Today we celebrate the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity. The Trinity is a core teaching of our faith, in fact, that is how we define a Christian in general is if they believe in the Trinity or not. At the same time, the Trinity is a very difficult concept to preach about, most preachers really struggle this weekend with what to say, how to define it, how to talk about God as three in one, it is such a mystery.
So, instead of trying to find an analogy that is inevitably heretical, I just want to highlight a couple of things from the Catechism. First, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 234, says: “The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of Christian faith and life. It is the mystery of God in himself. It is therefore the source of all the other mysteries of faith, the light that enlightens them. It is the most fundamental and essential teaching in the ‘hierarchy of the truths of faith.’”
That is a really strong statement. The… Trinity is the central mystery of Christian faith and life. the mystery of God in himself… the source of all the other mysteries of faith… the most fundamental and essential teaching…
How do we reconcile this, something so important to our faith yet so difficult to understand? Well I believe the best thing we can do is just to live it. It is simply just to enter into it, to pray to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, to get to know them all individually, and as we do, we will begin to know them collectively as one.
Now, I was thinking about this in the context of the Sports World - we are in the middle of a great week of sports. Tonight (Last Night) the National Hockey League championship begins. The National Basketball Association championship will have game two tomorrow (today). Iowa is in the NCAA tournament for baseball, and Major League Baseball is well underway, with the Cubs and Cardinals battling for last place in the division. But besides them, a lot of good sports.
One thing that I find so interesting when watching sports is seeing everyone wearing their team’s jersey or at the very least their colors. Hats, shirts, socks, anything and everything that can be worn is branded for our favorite teams.
But it’s like why? Why do we do this? I mean I am no different, I have a lot of the gear, Chicago Cubs gear especially. But does it really help the team? Does it make a difference to them?
Maybe, it might help them to see their colors, but I think more than anything it helps us to enter into the game, to help us feel as if we are part of it, part of the game, even when we are watching at home on TV we will do this.
Something very similar happens when we come to Mass, we dip our hands in the Holy Water, we make the Sign of the Cross, and we call it the Sign of the Cross, but it is really more the sign of the Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It is cross shaped, yes, but the words are Trinitarian, and we almost always do this when we pray, even at home.
This is much like us putting on our Cubs Jersey or our Iowa gear to watch the game, we are entering into the Trinity with our bodies, we are putting Him on, but it is even more important than at a game, this is something that we must do! In fact, we are reaffirming the central mystery of the Christian faith.
So I will close here with a second quote from the Catechism that speaks so well to this, paragraph 260: “The ultimate end of the whole divine economy is the entry of God's creatures into the perfect unity of the Blessed Trinity.” (CCC 260)
What does that mean? It means that our ultimate destiny is entry into the life of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, into the unity of the Trinity. So the Trinity is not like a math problem or some kind of complicated thing that theologians try to explain with analogies. The Trinity is your destiny. The Trinity is my destiny. The Trinity is the reason the world was made.
The ultimate reason for the whole plan of salvation was so that God’s creatures - us - might enter into the unity and the life of the Most Holy Trinity, of the Blessed Trinity. Because at the end of the day, Christianity isn’t about an idea, it’s about a God who is personal. In fact, a God who is tri-personal - three persons - Father, Son and Holy Spirit.