Dear friends today we celebrate the Blessed Trinity, the Undivided unity, the indescribable mystery of God’s own inner life and fountain of all gifts and graces. This great feast was established for the Latin Church by Pope John XXII, to celebrate Sunday after the coming of the Holy Spirit, which is the last of the mystery of our salvation. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity says that God is three in one and one in three. The Trinity is one. We do not confess three Gods, but one God in three persons, the Consubstantial Trinity. The divine persons do not share the one divinity among themselves but each of them is God whole and entire: The Father is that which the Son is, the Son that which the Father is, Father and the Son are that which the Holy Spirit is, that is, by nature they are one God. In the words of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), ‘Each of the persons is that supreme reality, viz., the divine substance, essence or nature’ (CCC 253) The doctrine of Trinity is one among the some many doctrine of the Church that have being severally attacked especially with the claims that, the believe in God in the Christian circumscription is not Monotheistic in nature; that is, the believe in one God.
They have made allusions saying that our believe in God is; 1. Tri-theism – which is making the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit three separate Gods. 2. Unitarianism, in which the Father alone is God and the Son is a supreme Great man, and the Holy Spirit an impersonal great force and power. 3. Diffused monotheism – is the idea of a Supreme Being who is partially diffused through other deities common in African Traditional Religion, and 4. Polytheism- the believe in many gods. While other religion or some ignorant fellows tend to accuse Christianity that their Religion is polytheistic, is because they do not understand that it is only in the Christian religion that we find the revelation of a God who dwells in relationship. Where we see God the Father being in union, communion and unity with His Intellect or logos that is the Son, and His Will, that is the Holy Spirit, In this relationship the unity of the Father is wholly in the Son and wholly in the Holy Spirit; the Son wholly in the Father and wholly in the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit is wholly in the Father and wholly in the Son.” (CCC 255) Some critics of the Trinitarian God have also averred that the word Trinity is not used in the Scripture, then why do we make allusion to the Trinity? Hence for them the concept Trinity shouldn’t be associated with God. It is very important and helpful to posit here that the word Trinity did not appear in the Bible, but it is rather a deduction from, and interpretation of thought and language of the New Testament.
The doctrine of Trinity emerged from facts which Christian experience cannot deny. Date back to the Ancient times in the philosophical quest of the ultimate underlying principle and the prime instantiation of all things in the universe, some philosophers came to the conclusion that the underlying principles of all things can be likened to an Unmoved mover, for some the Supreme being, for some the First cause, etc, but in all, they came to a realization that it is impossible to talk of the universe without an Extra-Terrestrial Being which govern its activities, and with this in mind it is established in the first place, that men knew God, and never had any real doubt of the deity of God. God here, so to speak, is obviously the almighty God. Then, into the world and into life, there comes Jesus Christ who came to redeem the fallen world but in Christian experience there also enters the Holy Spirit, guarding, directing, controlling, enlightening and sustaining the human life. These assertions are verifiable facts about the existence of the Three Persons and One God which is the Trinity. Also, our faith in the Trinity finds its solid basis in the Sacred Scripture. Some of which are as stated below; – Gen 1:26; And now let us make human beings our own image and likeness.
The concept us connotes that they are more than one/ – Proverb 8: 22 -31 we read about Wisdom which not only pre-existed creation but actually collaborated with God in the work of creation as the “master craftsman” and “architect” with God. The wisdom here is the Son, Jesus Christ. – In Mt. 28:19, the Gospel reading of Today Jesus says “ Go therefore make disciples of all nations, baptizing them, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” – Again in our second reading of the today on second Corinthians, Chapter 13:14, it says: “ The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all – St. Paul in his letter to the Ephesians, Chapter 4: 4-5, it says: “ There is one body and one Spirit just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all, who is above all and through all in all – John 14:8-9, in Philips encounter with Jesus, Philip said to him, Master, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us. Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you for so long a time and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father”. – In John 10:30. “The Father and I are one”. Looking closely we hear Jesus tell us that there is no separation between the Father and the Son…They are one On this celebration of the Most Holy Trinity we therefore come face to face with the inner mystery of God as a family of three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, where there is complete harmony, love and total peace.
This revelation (self-disclosure) of God about Himself fills us with amazement and open-eyed reverence, for we do not have a God whose limits we can define. In the Trinity our minds are brought into loving contact with the complexity and wonder of God, which no language is adequate to describe. Friends, the Trinity is a Communion of Love and St. Augustine captures it well when he says: the Father is the One who Loves. The Son is the One who is Loved. The Spirit is the very act of Loving. God is love in every possible use of the word. He is the Subject Love, He is the Object love, and He is the Verb Love. The essence of God is Love, and it is this same love that he has communicated to humanity from the beginning of the world to this present time as expressly stated in John 3:16 “ for God so loved the world that he gave us his only Son…” He broke into our cosmic space and became one of us, related to every one of us, even to the point of his death on the cross and his blood is the only efficacious antidote for the poison of sin, and it is the spiritual glue that binds us to the Trinity and to each other in a communion of peace and unity. God is not just some abstract power, the source, or some combination of super people. God is a community of persons.
We learn from the mystery of the Trinity that God loves and he is loved; that there is mutuality, reciprocity, a communion of life. That is the very essence of God. And God has made us in that same image. Yet, unless we learn to love and be loved, we can never grow into the fullness of the image of God that we are called to achieve. No wonder, Saint Irenaeus said, the greatness of man lies not only in the fact of subduing and dominating the earth (cf. Gen. 1:28) but especially in the fact that he participates in the life of the Holy Trinity and in participating in the life of the Trinity he must communicate love to his brothers and sisters. But the questions my dear friends are how well had we communicated the love that was communicated to us by the Trinity to our fellow brethren? In the activities of our world today is this love imminent or just an abstract entity? Do we say we communicate the love of the Trinity whereby people’s lives are treated worthlessly by us? Do we say we communicate the love of the Trinity when we forcefully take carnal knowledge of a girl child or woman, a boy child or man without their consent which amounts to rape and leaves them traumatized and depressed? Do we say we communicate the love of the Trinity to our brethren and still engage in extra judicial killings, taking the laws into our hands by killing innocent and and even culpable citizens and not respecting the sanctity and sacredness of the human life? We say we share in the communion and love of the Trinity and all over our world today, there is so much pain, so much hunger and desperation, so much divisiveness in politics and international relations, so much oppression and marginalization, corruption, hatred, kidnapping, banditry, discrimination and the likes.
My dear Friends, as celebrate the solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity let us imbibe the gift of love and do the needful s Christians, because we cannot grow in our union with God, unless we grow in love. And we cannot grow in love, unless we reach out to one another and begin to share in the same way that God shares within that mystery of the Trinity; reciprocity, mutuality and communion of life. We must be people who love and who are loved in order to be all that God wants us to be, remember he says: ‘If a man loves me, says the Lord, he will keep my word; of loving his fellow brethren as well, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.’ (John 14.23).
