HOLY TRINITY: Dt 4:32-34, 39-40; Rom 8:14-17; Mt 28:16-20

There’s a story about a young boy who climbs up a mountain in India, and there he meets a guru who is half asleep; he wakes him up and says, “I want you to explain God to me.”

And the guru smiled and said, “A God that can be explained is not a God that you should worship.” And he smiled and went back to sleep.

A God that can be explained is not a God that you should worship because if you can explain Him, it means that you’ve reduced God, the Creator of the world, to be another one of us.

The mystery of the most Holy Trinity is a basic doctrine of Faith in Christianity, understandable not with our heads but with our hearts. It is not like the ideological monotheistic god of Islam, but a revelational and relational God.  The Trinity is not merely an abstract doctrine but a living reality that shapes our faith and practice. It teaches us that God is relational and communal, inviting us into a divine fellowship of love. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are in a perfect relationship of love, and we are called to reflect that love in our relationships with others.

The oldest doctrinal formulation of the Church’s belief in the Trinity is found in the Apostles’ Creed which has served both as the basis of instruction for catechumens and as the Baptismal confession of Faith since the second century.  Later, the Nicene Creed, originating at the Council of Nicaea (AD 325), stated the doctrine more explicitly.  

The Christian life develops completely in the sign and presence of the Trinity. At the dawn of life, we were baptized "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit," and at the end, at the bedside, the words recited by the priest when giving the last sacrament are: "Go forth from this world, O Christian soul, in the name of God, the Almighty Father who created you, in the name of Jesus Christ who redeemed you, and in the name of the Holy Spirit who sanctifies you."

Christians believe that God is one and triune because they believe that God is love! The revelation of God as love, revealed by Jesus, has "obliged" one to admit the Trinity. It is not a human invention. If God is love, He has to love someone. There is no love "in the void," without an object. But, whom does God love to be defined as love? Men? But men have existed only for thousands of years, no more. The cosmos? The universe? The universe has existed only for billions of years. Before that, whom did God love, to be able to define himself as love? We cannot say that he loved himself, because this would not be love but egoism and narcissism.

This is the answer to Christian revelation: God is love because from eternity he has "in his bosom" a son, the Word, the one he loves with an infinite love, that is, with the Holy Spirit. In every love, there are always three realities or subjects: one who loves, one who is loved, and the love that unites them. The Christian God is one and triune because he is the communion of love. In love, unity and plurality are reconciled; love creates unity in diversity: unity of intentions, of thought, of will; diversity of subjects, of characteristics and, in the human realm, of sex. In this connection, the family is the least imperfect image of the Trinity. A husband and wife become one in their intimate expression of love, as the bible says, they shall become one flesh, and in that intimate expression of love, a child is born. A family is not just a father and mother but also includes a child/children. It was no accident that when creating the first human couple God said: "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness" (Gen 1:26-27).

When the Church describes something as a mystery, she is making the point that this truth cannot be known to us independently of such revelation from God. Our natural faculties including our intellect would not be able to arrive at this conclusion without God Himself having revealed or shown it to us. The Apostles, the monotheistic Jews, would never have come to know of God as a trinity had it not been revealed to them and they personally experienced it in their lives.

God is so far above us that we can never fully understand Him. We, mortals, would be incapable of knowing that God exists as One but in three distinct persons if this has not been revealed to us through Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition.

Speaking about mystery, isn’t a human person itself a mystery? Which wife or husband knows the other perfectly well? Doesn’t your wife or husband reveal to you as a mystery each day? Which parent knows his/her children well? Every day each one of us is revealed as a mystery. Who among us knows oneself fully well? I am a mystery to myself.

Although the word “mystery” implies a certain distance, it involves an intimate encounter. A relationship would remain shallow if the parties are not willing to open themselves to the other. All would agree that there should be no secrets between lovers. The reason why God would unlock and reveal a mystery to us is because He loves us and wishes to engage us and wants us to enter into a relationship with Him. Through this relationship, we come to know Him and by knowing Him more and more, we get to deepen our relationship with Him. This knowledge, admittedly, is not exhaustive but engaging. It draws us closer to the One who can never be fully known. It is a relationship of love. Just like the more you get to know someone you love, the more the person is revealed to be a mystery.

Now that we know His motivation is love, why would God bother to reveal Himself to us? That we might have Eternal Life. And what is eternal life? It is actually sharing in the supernatural life of the Blessed Trinity. How can we share in a life which we have no knowledge of? Impossible. That is why, the more we come to know God, the more we wish to enter into a deeper communion with Him.

Because God is love, we are able to truly love. Because God is unity, we are able to be united to Him. Because God is three Persons, we are able to have communion with Him. This is the reason why this dogma is the central mystery of faith.

May the Holy Trinity help us to know him better each day so that “we may love Him, serve Him, and be with Him in paradise forever.”