Archbishop of Sydney

Trinity Sunday

St. Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney
Deut 4:32-4. 39-40, Rom 8: 14-17, Mt 28: 16-20

By + Cardinal George Pell
Archbishop of Sydney
11/6/2006

Many people today, especially if they are not well informed on the topic, will claim that all religions are pretty much the same, with similar teachings.  Usually they go on to claim that these religions are not particularly useful and some of them even choose different teachings or practices which suit them from the different traditions.  The so called New Age religions are like this.

One important difference among religions follows from the presence or absence of a belief that there is only one God.  God, or gods are not absolutely essential to the nature of religion.  The Buddha himself wrote nothing about God and was probably agnostic rather than atheist.  We come into a special category of course, as we are monotheists, while those who believe in many gods are polytheists.  Most people in the ancient world e.g. in ancient Greek and ancient Rome were polytheists and many Hindus today believe in many gods, although some also believe in a supreme God.

In Moses’ time the Jews were surrounded by polytheists and often a nation would have a preferred god to whom they showed allegiance, recognizing that other peoples followed a different god, just as we follow different national soccer teams today!

This is the background for Moses’ claims about Yahweh, the one true God revealed to the Jewish people.  Such was the Jewish reverence for God that they never pronounced His name, while in Hebrew text the vowels are not written so that some mistakenly today call God “Jehovah” rather than “Yahweh”. 

Yahweh is God, explains Moses, “He and no other”; He is above heaven and earth, the creator of man, who has spoken to the Jewish people in the burning bush.  They heard this voice and remained alive, because they are the one people God has chosen as his own, the people whom He led out of slavery in Egypt with many signs and wonders.

We take it for granted that the one true God has given us laws and commandments, but the idea that God would be interested in our moral lives and in fact require us to live in a certain way would have been a complete novelty to the ancient Greeks and Romans.  Their gods were capricious and selfish themselves and never prescribed moral duties.

Implicit in the notion that God has told us how we should live is the possibility that this same God will judge our personal performance during life when we die.  For some this is a terrible burden and some neo-pagans today (i.e. people who do not believe in God) reject this notion that we shall be judged at death and often also reject the notion that there are moral truths, knowable standards of right and wrong.

One contemporary intellectual, George Steiner by name, even claims that the real reason why Hitler and the Nazis hated the Jews so insanely and with such malevolence was because the Jews brought us the news there is only one God.  There might be something in this, because the Nazi hatred of the Jews was diabolical and economically counterproductive as well as being monstrously evil.

We know that the Moslems, as well as our older brothers and sisters the Jews, believe in one God.  They are strict monotheists but some Moslems and some Christians deny we worship the same God.  When I have been asked about this I reply that as there is only one God no monotheist has anything else to worship, but the problem can be posed in another way.  Are the descriptions of God found in the Q’uran compatible with the descriptions of God found in our New Testament?

There are important differences because the Moslems do not believe in the Trinity of Father, Son and Spirit, whose feast we celebrate today.  Nor do they accept Our Lord as divine, believing him to be an important prophet only, who in fact did not really die on the cross.

Another important difference is that there is nothing like the emphasis on love in the Q’uran as there is in the Christian scriptures.  There is no equivalent to the passage in Romans which we heard today explaining that we are sons and daughters of God, not slaves and even more than servants.  We can call God “Abba” – better translated as “dad” than the more formal notion of the word “father” as we use it in Australia.  We are children of God, in some real sense brothers and sisters of Christ, heirs to his glory in the next life as we are called, at least sometimes, to share his sufferings in this life.

These perspectives are so important, these teachings bring such life changes to our living that we can understand why Our Lord commanded his apostles to take this message and preach it through the whole world, inviting everyone to be baptized in the name of the Trinity; Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Imagine how different our self-understanding would be if there was no God to forgive our sins, or if the one true God did not believe in forgiving sins, but followed the principle of “one strike and you are out”!  For all serious adult Christians life would be totally different.

The foundation of all our religious understanding comes from the conviction that the one true God loves us and this belief is so much easier when we accept that by understanding Jesus and his teachings we are shown God’s heart at work, when He sent his only Son to suffer and die so that we would be saved.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.