“Unto thee it was shewed, that thou mightest know that the LORD he is God; there is none else beside him.”
(Deut 4:35)
But about the Son he says,
"Your throne, O God, will last for ever and ever,
and righteousness will be the scepter of your kingdom.
(Heb.1-8)
“God is Spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.”
(John. 4:24)
A.) Personal Existential Expositions
a.1.) The Trinity and Creation
Our belief of the doctrine of creation is essentially connected in the dogma of the Trinity. I choose to incorporate creation to this chapter because I find it easy to connect the relation of these realities. In Genesis 1:1 - God created the heaven and the earth in the beginning. The Bible clearly and repeatedly claims that God made the heavens and the earth and everything in nature.
Moreover, my reflections on the Blessed Trinity start by contemplating on the reality of the world where I live. It is evident that when we look at the world around us, we are astounded by its immense diversity, which also is a clear sign of the diversity that exists in the Triune God. The diversity that we experience in shape, color, sex, language, culture, religion and way of life, cannot but be God's plan for the whole world. How monotonous and boring the world would have been if it were devoid of any diversity and variety!
Is it not most fitting and proper then that we acknowledge diversity as God's precious gift and also accept and respect it? It is indeed sad to see that people are very much divided and discriminated against on the basis of language, culture, color, sex and religion. If the white, black or brown people cannot get along with one another; if Hindi, Bengali, Tamil and Bhojpuri-speaking people cannot tolerate one another; if Shuddras, Vaishyas, Rajputs and Brahmins cannot see one another; and if Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians cannot respect one another, it would indeed be a sin against the Triune God, from whom all diversity has proceeded.
We are diverse and yet called to be one just as the Holy Trinity is distinctly three and one at the same time. But we can be one only in as far as we accept and appreciate the other who is different from us. Let us remember that it is not uniformity that God wants but unity in diversity.
When I speak of unity in diversity, it means to me that our life has one ultimate purpose. We are all directed toward the one happiness that is in union with our God. However, to achieved such happiness there are varied ways and means on how to get there. The diversity that I mean is on our way of actualizing our desire for happiness that is in union with God.
I have two sisters and every time we are together we often times argue with one other. It just happened that our minds would really not meet in a certain idea and we keep on disagreeing. When my younger sister expresses her contention, my older sister will oppose and express her own. If I will speak about morality, both of them, in chorous, will always judge that the Church teachings are obsolete and no effect at all to the lives of the faithful. And when they will discuss about today’s trend, I will strongly diverge to their point and stress to what I believe is right. Those are samples of the topic that we find difficult to concur to. Nevertheless, when it comes to food or dessert, we are one in saying, “Yes.” We are one in one thing, we love to food.
a. 2.) Blessed Trinity as a Relationship of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit
The Blessed trinity in my reflection, although it’s not about conflicting views of the three persons, is something about relationship. It is about the story of the Father fully known in the Son and perpetuated by the presence of the Holy Spirit of Love. They are distinct in persons but one in divinity. My sisters and I we at times distinct in our views about thing but we share deep about food not simply because of food alone but because we have relationship as brothers and sisters, as a family. We might yell and screaming to one another in a certain point but we remain friends because we belong to one family.
The Blessed Trinity can be understood in the same way not in the context of conflict but in the context of relationship.
The story of salvation in Jesus Christ teaches us that it doesn’t do simply to talk about God only in singular terms. God may – indeed must – be One, but there is relationship within God. The “Three Persons” in a dynamic relationship. And what binds them together is Love. There is a dynamic unity of love and will which means that God sends Jesus into the world to be the savior of the world that means dying in the cross. But Jesus is no unwilling sacrificial lamb. In my years of biblical studies, I can attest that the death of Jesus is not because he is a victim of the will of the Father, but with all freedom, he embraced His death for ransom of the many. Jesus was a volunteer, a volunteer victim for our sins.
In the account of the John’s gospel, Jesus’ high priestly prayer establishes that there is a unity of divine will! The love of God for the world is matched by the love of the Son in going to the cross. The loving self-sacrifice of the Son is matched by the love of the Father, who abandons himself to the loss of the Son.
The Spirit is sent in the same way as the Son is sent. In the same John’s gospel, the Spirit is “Another Christ”. However, in the letters of St. Paul, he picks up on this, when he insists that anyone who has the Spirit belongs to Christ because the Spirit is the Spirit of Christ (as well as the Spirit of God). The role of the Spirit is to “lead the disciples into all truth” ( Jn. 14:26, 15:26). Jesus makes the Father known to them. He does so as the Word made flesh- the one who has come from the bosom of the Father (Jn. 1:18). As such, the disciples can trust absolutely what they know of God through Jesus. To see Jesus is as good as seeing the Father. It is to see God – but in human form.
Jesus came to make the Father known. However, he was rejected and crucified. The rejection of Jesus was also the rejection of the God whom he called Father. Yet God does not allow the crucifixion to stand as the last word. Unknown to those crucifying him, Jesus is the Lamb of God, whose death takes away the sin of the world (John 1: 29). This means that the disciples preach Jesus. They don’t just repeat his message: now they have a further story to tell – the story of God walking among us in Jesus and saving us though his death and resurrection. They can tell this story because it is God’s story! The Jesus story is not simply the story of God acting through a man: it is the story of God as a man! Jesus is the act of God.
a.3.) The Oneness of God
“Three on one” therefore insists that we have first and always to speak about God in terms of relationality. To be God is to be in relationship. The relationship between God and the world flows out of the relationship of love that exists between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It means that Jesus is not just a man of God, but God as a man! And if Jesus shows us not only what God is like, but what it means to be human, then we come to understand that to be truly, fully and freely human – to have “Life in all its abundance” – is to be related in love to God and to one another.
