Trinity Sunday, A June 7, 2020
Fr. Albert St. John the Evangelist, Jeanerette
Video of the 8am Mass: https://youtu.be/c6QNZhfHWvw
If you think you understand the Trinity, you’re wrong. If you don’t believe in the Trinity, you’re wrong. Perhaps more than anything else, this mystery of the faith is the most humbling because we are forced into the position of firmly believing what we cannot possibly understand while we are also expected to try to understand. In other words, we have to try to do something even though we know we’re going to fail.
“Faith seeking understanding.” That is the catchphrase of an ancient teacher and bishop in the Church named St. Anselm. He spent a great deal of time writing and thinking about the faith that we all share and came up with a number of beautiful paradoxes, one of which is this: I do not understand in order to believe, but I believe in order to understand. While most people in fact do believe things they don’t understand – think of many complicated scientific theories for example – they tend not to accept that standard when it comes to religion.
Part of that is hypocrisy and sinfulness, no doubt. But part of it is that, for scientific and other complex ideas, it is at least possible for a human being to understand it. When it comes to the Catholic faith however, we unashamedly ask people to believe what they can never understand even as we tell them to try.
And this Sunday when we celebrate the Trinity, it’s worthwhile to look more closely at this mystery, at what is so difficult to understand. In essence, we can simply say One God and Three Divine Persons and be absolutely correct. But do we really consider what that means?
When I say, “human being,” what do you think of? A rational animal, a creature with intelligence and free will. Something that has a body and soul. Really, it’s kind of hard to talk about human beings without thinking of people, persons. And when I say, “person,” what do you think of? A human being with their own mind, their own free will, their own body and soul. A human being with a name, a personality, and an eternal destiny. For us, three human beings are three persons with three different minds, three different free wills, three different bodies and souls.
It’s inconceivable for one human being to be two persons because we automatically think of intelligence and free will when we think of a person. Even if you were to consider someone with a split personality, you are in some sense thinking of two different minds and free wills. For human beings, each person has their own thoughts and feelings and desires. Not for God.
When I say God, I mean the eternal, infinite, all-powerful creator of the universe with a divine intelligence and will. Now, when I talk about a “person” of the Trinity, I am talking about an eternal, infinite, all-powerful creator with a divine intelligence and will. The weird part is that each person has the same intelligence and the same will and the same power. It’s not three people who agree with each other, it’s three persons have literally the exact same mind and will. There is no power of one that is not always and everywhere the exact same power of the other two. The Father did not create without Son and Holy Spirit because all three only have the one divine power to create.
Yet, we have to accept that there is some kind of real distinction between these three persons who always and everywhere have the exact same thoughts, choices, and powers. It doesn’t make sense. Honestly, it’s not supposed to and talking about it should always be a little confusing. That’s because, as I used to tell my 7th grade students, God is bigger than your brain. If it were possible for us to actually understand God completely, then he wouldn’t be much of a God, would he? In fact, God once sent an angel to St. Augustine to make that very point. As Augustine was walking along the beach trying to understand the Trinity, he saw a little boy scooping up water from the sea and pouring it into a little hole he had made in the sand. When Augustine asked why he was doing that, the boy replied, “I am trying to put the sea into this hole,” to which he replied, “that’s impossible, it will never fit.” Then the child, who was really an angel in disguise said, “it would be easier and quicker to draw all the water out of the sea and fit it into this hole than for you to fit the mystery of the Trinity and His Divinity into your little intellect; for the Mystery of the Trinity is greater and larger in comparison with your intelligence than is this vast ocean in comparison with this little hole.” Then the child vanished.
So, what’s the point then? Why bother to wrestle with the impossible? Because it is humbling and uplifting all at once. Augustine’s time contemplating the mystery was not wasted because it allowed him to have this encounter, which drove home just how amazing God truly is. This produces awe and humility, and there’s never too much of those.
And consider that this God, who is so far beyond us, actually took the time to reveal this impossible mystery to us. The more we realize the difference and distance between us and God, the more is should amaze us that he even cares, much less that he took on a human nature just to teach us this and suffer for us and die for us!
If we ask why God created the universe, the answer is because God is a Trinity. Why did God make human beings in his image? Because he is a Trinity. Why did God send his Son to redeem us? Because he is a Trinity. This, then, is the real reason we bother to contemplate the mystery of the Trinity, because what we can understand is that God is love because he is a Trinity and he is a Trinity because he is love.
The Trinity is the central mystery of the faith. Not Christmas, not Easter, not Pentecost. Those are about what God did. When we ask why God became man, died, rose from the dead, and sent us the Holy Spirit, there is only one answer: because that’s who God is. Love. Love requires an exchange and God, as a Trinity, is an eternal exchange of love between Father and Son which is so real that it is the Holy Spirit itself. How does this work when they all share the same nature, mind, and will? I’m not sure, but I still like to ponder it because it amazes me that something, someone so beyond me is so eager not only to make me and save me, but to reveal this inner life to me. And the best part? It’s that God wants nothing more than for us to join him in this ineffable, eternal exchange of love, to share in the inner life of the Trinity whose nature we can’t even comprehend.
We cannot try to understand so that we can believe. We must instead trust the one who has told us, so we believe in order to understand. And though we cannot comprehend the mystery, we can understand this much: God is love and because he is love, he wants us to know him, to love him, and to rejoice in that love with him forever.