TRINITY SUNDAY

Triqueta -- an ancient symbol of the Trinity

Genesis 1:1-2:4a
Psalm 8 or
Canticle 2 or 13
2 Corinthians 13:11-13
Matthew 28:16-20

This Sunday is the only day in the whole Christian Calendar that is dedicated to a theological doctrine rather than a person, event or sacred symbol. Compared to other occasions, the Feast of the Holy Trinity came to be observed rather late in the Church’s history and was not made official until 1334. The intention was to conclude the liturgical commemorations of the life of Jesus Christ and the coming of the Holy Spirit by focusing on the whole nature of God. The Feast was taken up with particular enthusiasm by the church in England, and so came to be specially identified with the Anglican Church that resulted from Henry VIII's break with Rome in the 16th century.

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity  -- that there are Three Persons in One God -- is  central to orthodox Christianity, and figures in confessions of faith both at baptism and confirmation. At the same time, though we are asked to affirm it, it is immensely difficult – perhaps impossible -- to understand completely. How did we end up in this position, of having to believe what we can hardly understand?

The answer is that as early Christians struggled to hold on to the essentials of the Jewish belief in One God while acknowledging the full significance of Jesus’ Resurrection, and at the same time being able to explain their sense of spiritual empowerment even after the Risen Christ was no longer present to them, they sort of stumbled on a formula. We owe its most familiar version – as a blessing – to St Paul in today’s Epistle  --“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all”. But this simply reflects the “great commission” that Jesus gives his disciples in today’s Gospel – “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”.

These two very short lessons follow a much longer one, the first thirty five verses of the Old Testament in which the creative acts of the sovereign God to whom we owe our very existence are recounted. The heart of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity lies in this thought: the awesome majesty of the God who made us is the very same reality that we encounter in the humanity of Jesus and in the experience of grace in our daily lives. We may not know exactly how to integrate them theologically, but all three ‘Persons’ are indispensable to the ways in which Christians come to know and to love the one true God.