Our People

Homily for Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity

Our Lady Star of the Sea Watson’s Bay

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
18/5/2008

Where on earth did we get this Trinity idea from? If ever there was a theological Sudoku puzzle with degree of difficulty ‘maximum’, surely this is it!

Last Sunday we saw the first efforts of Christians to plumb that mystery. Just as the Holy Spirit had overshadowed the Blessed Virgin Mary at the Annunciation and filled her with grace and conceived in her God-made-man, so we saw that at Pentecost that same Holy Spirit came down upon the Apostolic Church and filled her with grace and brought forth in her the members of the newborn Church.

We saw people of diverse languages and backgrounds given a new identity – professing one faith, received from One Lord and passed on in one long Apostolic tradition to this day. The central mystery of that faith was put simply by St Paul in our epistle today: we believe that “the grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God [the Father] and the fellowship of [God] the Holy Spirit” is with us all in the Church (2 Cor 13:13).

Every generation struggles to find the right way to speak of the God who is Three-in-One, a divine unity and yet a community of divine persons. Great philosophers and theologians have given us the language of ‘persons’, ‘processions’, ‘relations’ and ‘consubstantial’, but even with their help the Church took centuries to formulate her creeds.

And it all began on that first Pentecost Day. With the vision of the Risen Christ still impressed upon their eyes and the fire-power of the Holy Spirit in their hearts, the first disciples began to reflect upon the central truth about God that Jesus had taught them – the truth told in this morning’s Gospel passage – that God is love (Jn 3:16-18; cf 1 Jn 4:8). As they reflected upon and sought to tell the world about the God-who-is-love, they realized that he was the God-who-is-love even before there was anything as lovely, as loveable, as us to love, even before there was anyone, anything in the world. So unless God was spending all eternity just loving himself, God must have an internal life of persons who love each other.

As they contemplated and communicated to the world the God-who-is-love-from-all-eternity, the disciples of Christ realised that like all true lovers, the three persons of the Holy Trinity receive their deepest identity from each other. The One whom we call the Father is forever that One from whom the Other is begotten: that’s what makes him The Father. The One we call the Son is forever the One begotten of the Father: that’s what makes him The Son. Put another way, He is forever the One spoken by the Father: that’s what makes him The Word – who in time took flesh as Jesus Christ. And at Pentecost it became clear that there is a third, the One who is the love of the two for each other, from all eternity – who in time was poured into the hearts of us all.

Every generation struggles to find appropriate words with which to speak of God and each generation is shaped by that language. So, in a few weeks time, World Youth Day will speak of the Holy Trinity through ancient and contemporary idioms, through catechesis and prayer, liturgy and celebration. The central theme will be one that goes to heart of our identity, one only Christians could say: You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses. (Acts 1:8)

Why do I say that is a uniquely Christian message? For it is The Father who sends The Holy Spirit to enable us to be witnesses to The Son. The whole of our Creed, you might say, is captured in the World Youth Day theme – which is, of course, Our Lord’s last words. As we pray for a new Pentecost for the Great South Land of the Holy Spirit, we are asking that “the grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God [the Father] and the fellowship of [God] the Holy Spirit” be with us all. We are asking that the Most Blessed Trinity be deeply impressed upon the hearts of our young people. As Father, Son and Holy Spirit each receive their identity from each other and from the relations between them, so we hope a new generation of human persons will receive their identity from that same Blessed Trinity and from their relations with God and each other in the Church.

After Mass today I will pour water on the head of a little boy, saying Benjamin Edward, I baptise you in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. From that moment he will be forever an image of the Holy Trinity: a beloved son of God the Father, a graced brother of Christ Jesus, a temple for the Holy Spirit in fellowship with God and his saints. Thereafter, we hope that in every recollected moment he will pray, as we do, “In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit”. We pray that he will regularly offer praise at Mass, as we do, to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. We hope that he will believe, as we believe, in this One-God-in-Three-Persons, the faith handed down to us from the Apostles, told in the lives of the saints, sung in the Sacred Liturgy, and lived in works of justice and institutions of charity. Above all, we pray, for this little boy and for the young people of our world, that they will encounter the Most Holy Trinity in all these words of God, but above all in THE Word of God, Jesus Christ, mediated to us in the Sacred Scriptures and in the Sacraments – that through that encounter, their very identities will be shaped forever.