A Homily for the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity
Readings: Proverbs 8:22-31 Romans 5:1-5 John 16:12-15
I have made some theological errors over the years. Here are two of my earliest.
Before I started parochial school, I thought that God was the blue-starred, triangular pattern in the center ceiling of our church’s sanctuary. Why? Because that is where the priest looked when he prayed at Mass.
And in fifth grade, I began to worry that I was destined for perdition. So I decided to recite the Rosary each day. This was my first foray into a life of devotion, and I wanted to do it right. I remember kneeling at my bedroom window. I gave God the kneeling but took the concession of the window. I needed something to look at while I prayed.
Knowing no better, I decided that on Sundays, my Rosaries would be addressed to God the Father, God the Son on Mondays and God the Holy Spirit on Tuesdays. I then repeated the cycle.
Of course, there are seven days in a week. What to do with that extra day? If I favored one member of the Trinity, what would that do to my relationship with the other two? I was just getting started with a devotional life, and I did not want to begin by creating celestial grudges.
Then I hit upon it! I would give Saturdays to the Blessed Virgin Mary. After all, it was her Rosary, and how could any of the three divine gentlemen—for that is how I thought of them—resent this small acknowledgment?
I had correctly established Our Lady’s status as a creature. No one could accuse me of Mariolatry. However, I had turned the Christian doctrine of the Trinity into polytheism, treating each member of the Trinity as though he were a distinct deity. But the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are not a celestial committee, one made up of three gods, each of whom votes as he sees fit.
On discovering my mistake, I should not have felt too bad. It took the early church several centuries to work out the conundrum that Christ left to us: If Jesus addressed some heavenly person as Father, and he also spoke of another divine person who would come to us in his stead, how could there be only one God?
There were a lot of failed attempts to solve this problem. By way of the briefest summary, here are two poles in the spectrum of wrong answers given in the early church, though neither makes my mistake of positing three distinct gods.
1) Modalism: There is only one God, who came to us in three different but essentially only temporary ways. Once you consider the eternal God in himself, there is no distinction between Father, Son and Spirit.
2) Subordinationism: Only the Father is truly God. The Son and Spirit must be half-gods, something like Marvel superheroes.
In 325 A.D., Emperor Constantine summoned the world’s bishops to Nicaea, a suburb of the great city of Constantinople, the eastern capital of the Roman Empire. There they began the process of setting these errors straight. It would take more time and more councils to produce what we call the Nicene Creed. And now, 1,700 years after that council in Nicaea, each Sunday we confess that Christ is:
the Only Begotten Son of God,
born of the Father before all ages.
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father;
through him all things were made.
Likewise the Holy Spirit is:
the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son,
who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified,
who has spoken through the prophets.
Besides my fifth-grade tritheism, the Nicene Creed rejects both modalism and subordinationism—modalism because God does not simply engage us in three distinct ways, all the while remaining one in himself; subordinationism because there are no degrees of divinity within God. Christ and the Holy Spirit are no less God than the Father.
But one might ask, what difference does it make, at least until we encounter God as he is in himself? Why worry about a Trinity we cannot see?
Here is at least one answer. Our faith, our experience of Jesus Christ, tells us that the most fundamental reality, even more fundamental than the universe itself, is love, an inner, divine love.
Before the material universe came into existence, God existed as Father, Son and Spirit: a Father who eternally—meaning that he never does not do this—goes out of himself in love toward the Son; a Son whose entire existence is a return of this love to the Father; and a Holy Spirit who comes forth from the Father through his love for the Son.
We love God, God loves us, and God commands us to love each other. But before any of this came to be, God already existed as love: the love of Father, Son and Spirit.
By way of illustration, here is another scene from my childhood, the first and only time I saw my parents kiss. We are hardened Volga Germans who made their way to the United States by way of Russia. We are neither overly nor overtly affectionate.
Here is how it happened. My father had just gotten a serious raise in salary. I came around the corner and found my mother sitting on his lap, kissing him. I knew vaguely that parents did this sort of thing, but the sight brought home the fact that, however devoted they were as parents, their entire existence did not consist in their parenting me and my siblings. They loved each other. They had done this before we came, and they would still do so once we had grown and moved away. Their love for their children came out of, was nestled into, their love for each other.
The scientific method, with its microscopes and telescopes, is an inner-worldly process, which is why it cannot answer the questions: Where did the world come from? And why? Why is there something rather than nothing?
But the doctrine of the Trinity tells us that love is the most fundamental reality of the universe, that in the beginning was love.
Only life itself teaches this fundamental truth. In giving and receiving love, we encounter a love greater than we are, greater than our world. Love is the world’s alpha and its omega. This is what we confess in the Nicene Creed, and that confession is one way of giving ourselves over to God, our way of entering an eternal, circling dance of love.
