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The Catholic Telegraph
June 8, 2001We have come to the end of the Easter season in which we recalled the events of Christ’s suffering, death, and resurrection. Last Sunday we celebrated the events of the first Christian Pentecost: the manifestation of the Holy Spirit and the Spirit’s sending the apostles forth to preach the gospel to the world. Now the Church’s calendar returns to Ordinary Time, a long series of weeks that serve to celebrate the ongoing unfolding of God’s plan of salvation. But before we enter fully into Ordinary Time, the Church gives us two special Sundays, Sundays on which we reflect on and celebrate not events but two central realities that lie at the heart of Christian life: the Holy Trinity (this Sunday) and the Holy Eucharist (next Sunday).
Most Catholics know that in God there is one nature, but three distinct divine Persons. We know that the Trinity is a mystery, something we can’t really understand but that is somehow involved with our salvation. We are aware that the Holy Trinity is an important doctrine of our faith, but we don’t really pay all that much attention to it. That may be one reason why the Church gives us a special liturgical celebration in honor of the Trinity each year!
Scripture tells us about the Holy Trinity, but in an indirect and allusive fashion, not in a set of technically exact propositions but in contexts of God’s reaching out to care for us. Today’s live letter is an example of Scripture teaching us about the Trinity as it explains to us some of the elements of God’s saving action in our lives.
Paul has been telling the Romans about how they are saved or redeemed by faith in Christ rather than by the exact observance of Jewish law. In our passage he begins to draw some conclusions.
Because we are "justified by faith," we are at peace with God. This relationship comes to us through Christ (the Son of God). God’s generosity comes to us through Him, and puts us in a position in which we take joy in the fact that we can look forward with confidence to sharing in nothing less than the glory of God.
But there’s more. We relate to the Father through Christ, but the Holy Spirit is involved as well. The Spirit has poured out the love of God in our hearts. This love enables us to face up to and even take joy in our afflictions. Our confident confrontation of our trials leads to a firmness of character that brings us to unshakeable hope.
In this passage, Paul tells us that, thanks to the intervention of Son and Holy Spirit, faith leads to hope through the love of the Father for us and through our relationship with the Father. Christ’s saving action of the past brings us into a present from which we can look forward courageously to a glorious future. The Spirit gives us the strength to move forward to that future. Our salvation is a complex affair. It involves past, present, and future; faith, hope, love; Father, Son, and Spirit.
Paul does not speak this way to his readers in order to give them technical theological information about the nature of God, about the Persons of the Trinity, about the Persons’ relationships with one another. Later Church teachers would concern themselves with questions like that. Paul’s teaching is rooted in his desire to make his readers aware of the depth and complexity of God’s involvement in their lives, of the many-sidedness of the care that God expends on them. His purpose is not to communicate knowledge of the Trinity but to elicit appreciation of the love for us expressed by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
One of the things that we Catholic Christian believers have to remind ourselves of with some regularity is that our relationship with God is deeper and richer and more intricate than we tend to think. We want simple answers to simple questions. Am I going to go to heaven or not? Does God love me and care for me?
Of course there are simple answers to questions like that. God does love me and care for me and I will get to heaven if I stay close to Him. But there is more to what God is and does than simple answers - more depth, more richness, more complexity. It is not that God enjoys making things difficult for us to understand, but that God’s giving reflects His being in ways that exceed our human expectations, our human ways of understanding.
Faith, hope, love; past, present, future; Father, Son, Holy Spirit; our participation in the interpersonal reality of God; our sharing in the happiness and glory of the timeless Trinity: all of that is part of the answer to the questions we ask about ourselves and about our future. What God offers us is nothing less than the communication of Himself and if we are not aware of the infinite mystery and richness and glory of God, we will necessarily undervalue that gift. We need to encounter the Holy Trinity in order to maintain some degree of awareness of how deeply and how elaborately God loves us.
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Conversation Questions
Do I find God’s relationship with me simple or complex?
How do I experience the Trinity in my life?
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