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There were days that I had to take bus when I was studying theology in Dublin. I avoided the upper deck of the bus because the Irish, in the slums where I lived, were like some Malaysians. “No smoking” was just a meaningless sign. There were times I was forced upstairs and the scenery on the way to or from college looked different.
Like today’s Trinity Sunday. A different perspective can deepen our understanding of who God is. The lower deck of the bus represents our everyday life. When we face a reality, day in and day out, the landscape can fade into the background. Those who are clutter-blind know the experience.
Our liturgy is basically Trinitarian. We take it for granted. The common formula at the end of the Collect sounds like this: Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, forever and ever. Amen. Since all our prayers are Trinitarian, do we need Trinity Sunday at all.
Trinity Sunday is like the upper deck of the double-decker bus—a reminder to step away from the everyday grind that sometimes reduces a mystery to nothing. Firstly, the Trinity is not our invention. It is a revelation from God on which our faith is based. We believe in one God even though He revealed Himself as the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. While we need to be faithful to this revelation, the question remains if the formula is dated or out of touch with progress.
For example, when in the 50s or 60s under the aegis of liberation, equality, feminism, it was felt that language was inherently oppressive since its structure was patriarchal. There was a movement to neutralise language through a process of de-masculinisation or maybe emasculation. In the past, the word “everybody” carried with it a masculine pronoun, “he”. “Every Malaysian knows at least two languages and that is because ‘he’ lives in a multi-lingual country”. Today we phrase it as “Every Malaysian knows at least two languages and that is because ‘they’ live in a multi-lingual country”.
This “neutered” English crept into our liturgy. It was felt that our prayers should also be “gender neutral”. The word “neutered” is terrible because it seems to emasculate or “defang” language. Anyway, the trend was to update our liturgy to suit this linguistic development. The challenge is that we have a given formula. It is not a construct that the Church invented. Instead it was handed down to us by the Apostles.
The received formula is “I baptise you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit”. It became inclusive when “We baptise you in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” OR better still, “I baptise you in the name of the Creator, the Redeemer and the Sanctifier.
Three points to note about these ancient and modern formulae. Firstly there is an agreement in the singular “name”. We are baptised in the NAME. There has never been any baptism done in the NAMES which directs our attention to the given. God’s revelation is a given and on that mount before His Ascension, Christ gave us the formula to baptise in ONE NAME and not three names.
Secondly, it is Christ who baptises. The use of the singular pronoun “I” signifies that the person or the minister who baptises, acts in persona Christi. It is the person and not the “assembly or congregation” that Christ is acting through.
Thirdly, the usage of the formula “creator, redeemer and sanctifier” arises from a confusion between personality and the job description. Whenever God works, God works as one. However, we ascribe creation to God the Father but the Son and Spirit are also working because it is through the Son that creation came to be and it is in the Spirit that life flourishes on earth. There is a relationship between the Father, Son and Spirit which is marked by unity. However, when we speak of Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier, what is missed out are the relationships between these three descriptions. What sort of relationship exists between the Creator and the Redeemer? Between Father and Son, there exists a relationship because words like Mother and Child, Father and Daughter are relational terms. The relational nature of these words are clarified when we ask this question, “Who comes first? The mother or the son”? Our logical framework is based on age in the sense that between an adult and a child, the adult has more years and therefore he or she should take precedence but in reality, no one can be a mother without a child. The minute a woman is pregnant, she is already a mother.
Coming back to the formula, creator, redeemer and sanctifier, the updated formula even though it is progressive, it cannot do justice to the relationship inherent in the revelation of God. In fact, a priest in the recent past, that is, in 2017, had his (not theirs, ha, ha) ordination invalidated and consequently, all his sacramental acts too. The Deacon who baptised Matthew Hood used this formula “We baptise you”. The clever Deacon was trying to be more inclusive. Apart from the so-called Fr Matthew Hood’s ordination being invalid, his absolution in Confessions were also not valid and subsequently all the marriages he conducted too. In the Diocese of Toowumba, Queensland, Australia, the same happened.
Just recently, we also changed a formula in the English language to better reflect our understanding of the Trinity. It is the formula used to conclude the Collect. The change took place on 17th Feb 2021. It was Ash Wednesday. “Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, ONE GOD, forever and ever” became “Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, GOD, forever and ever”. Why?
