Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity

““When he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to all truth.” Jn. 16:13

Math has never been one of my strong points.

And that is a major understatement!

Even now I clearly recall the terrible frustration dear Sr. Clement Joseph experienced so many years ago trying to get me to understand even the most rudimentary concepts of geometry. But slow as I was to learn the obscurities of higher mathematics, even I could figure out that one plus one plus one does not equal one.

And yet, on the face of it, that’s what we celebrate today on this feast of the Holy Trinity: 1 + 1 + 1 = 1.

Even grade school children shake their heads at this. How can this be?

As mysterious as it is, this faith conviction of ours is so fundamental to us that each Sunday we stand together and recite the Creed proudly professing our belief in God as Three Persons-In-One.

So, we believe in it. But do we really understand what it means? Most of us would probably, in all honesty, say no.

And if you’re among those, don’t feel lonely. This belief in God being a Community of Three-In-One is so difficult to comprehend that it took the theologians and the bishops of the early Church the better part of 500 years to find technical language that could attempt to explain it.

And, after all that effort, many of us, like me, just don’t get the mathematics of it at all.
Fortunately, that’s not important.

What is essential – even indispensable – is for us to realize that the very first Christians, the earliest disciples and followers of Jesus, did not conceive of their understanding of God in terms of a complicated math equation.

They came to believe in, and fall in love with, a God who was Three-In-One through what they experienced.

Which was this:
They experienced the man Jesus who died on a cross, and then rose from the dead! This reality shook them to the core of their being.

They experienced how this radicalized each of them so profoundly that they came to see that Jesus was the very revelation of God in time. He was the face of God. He was what God looked like as a human being: loving, healing, caring, forgiving.

And they experienced Jesus always speaking of God as his Father. Moreover, they experienced that whenever he prayed, Jesus called God, Father. He even taught us to do the same, as in “Our Father, who art in heaven….”

What we tend to forget some 2000 years later is that no one before Jesus ever spoke of God in so intimate and personal a fashion. Jews at that time considered doing so outrageously blasphemous. To them, God was a Being so distant and remote and holy that His name could neither be written nor spoken!

And yet, the earliest Christians experienced Jesus addressing God with the most intimate word available, Abba – the very same word a child uses to refer to his/her Daddy!
Unheard of. Shocking.

But this is what Jesus taught them:
God is our kind, merciful, and gracious Father, and we are His children.

Since all of this was so, they then experienced this ultimate reality:
That Jesus is the Son of this Father. He re-presented the Father to the world. And together, the Father and the Son had one project, one main goal: to make the world a merciful, gracious place in which to live.

They even had a name for it: the reign of God – what the world would be like if God truly ruled.

The earliest followers of Jesus experienced that together Father and Son were devoted to making a more humane world, a world in which everyone is brought the good news of God’s enduring love, a world in which everyone is sought out, called, challenged, and given the possibility of abundant life forever.

And this is where the third person of the Trinity comes in, the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is the One the early disciples experienced at Pentecost, after the Son had left them. This is the One who breathed on them and energized and animated and drove this great project forward.

It is this same Spirit that you and I experience to this very day breathing into each of us the possibility of breaking through the limits we place on ourselves, opening doors of opportunity we feel powerless to enter on our own, pushing us ever forward toward living as Jesus did, motivating us to do what we never dreamed possible: reaching outside of ourselves and embracing the “least of these.”

Together God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit create a Community, a Family of Love … the beating heart of the very universe in which we are blessed to live.
The Son and the Spirit, then, are like the two “hands” of God the Father. Through these two “hands,” God acts “outside” of his own self. Through these two “hands,” God, in effect, reaches out and hugs the world. God, in effect, becomes the Divine Hugger. 

The good news for a math challenged person like me is that the reality of God ultimately has nothing at all to do with numbers, but everything to do with love. So much so, that if there were three words I’d choose to describe the “Threeness” of God, they would be God For Us.

Again, our treasured belief ultimately has nothing to do with higher math. Nor does it have anything to do with some abstract Being dwelling up in the sky somewhere.

What it has everything to do with is the reality that our God is close, personal, intimate, and deeply engaged in each of our lives – even to the point of inviting us to be a part of a family.
Again, nothing at all to do with math, but everything to do with love.

Ted Wolgamot, Psy.D.