Sunday, 15th June
The Most Holy Trinity – Solemnity
Proverbs 8:22-31
Romans 5:1-5
John 16:12-15
There are doctrines of faith that no human being could ever come up with just by thinking. The doctrine of the Trinity is one of them. It is revealed by God. Of course, you can analyse it with your intellect and try to understand it ever more deeply. Many philosophers and theologians have done this since the days of antiquity. But it is not possible to prove in a purely rational way that God is truly triune. We had to hear it from God himself. We heard it through our Lord Jesus Christ, who himself is the eternal Word of the Father, and through the Holy Spirit. Today we hear it through the Church, which faithfully passes on the word of Jesus and which is filled with the Holy Spirit.
So our faith tells us: God is triune. One God in three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We thus know something about the innermost nature of God.
But what does this knowledge teach us? Has this revelation simply been given to us to satisfy our curiosity? Does the doctrine of the Trinity have any relevance for us?
The Unitarian sect rejects the doctrine of the Trinity. They simply pray to one God. Muslims do the same. For many people, this seems much more obvious and simpler. God is God. Full stop. You don’t need three persons.
It is not always easy for us Christians to explain how three different persons can still be one God. Some even believe that this is logically impossible. There has been an ongoing philosophical discussion about this since ancient times. The term ‘person’, which is so ubiquitous today, was first coined in the course of this discussion. But not all critics could be convinced that the logical problem can be solved.
The doctrine of the Trinity therefore seems quite uncomfortable. It separates us from other people who also believe in one God. We have to explain a lot. And perhaps we get tangled up in our attempts to explain and end up saying something that doesn’t correspond to our faith at all. For example, that we worship three different gods. Or that Father, Son and Spirit are just different manifestations of one and the same divine person. If we end up with these statements, then something has gone wrong with our attempt of explanation.
If the doctrine of the Trinity had only been revealed to satisfy our curiosity, then God would not have done us much good. He would have made everything unnecessarily complicated for us.
But that’s not how it is. Everything that God reveals is relevant for our salvation. Even the doctrine of the Trinity. Even more, it is the prerequisite for our salvation to be possible at all. It is at the centre of the Christian faith.
If we had to reduce the faith to a single sentence, we could choose this sentence to summarise it: God is love. This is what we read in the first letter of St. John.
Love in its full form is only possible between two persons who meet as equals. ‘Love consists in communication from both sides,’ writes St Ignatius. In order for God to love, he needs someone to love him back. And one that loves back on an equal level. It is not enough for God to create the world and then love this created world. That would be like a human sculptor producing a statue and then saying that he not only admires this statue, but loves it in the full sense of the word. That seems strange to us. If not somehow perverse.
In order for the one God to be love, a second person of the same divine nature is needed. God cannot be just one person. A second person of the same divine nature must originate from him. We call the two persons Father and Son, just as Jesus taught us. These two persons are intimately connected. They share everything with each other. The Father has given everything he has to the Son, as we heard Jesus say in today’s Gospel.
The bond that unites Father and Son is their mutual love. And this love is in turn God himself. For God is love. But it is also different from the Father and the Son. It is itself an independent divine person: the Holy Spirit.
Everything that the Spirit will say to us is taken from the Father and the Son. ‘He will not be speaking as from himself.’ This is how Jesus explained it to us. The Spirit has everything he has from the Father and the Son.
Our salvation consists in the fact that God loves us. And not in the way a sculptor admires the statue he has made, but with real, true love. With the same love with which God the Father loves his Son. This love between Father and Son is the Holy Spirit. And we have received this love. ‘The love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given us.’ This is what we heard in the reading from the Letter to the Romans.
Only a triune God can truly be love. And it is only this true, divine love that brings us salvation, redemption and eternal life. With our baptism, we were actually received into this true, divine love. It is the Holy Spirit who has been poured into our hearts.
Amen.