B.) Doctrinal Expositions
b.1.) The Father
The Church professes her faith in the one God, who is at the same time the Most Holy and ineffable Trinity of Persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Church lives by this truth contained in the most ancient symbols of faith.
God is incomprehensible to us. He wished to reveal himself, not only as the one creator and Almighty Father, but also as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This revelation reveals in its essential source the truth about God, who is love: God is love in the interior life itself of the one divinity. This love is revealed as an ineffable communion of persons.
The mystery of the intimate life of God has been revealed to us by Jesus Christ: "He who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known" (Jn 1:18). The last words with which Christ concluded his earthly mission after the resurrection were addressed to the apostles, according to St. Matthew's Gospel: "Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations. Baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" (Mt 28:19).
The Old Testament has not revealed this truth explicitly. It prepared the way for it by showing God's Fatherhood in the covenant with his people, and by manifesting his activity in the world with Wisdom, the Word and the Spirit (e. g., Wis 7:22-30; Prov 8:22-30; Ps 33:4-6; Ps 147:15; Is 55:11; Wis 12:1; Is 11:2; Sir 48:12). The Old Testament has principally consolidated the truth about the one God, the hinge of the monotheistic religion, first of all in Israel and then outside of it. One must then conclude that the New Testament has brought the fullness of revelation about the Blessed Trinity. The Trinitarian truth has been from the beginning at the root of the living faith of the Christian community by means of baptism and the liturgy. The rules of faith, which we meet frequently both in the letters of the apostles and in the testimony of the kerygma, kept pace with the Church's catechesis and prayer.
b.2.) The Son
In the Bible, Jesus is often called the Son of God, which means that He is God made manifest in human form (John 1:1, 14). Jesus is the Son of God because He was conceived by the Holy Spirit (Luke 1:35), who is God. In Jesus' time, the phrase son of man was used to signify a human being. In relation to that, Jesus being the Son of God, means that Jesus is God.
Jesus possesses the same attributes as God and both are honored equally. John 5:21-23 says, "For just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son gives life to whom he is pleased to give it. Moreover, the Father judges no one, but has entrusted all judgment to the Son, that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father. He who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father, who sent him."
Both the Father and the Son perform the same works. John 5:24-27 confirm this: "I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life. I tell you the truth, a time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life in himself. And he has given him authority to judge because he is the Son of Man."
b. 3.) The Holy Spirit
The Holy Spirit is one of the three persons of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. For many of us, this is a difficult concept to grasp. Scared Scriptures declare that there is only one living God, yet we learn from scripture that He comprises three separate personages. One way to partially visualize this concept is to examine the nature of water (H2O). Water is a single compound that can exist in three states – liquid, ice and vapor. An egg is another picture. It is comprised of the white, the yoke and the shell, yet it is still one egg. Of course, by no means do these examples paint a complete picture of our God, but they are illustrative of the fact that His three “persons” in no way invalidate His oneness.
The Holy Spirit is the primary presence of God among us today. He Reveals God through Scripture, by making Himself known and by guiding and directing God's people. He enables and empowers believers by giving and sustaining all life, by giving power and gifts to serve God, by bringing forth fruit in believers; and by purifying, teaching and uniting believers. But the Spirit's presence and blessing is dependent upon our response to Him: He brings blessing, but the blessing may be temporarily removed or lessened. Acting with hardened disobience towards the Holy Spirit brings strong judgement, and irrationally rejecting the truth of the Holy Spirit's work in Jesus and then attributing it to Satan cannot be forgiven.
The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of the Christian faith and of Christian life. God alone can make it known to us by revealing himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Incarnation of God's Son reveals that God is the eternal Father and that the Son is consubstantial with the Father, which means that, in the Father and with the Father the Son is one and the same God.
The mission of the Holy Spirit, sent by the Father in the name of the Son (Jn 14:26) and by the Son "from the Father" (Jn 15:26), reveals that, with them, the Spirit is one and the same God. "With the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified" (Nicene Creed).
"The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father as the first principle and, by the eternal gift of this to the Son, from the communion of both the Father and the Son" (St. Augustine, De Trin. 15, 26, 47: PL 42, 1095). By the grace of Baptism "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit", we are called to share in the life of the Blessed Trinity, here on earth in the obscurity of faith, and after death in eternal light (cf. Paul VI, CPG # 9).
"Now this is the Catholic faith: We worship one God in the Trinity and the Trinity in unity, without either confusing the persons or dividing the substance; for the person of the Father is one, the Son's is another, the Holy Spirit's another; but the Godhead of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is one, their glory equal, their majesty coeternal" (Athanasian Creed: DS 75; ND 16).
Inseparable in what they are, the divine persons are also inseparable in what they do. But within the single divine operation each shows forth what is proper to him in the Trinity, especially in the divine missions of the Son's Incarnation and the gift of the Holy Spirit.
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