Remembering, Understanding and Loving: The Feast of the Most Holy Trinity

 

The Feast of the Most Holy Trinity

Readings for the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity

The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity. We can’t understand completely the Trinity, but stretching to comprehend Divine Revelation is be part of salvation. Understanding the Trinity ultimately challenges our self-understanding as we are made in God’s image and likeness. Last week, I discussed St. Augustine’s analogy of the Trinity as Lover, Beloved and Love. St. Augustine himself thought that analogy was somewhat short of a meaningful understanding of the mystery. He proposed another analogy that has become famous.
 
St. Augustine reasoned that if each of us is formed in the image of God, then the Trinity should be present in our conscious way of being. What he proposed was an analogy that compared the Trinity to our interior, conscious life: in our memory, understanding, and will. The analogy works like this: When we speak, we first remember the words, we understand their meaning, and we actively verbalize those words. We can’t speak without remembering, understanding and pronouncing the message. These actions are distinct but form the whole of human conscious interaction with others. St. Augustine proposes that the Father (memory), the Son (understanding), and the Holy Spirit (will to love) are like remembering, understanding and loving. Like the Trinity, these three human activities have an internal order and are shared in the act of communicating. We take our remarkable human capacity for communication for granted, but it is, in an analogous sense, the image of God in each of us.
 
In St. Augustine’s prayer his theology of the Trinity, the person and the life well-lived find their expression. He doesn’t dissect God but tries to understand God as the experience of life and love made present in faith, hope and charity The Trinity is not like physics or chemistry.
 
God has the Divine Nature and is personal. “Nature” answers the question what something is. Person answers the question who someone is. Physical science can address the material “whatness” of something, if it is indeed material. Person is something more than just whatness.” Our lives as Christians begin when we are baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. When we enter Church and dip our fingers into the holy water, making the sign of the cross, we remember the Trinity. Our faith is about Easter and the Resurrection, that is true. But it is life in the Trinity that we are being saved for. That is the abundant life to which the Lord directs our ultimate attention.
 
The Image of the Trinity in the Old Testament
All of Easter I have talked about typology, how the New Testament is hidden in the Old Testament. The first story for the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity recounts how Moses went up the mountain in Sinai to replace the tablets of the law that he had destroyed in his anger at the worship of idols led by his brother Aaron.

So, Moses cut two tables of stone like the first; and he rose early in the morning and went up on Mount Sinai, as the LORD had commanded him, and took in his hand two tables of stone. And the LORD descended in the cloud and stood with him there and proclaimed the name of the LORD. Ex. 34:4

 The English word “LORD,” in all caps, is how we translate the Hebrew ”YHWH”, the four holy letters that the Jewish people don’t actually pronounce. They will sometimes say “HaShem” literally “the Name” but will avoid saying YHWH. So, the story continues,

The LORD passed before him, and proclaimed, "The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” And Moses made haste to bow his head toward the earth and worshiped. And he said, "If now I have found favor in thy sight, O Lord, let the Lord, I pray thee, go in the midst of us, although it is a stiff- necked people; and pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us for thy inheritance." Ex. 34

 So, consider the imagery: The Lord descended in the cloud, think of the experience of the Holy Spirit. The Lord stood with him, as Christ stood with us. The “Lord” is the principal title for Jesus, for the Son, used by his disciples. In the ancient Christian tradition, St. Justin Martyr and St. Irenaeus, appearances of God, like the three men who come to Abraham in Genesis 18-19, the Church Fathers taught that was the Son, coming to humanity in a way that prefigured the Incarnation. So, in the story of Moses, the cloud symbolizes the Spirit, and the Lord is the image of the Son. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 707, teaches, that

Theophanies (manifestations of God) light up the way of the promise, from the patriarchs to Moses and from Joshua to the visions that inaugurated the missions of the great prophets. Christian tradition has always recognized that God's Word allowed himself to be seen and heard in these theophanies, in which the cloud of the Holy Spirit both revealed him and concealed him in its shadow.

 The theophany recounted in the reading from Exodus, reflects the tradition of seeing theophanies as a sign of the mystery of the Trinity that will be revealed in the New Testament.
 
