Trinity Sunday Reflection with Canon Robin Gibbons, 14 June 2025

Abraham and Three Angels by Marc Chagall - 1966 Wiki Image

Perhaps this is a naïve and rhetorical question, but why do we have a designated feast of the Trinity?

It seems to me, particularly as one who serves in the Eastern Catholic Tradition, that the Trinity permeates all aspects of our life and worship, but that the mystery of the Triune One is just that, a mystery which we can partly grasp but never define.

Somehow a feast like this tries to define, tie down something beyond our reach, although to be positive about this celebration, it does draw our attention to the ground of all that makes our faith whole and robust, by pointing out that the Triune God is not an abstract doctrine, but as Karl Rahner wrote, something dynamic and active, never static, always present, the following phrase helps us to learn more: "The Trinity is not merely a reality to be expressed in purely doctrinal terms: it takes place in us..."

This quote is an excellent starting point for thinking and praying. It does not give us a definition, rather it hints that our understanding the Holy Trinity is about living relationships, which is implicit in the greater conversation and connection between Father, Son and Spirit and they with all creation, particularly ourselves.

In this anniversary year of the first great ecumenical council of Nicaea of 325, there will be many serious and scholarly papers written about the emergence of that creedal formula which we now recite in all our Eucharistic Liturgies. East and West. Though this Council was primarily concerned with the divine and human natures of Christ, it had to indicate how the person of Christ connected to the unseen Father and active Spirit.

There is in the creed (recited in the East) an expression of the immutable individuality of each person, particularly in the role of the Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and is not dependent upon the Son. A later reformulation which gained currency in the west has the Spirit understood as somehow becoming more apparent after the Son's earthly life has been achieved, and so a change was made to show this development through the words 'proceeds from the Father and the Son' which we need to note was only gradually adopted. These two phrases are not mutually exclusive, though to be fair they can confuse. I wish we could all adopt the ancient formula, as it also points out that like the Word, the Spirit has been present at all times from creation to now, and was certainly active in the life and ministry of Christ, part of the Divine plan for our human family and all that is connected to us. Maybe something to help resolve that and the date of Easter will emerge from the events celebrating this Council, I hope so!

I suppose that as some are supposed to be good at multi-tasking, we accept that this might be the gift of some in all areas of life, but I would suggest that on the whole, we humans are not great at theological multi-tasking. Holding together the dynamic of the unseen Father, the historical importance of the Son, Jesus the Christ and of his abiding presence shared with us in so many ways, given us by the out pouring of the Spirit's gifts, who is active amongst us and in us, takes a lot of reflection. These insights have so many elusive avenues of thought, hints and guesses, as well as truths seen and known. If intellectual thought about the Triune God escapes us, we are however capable of holding together other gifts, wonder, joy and delight in the life we have and the world that we live in.

More than all this, we know that in the mysteries of human connectivity, not all things are visible to the human eye, in that phrase of St Exupery's 'Little Fox' we discern that often …"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye," meaning of course that there are many things in which we believe that we do not necessarily see, experiencing them in ways beyond sight and sound - particularly those experiences which we learn about in the inner languages of our being, such as those of love, grief, struggle, pain, forgiveness and that gift of fortitude which we can describe as resolve.

Yet looking at our readings perhaps it is the description of prayerful wonder that we find in the words of the psalmist in our responsorial psalm, that of psalm 8 which leads us into the real encounter all of us are offered from the Triune God.

We sing (and hear):

' When I see your heavens, the work of your fingers,

the moon and stars that you set in place-

What is man that you are mindful of him,

and a son of man that you care for him?' (Ps 8 :4, 5)

Mindful of the generic word, 'man' as meaning all of us, the invitation of God is not to dwell too much on doctrine but on prayer, less on definition but on the reality of a dynamic God reaching out to us, opening ourselves to the presence of the All Holy in life. For those of us in the Church that gift is experienced in liturgy, but it is not exclusive. The One in Three reaches to all. Yet it is our task, our mission, our vocation, to enter into the love of the Trinity and help reveal it to others. John Zizioulas helps us discern where we are to go, we instinctively know, it is prayer and communion in the Eucharist through Word and Sacrament. After all the Lex Orandi (prayer, worship) of the Church leads to the Lex Credendi ( belief, definiton, doctrine) and not the other way around.

