is constituted by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
There are lots of questions that arise as Paul teaches the Romans about the meaning of their experience as Christian believers. Is the Son as truly God as the Father is? Is the Holy Spirit God, too? Is the relationship between Son and Father the same as the relationship between Holy Spirit and Father? How do Son and Holy Spirit relate to each other? What words can we appropriately use to signify what Father, Son, and Holy Spirit share in common? How can we express their differences from each other? What is the nature of these differences? Are undertakings outside of God (like creation and redemption) particular to Father, Son, or Spirit or are they the work of all three together? There are lots of aspects of the Trinity to offer employment to those who engage in theological speculation. St. Augustine was one such, and his book on the Trinity (which came before many of the final words on the Trinity were said by the Church) runs to 471 pages!
Precise theological terminology and clear teaching about the Trinity are important. But more important is the awareness on the part of God’s people that God is community, energy, love, knowledge, gift, power, self-expression, completeness - and that we have been called and enabled to share the life of God.
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Conversation Questions
Is the Holy Trinity at the center of my faith life or on the periphery?
To which Person of the Trinity do I relate most familiarly? Why?
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