St. Paul: In 2 Corinthians 3:11-13
St. Paul, in the second reading from 2 Corinthians, says,

Finally, brethren, farewell. Mend your ways, heed my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace, and the God of love and peace will be with you. Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints greet you. 2 Cor. 3:11-13

 So, Paul is a Jew, a monotheist, who would have prayed, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord” (Deuteronomy 6 ). In the next verse St. Paul says

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. 2 Cor. 3:14

 St. Paul is explicitly Trinitarian. It is still the greeting we use to begin the mass.

The Gospel from John
St. John is also explicitly Trinitarian. In the Gospel reading for today,

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him. He who believes in him is not condemned; he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. John 3:16

 So, in the Greek it literally says “God gave his only begotten Son, so that whoever believes in him might not perish.” One reason that is important is because it sets Jesus out as a unique kind of son. We are ‘sons of God’, by adoption through baptism. Rom. 8, Gal. 3.  The Lord is the “only begotten Son of God.” Jesus is God’s Son in a completely unique way; light from light, true God from true God.
 
Jesus is the uncreated son of God. Angels and human beings have a beginning, but Jesus has no beginning as the eternal Son. He's uncreated and always is the Son of the Father. No other person can claim that. The Greek word is “monogene ̄ s.” Mono means only and gene ̄ s comes from the verb gennao ̄ meaning to bear or to beget. Jesus existed before he became a man. We didn’t pre-exist our conception in our mother’s womb. When we were conceived, we were created by God, directly and immediately by him. The same thing, the Angels, when they were created by God at the beginning of time, they were created out of nothing. They had a beginning, but Jesus did not have a beginning.
 
This is important because it helps us to understand that from all eternity there was more than one person in the one God. As Christians, we need to at attempt to grasp the basic meaning of it, so that we can profess the faith with understanding. God revealed this to us, because it has saving importance.
 
The Nicene Creed
We worship Jesus because he is divine. We offer sacrifice in worship. That we will discuss further next week during the feast of Corpus Christi. Sacrifice is the main distinction between venerating someone, like a saint, and worshipping God. We do more than just venerate God, we bow down before him in worship. As part of that worship we recite the Nicene Creed and affirms that Jesus Christ is “consubstantial with the Father.” Consubstantial means that Jesus is of the same substance, or nature, as the Father. Jesus is the same “what” as he has a divine nature. Our nature is a different nature, a human nature that is created out of nothing. We are dust, God is spirit who shares His divine life with us in the sacraments.  In the Creed, the Father is the Lord, the Son is the Lord, and the Holy Spirit is the Lord. That is the essence of the mystery of the Trinity and why we profess the Creed every Sunday. Heaven, our ultimate end, is the entry of God's creatures into the perfect unity of the Blessed Trinity. (CCC 260) The Trinity is our destiny, the ultimate reason that the world was made. Christianity isn’t about an idea, but about the reality of God and us made present in the scriptures and the sacraments. We partake even now in that Divine life through the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity.
 
St. Augustine’s prayer
Philosophy is an intellectual exercise. Theology is the prayerful engagement with the mystery of God. When I was in the seminary, there was a lively debate underway concerning whether theologians must have a prayer life in order to do meaningful theology. Some denied the necessity of prayer reasoning that philosophy and theology were fundamentally intellectual exercises. I think the right answer is that theological engagement with God is fundamentally a spiritual pursuit, not merely intellectual. I am on solid ground because I know that St. Augustine and the Fathers of the Church would have been contemptuous of those who reduced the sacred science of theology to mere intellectual inquiry.  St. Augustine was a prayer. Here is his prayer for understanding the Most Holy Trinity, the greatest mystery of Catholic faith,  St. Augustine prayed:
 
O Lord my God, my one hope, listen to me lest out of weariness I should stop wanting to seek you, but let me seek your face always and with ardor. Do you yourself give me the strength to seek, having caused yourself to be found and having given me hope of finding you more and more. . . Let me remember you, let me understand you, let me love you. Increase these things in me until you refashion me entirely. Augustine, On the Trinity, trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City Press, 2007), 5.51