I leave you with his vision, but as I do, I also ask that we bring before the Living God in intercession, all those killed in the Air India disaster, all whose lives are now irrevocably altered, and for the people of Gaza that the mercy, love and healing power of the Triune God be upon us all.

"In the Eucharist we can find all the dimensions of communion: God communicates himself to us, we enter into communion with him, the participants of the sacrament enter into communion with one another, and creation as a whole enters through man into communion with God. All this takes place in Christ and the Spirit, who brings the last days into history and offers to the world a foretaste of the Kingdom." (Zizioulas)

It is there in the ordinariness of gathering, of hearing and accepting Word, of preaching, in that kiss of peace, in bread and wine changed beyond sight into the mystery of the Son, in our tentative eating and drinking of Him who is our life, that we too become drawn into the mystery of the unending Holy Three in One.

Lectio

THE CREDO OF THE PEOPLE OF GOD

Proclaimed by His Holiness Pope Paul VI on June 30, 1968

Creator of things visible and invisible

We believe in one only God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, creator of things visible such as this world in which our transient life passes, of things invisible such as the pure spirits which are also called angels, and creator in each man of his spiritual and immortal soul.

God absolutely one in His holy essence

We believe that this only God is absolutely one in His infinitely holy essence as also in all His perfections, in His omnipotence, His infinite knowledge, His providence, His will and His love.

God, ineffable Love, has made Himself known to us

He is He who is, as He revealed to Moses, and He is love, as the apostle John teaches us: so that these two names, being and love, express ineffably the same divine reality of Him who has wished to make Himself known to us, and who, "dwelling in light inaccessible" is in Himself above every name, above every thing and above every created intellect.

The Most Holy Trinity calls us to share His eternal life

God alone can give us right and full knowledge of this reality by revealing Himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, in whose eternal life we are by grace called to share, here below in the obscurity of faith and after death in eternal light.

The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity

The mutual bonds which eternally constitute the Three Persons, who are each one and the same divine being, are the blessed inmost life of God thrice holy, infinitely beyond all that we can conceive in human measure. We give thanks, however, to the divine goodness that very many believers can testify with us before men to the unity of God, even though they know not the mystery of the most holy Trinity.

Eternal existence of the three uncreated Divine Persons.

We believe then in the Father who eternally begets the Son, in the Son, the Word of God, who is eternally begotten; in the Holy Spirit, the uncreated Person who proceeds from the Father and the Son as their eternal love.

The worship due to the three Divine Persons

Thus in the Three Divine Persons, coaeternae sibi et coaequales, the life and beatitude of God perfectly one super-abound and are consummated in the supreme excellence and glory proper to uncreated being, and always "there should be venerated unity in the Trinity and Trinity in the unity."

Metropolitan John of Pergamon ( John Zizioulas)

From Communion and Otherness

"The first thing that emerges from a study of the doctrine of the Trinity is that otherness is constitutive of unity, and not consequent upon it. God is not first one and then three, but simultaneously one and three. His oneness or unity is safeguarded not by the unity of substance, as St. Augustine and other Western theologians have argued, but by the monarchia of the Father, who himself is one of the Trinity. It is also expressed through the unbreakable koinonia that exists between the three persons, which means that otherness is not a threat to unity but a sine qua non condition of it.

Secondly a study of the Trinity reveals that otherness is absolute. The Father, the Son and the Spirit are absolutely different (diaphora), none of them being subject to confusion with the other two.

Thirdly and most significantly, otherness is not moral or psychological but ontological. We cannot tell what each person is; we can only say who he is. Each person in the holy Trinity is different not by way of difference of natural qualities (such qualities are all common to the three persons), but by way oft he simple affirmation of being who he is.

As a result, finally, otherness is inconceivable apart from relationship. Father, Son and Spirit are all ames indicating relationship. No person can be different unless he is related. Communion does not threaten otherness; it generates it."