Trinity Sunday · May 26, 2024 · 10:30 AM
Sadrac Camacho
Dt 4:32-34, 39-40; Ps 33:4-5, 6, 9, 18-19, 20, 22;
Rom 8:14-17; Mt 28:16-20
+ In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, AMEN.
Some months ago I was engaging in dialogue online regarding the Trinity and came across a cartoon from a channel called “Lutheran Satire.” The creator’s protestant heritage isn’t exactly relevant to the point I want to make, and that’s because the cartoon was discussing the Doctrine of the Trinity, which is something Catholics as well as most Protestants hold to be an absolute truth. Apart from the very baptism that incorporates us into the body of Christ, it is the univocal belief in a Triune God, the recitation of a trinitarian formula during our baptism, the formula ordained by Jesus himself in our reading from Matthew, that most clearly instantiates our unity as Christians. Through being submerged in water, we become submerged in God: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and we are all, whether Protestant or Catholic, made siblings in Christ. In any case, this cartoon was called “St. Patrick’s Bad Analogies.” It works around a very basic plot. Two medieval peasants present themselves in front of an anthropomorphized icon of Saint Patrick holding a three-leafed clover and ask him to speak a bit about the Trinity but warn him to keep it simple since they are simple people lacking in education. St Patrick goes on to say that the Trinity is three persons in one God. The peasants however say begrudgingly that they can’t understand that; it makes little sense to them. So St. Patrick, somewhat clumsily concocts an analogy. He says the Trinity is like water, which can be found in three forms: liquid, solid, and gas. It is at this point that the supposedly uneducated medieval peasants chime in, crying out, “That’s the heresy of modalism.” Modalism is an ancient heresy that purports there is really only one person rather than a Trinity. This one person of the Godhead merely presents himself in three forms.” Here begins a fairly humorous sequence; these peasants, uneducated as they are, seem, solely for the purpose of tongue in cheek humor, to have perfectly learned responses and a PhD in early Church history. The sequence is such that whenever St. Patrick attempts to introduce a new analogy, the peasants rebuke it as the heresy that it really is. St Patrick, recalculating, says the Trinity is like the Sun, which is itself the star that produces the light and the heat. The peasants quickly present a rebuttal, anathematizing the analogy as the heresy of Arianism. Arianism is the ancient heresy that catalyzed the development of the doctrine of the Trinity at the Council of Nicea. Arianism adhered to a quasi-subordinationist theology that held the Son was himself a creature of the Father and therefore was not equal in divinity to the Father. So the peasants and St Patrick go back and forth a couple times with St Patrick crafting a new analogy shortly before his metaphors would be struck down by these supposedly uneducated peasants. In the end, St. Patrick gets very frustrated and blurts out, rapidly and cathartically:
“The Trinity is a mystery which cannot be comprehended by human reason but is understood only through faith and is best confessed in the words of the Athanasian Creed, which states that we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in unity, neither confusing the Persons nor dividing the substance, that we are compelled by the Christian truth to confess that each distinct Person is God and Lord, and that the deity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit is one, equal in glory, coequal in majesty.”
On hearing this cartoon version of St. Patrick purging away his frustrations, call it an act of the Holy Spirit, my hardheadedness with regard to the Holy Trinity was softened. I had been for so long trying to brute force my way into logically systematizing and mechanistically describing the Trinity. I was so perturbed by the atheists and agnostics around me unhappily condemning the logiclessness of the Trinity. I saw a necessity to fight back. I asked how is it that there can be three persons of the trinity but not three Gods? How is it that they can all be bound as one essence? What even is essence when we’re speaking about God? If you take a look at the Roman Catholic Catechism, it states that “The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of the Christian faith and of Christian life. God alone can make it known to us by revealing himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” This is patently true. That we have come to know of the one God as three persons is at its core an act of revelation, not mechanistic, obsessive reason. Indeed, in rendering God strictly through logical systems we get heresies like modalism, which demote many of the leading narratives of the Scriptures to nonsense. If God is but one person in three forms, then this one-personed God was praying to himself in the Garden of Gethsemane. Was one person present at the baptism of Jesus, as the Holy Spirit washed down, the Father was heard in heaven, and the redeemer stood bathed; that’s a lot of nonsense if there is only one person to God. And that was precisely the problem with many of these ancient heresies. In trying to be hardheadedly “logical”, the Heresy of Modalism made impotent the narratives of this divine and unifying love of the persons of the Trinity, the love of the Father for the Son, the love of the Son of the Father, the procession of the Spirit from them both which adopts us into a divine lineage, all of this is done away with if God is but one person wearing three different costumes. And then Arianism in trying to vanquish this tendency of Modalism, confessed that the Father and the Son were distinct persons but only by way of reducing the rank of the Son to creature, stripping our Redeemer and our Lord of much of His divinity, and reducing the Spirit to an impersonal force. Rather, the tapestry presented by both Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition is that we ought to regard the Father, the Son, and the Spirit as equal in status, however distinct they might be and however it might confound us to hold so. Both of these sources of divine revelation are incontrovertible and they have cast upon this Mystery a light that may transmit to us the triadic nature of our one God. It is by dint of revelation not reason that we know the Holy Trinity and it is not up to us to tease apart God’s inner workings until we come to an understanding. If we were trapped in an infinite ocean, the depths of those waters would obscure all sense of direction, we would never find our way up. Such is the case with the trinity, what is the state of our pride that we may think ourselves fit to tease apart infinities from infinities from infinities that we may come to learn the fullness of God in every respect. We simply can’t. We will never find our way up in that ocean. Rather, we grant ascent to what has been revealed to us to be true, through scripture and the councils–those words that echo in our reading from Deuteronomy “The Lord is God and there is no other.” or from John “the word was with God and the word was God and the word became flesh” or in Acts “that when we lie to the Holy Spirit we lie to God”–once we accept this revelation, reason follows therefrom, supported by it. We can divine through reason how the Trinity plays into salvation, how it is a model for our own lives and lovingkindness. But let us not allow that reason to supplant the place of revelation. Let’s leave the primordial hows and whys to the almighty.
At this point, we strike an impasse. We are limited by our terrestrial language. We are limited by human reason. And yet God is no less limited by his revelation and what it means for Christian living. He dispenses everything with justification. In contemplating the Trinity, we encounter not just a theological concept, but a profound revelation of God’s inner life—a life characterized by perfect communion and self-giving love. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit exist eternally in a relationship of mutual love and interdependence, forming a divine community of persons. As beings created in the image of this Triune God, we are called to participate in this divine community, to mirror its relational dynamics in our own lives. Just as the Father pours Himself out in love for the Son, and the Son reciprocates in perfect obedience, so too are we called to love one another with the same selflessness and sacrificial love. We are challenged to view our relationships not merely as individual transactions, but as participations in the ongoing drama of divine love. Each interaction becomes an opportunity to embody the relationality of the Trinity, to mirror the divine community in our own human communities. So, let us not simply stand in awe of the Trinity, but let us actively engage with its implications for our lives and relationships. Let us embrace the call to be bearers of divine love, agents of reconciliation and unity in a fractured world. In embracing this vision, we fulfill our deepest calling as human beings—to participate in the divine life of love, and to bear witness to the transformative power of the Triune God in our midst. Amen.