14-15 June The Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity (C)

ONE YET THREE AND SEEKING COMMUNION

Last week as Trinity Sunday. We speak of God as one yet three. We affirm this truth each time we make the sign of the cross. However, it was some centuries before the Church came to this understanding at the Councils of Nicea (325 AD) and Constantinople (381 AD). The development of this doctrine is an affirmation of ‘the one deposit of faith’, that is, the Church’s prayerful reflection on scripture and tradition to articulate what we believe under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. We begin by understanding that the Israelites understood God as totally other and one. So it is that our First Reading speaks of ‘Wisdom’ as ‘master craftsman’ to account for the earth’s creation, or as Henry Wansbrough has put it, “how God could ‘dirty his fingers’ by creating the world.” Wansbrough further comments, “So there is in God something which both is God and is not the same as the Creator.” He goes on to note that “in the New Testament Jesus is known as the Wisdom of God and as the Word of God... This is the beginning of the understanding of the Trinity”. Indeed, Jesus speaks of God with intimacy as ‘Abba ’ or Father or more truly, the informality of ‘Dad’. In turn, the early Church understood that in Jesus they were drawn into a personal relationship with the Father involving a third divine person, the promised Advocate poured out at Pentecost, as we celebrated last week. “So, without injury to the
basic monotheism from which Christianity derived from the Jewish faith, the sense of Three Persons in the One God came into being –not as a remote heavenly mystery, let alone an arid theological puzzle, but as a way of expressing the Christian sense of being drawn into the divine communion of love. There they found the impulse and energy to be instruments of the saving outreach of that love into the world” (Richard Byrne SJ). This was radical and in sharp contrast to the then prevailing Greek philosophers' understanding of God as “distant, impersonal and immovable” (Sr Mary Coloe PBVM). Indeed, in our Second Reading, St Paul points out that God’s abiding presence and the resultant missionary impulse continue in spite of any suffering or hardship. As for them, so for us: the Spirit of God has been poured into our hearts (v.5) such that we have a founded hope in the depth of our being, whatever our
circumstances. And to it was that Pope Francis called us to be pilgrims of hope in Christ in this Jubilee Year of Hope. It is all about an awareness of God’s unstinting love in all circumstances and our response to this self-revelation of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
And so, we pray that ever old yet ever new prayer: “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be world without end. Amen.”

 Fr John

South Belconnen Parish Priest