Next Sunday, we will celebrate the Feast of the Holy Trinity. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is a great mystery of faith, that is, it is a reality that is beyond our human comprehension.
It is our profession of faith that there is one God but within that one God there are three ‘persons’ – individual realities. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are distinct from each other, but are, at the same time, united in will and in essence. The Irish always delight in the example of the shamrock that has three leaves but is one plant. Or, you can think of your eyesight. We have two distinct eyes but they are undivided in their vision. The essence that unites the three individual realities as one is love. We believe that the essence of God is love so that God exists in a perpetual relationship of love in which the Father, Son and Spirit are one in the love that they share within themselves and one in the love that they impart to the world.
This final point is very important. We believe that God became flesh in the person of Jesus. “God so loved the world that in the fullness of time God gave God’s only begotten Son so that whoever believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” We do not believe in a God who is indifferent to us and to our world. We believe in a God who has an active love and concern for us and for our world. God, therefore, took flesh in Jesus so that through Jesus we might have the hope of one day sharing in the fullness of God’s own life. And when Jesus returned to the Father after his resurrection, God gave us the gift of the Spirit so that we would always have access to the wisdom, grace and strength we need to persevere on the path that will lead to the eternal life that Jesus won for us. The doctrine of the Trinity, therefore, is not simply an academic doctrine of no practical concern to us, but rather it is the revelation of the truth that ours is a God of love and that this love that is God is the source of our salvation.
On the Feast of the Holy Trinity, let us pray to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit that together they will help us attain the salvation that their love has won for us.