15 Jun 2019
Gospel Reflection
Mystery of the Blessed Trinity and Mystery of the Church
The Gospel (John 16:12-15):
Everything the Father has is mine; all the Spirit tells you is taken from what is mine.
This reading from Christ’s Farewell Discourse is chosen for this feast of the Blessed Trinity because of the mention by Christ (the Son) of the Father and the Holy Spirit. Today we celebrate the feast of the Blessed Trinity, or in the formal title, “The Solemnity of the Holy Trinity”. The Trinity is something of an abstraction. We rarely, if ever, hear of devotion to the Blessed Trinity. The Trinity is recognized as the greatest and deepest of the Christian mysteries. It took centuries, with errors, heresies, and bad formulations, for the Church to arrive at the formulation of, or belief in, the Blessed Trinity as we have it today. Belief in the Trinity is belief in one God in three divine persons. As formulated in the latest Catechism of the Catholic Church (paragraphs 253-260), the Trinity is One. We do not confess three Gods, but one God in three persons, the “consubstantial Trinity”. The divine persons do not share the one divinity among themselves, but each of them is God, whole and entire. The divine persons are really distinct from one another.
So much for the theology of belief in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as the Trinity, the one true God. Such theology does not necessarily make for devotion, or a greater understanding of the mystery of the Trinity. This great mystery of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit reveals the innermost nature and life of God to us: God as love, as saviour, as unity. This mystery of the Blessed Trinity was revealed to us as source and model of our Christian life. In his farewell discourse at the Last Supper, Jesus prayed to his Father for his followers, in all ages to come: “I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be one in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me, I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, … that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (John 17:20-24). This is practically what Paul says in writing to the Romans, summarised in the heading to today’s second reading: We go “to God through Christ, in the love poured out by the Holy Spirit”. The Holy Spirit in the hearts of believers makes them, makes us, aware of our dignity as children of God, called and enabled to live according to the pattern of the inner life of God himself, as revealed by Jesus, and continued in the mystery of the Church. The Church will never be properly understood unless viewed as a mystery, the Body of Christ, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit called to live in accord with that deep mystery which is the Blessed Trinity, and as a witness on earth to the living God, the source of true life.
Fr Martin McNamara MSC