The previous formulation undermines the uniqueness of the Trinity because the translation can suggest that there are three gods. Firstly, the prayer is directed to God the Father and therefore the reference to “One God” is not a reference to the Trinity. Perhaps a rephrasing might help. “Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, for He (Jesus Christ) is God for ever and ever”. The conclusion is affirming the divinity of Christ and not referencing the uniqueness of the Trinity.
Jesus Christ is God. He is not One God for if He were One God, then we have three Gods. Our language about God has to be faithful because God chose to reveal Himself to us as Father Son and Spirit. How do we want to deal with this? In the past they dealt with it from the perspective of one and three. They had to grapple how three are not three but one. We are no different. We may not wrestle with three in one but still we may be worshipping three Gods without knowing it. Take the Taize hymn. “The Lord is my light, my light and salvation. In God I trust”. If my memory serves me right it used to be “In Him I trust”. Once again, the de-masculinising of our liturgy which in the end begs the question of whom we are worshipping. If we were to follow the trajectory to its logical conclusion, perhaps the hymn should be fully de-masculinised as “The Sovereign (gender neutral) is my light, my light and salvation” otherwise we might be pointing to the Lord and then affirming that the God we trust has no connection with the Lord whom we had just affirmed.
Language has become less a servant of speech, of unity in the search for truth. Instead it morphed more into a means of manipulation serving ideologies to influence thought, perception and social interaction. Somehow a criminal is less a “criminal” when he or she is labelled a justice-involved person. I am well aware that we live in a world where there are approved narratives and we are expected to toe the line. Woe to those who disobey this diktat.
This homily tries to talk about the Trinity in the context of a changing linguistic landscape. Expressions of speech can change and they do but there are realities which we have received and they are beyond us, no matter how we feel. The dogma of the Trinity is the foundation of creation. All created reality came to be through the Trinity. Every prayer of ours has a Trinitarian motif. While our prayers may describe the workings of the Trinity ad extra as the Creator or the Redeemer or the Sanctifier, what is also needed is to appreciate the inner life of the Trinity ad intra because all created reality came to be through their relationship with one another—as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We would do well to remember that.
There is a scientific axiom which states that nature abhors a vacuum. If we take nature in its totality then it would make sense that man does not like the unknown. We do not sit comfortably with the unfamiliar which explains the dismal state that humanity is in right now. Eve could not accept mystery’s hidden or shrouded nature and consequently took up Satan’s suggestion that promised her unlimited knowledge.
Man has this insatiable quest to know more. When rockets were launched into space, it was supposedly the final frontier but that was not the only frontier we have been trying to master. The inner thoughts and processes formed the other frontier that we have been trying to map out. The process of “conquest” continues. Just like St Thomas Aquinas in his days who speculated on the number of angels dancing on top of a pin head, in our days, we try to cram as many bytes as we can onto our ever-miniaturised data storages from the first floppy discs to the latest solid state drives. Right now we are familiar with terabytes. Soon we will be introduced to petabytes and the beyond.
Man has been trying to breach every boundary imposed by nature in this endeavour to control his destiny, to be autonomous, to be like God. Even if we have gone beyond the limits of outer space, we will still want to know what lies behind the beyond. Wise St Augustine recognised this desire to be nothing more than our hunger for the Creator, who had at the inception of creation, moulded into man’s heart a longing which can only be satisfied by the Maker.
This so-called drive or hunger can be unruly. In a way, the desire or drive mirrors a particular perception of how the Holy Spirit behaves. The scene at the descent of the Holy Spirit seems to confirm that. It was almost chaotic when we consider the rushing winds and the loud noises. This unpredictability at the appearance of the Holy Spirit lends itself to an association of freedom with spontaneity. This idea of freedom here is more of an unfettered autonomy. The arbitrariness or the spontaneity of the Holy Spirit may support or justify a perception of human freedom in the area of thought and behaviour. All of us like to do what we want and none of us likes to be told what to do or what not to do. We value individual autonomy.
What might escape our notice is that the descent of the Holy Spirit is also synonymous with the birth of the Church. Nothing is more permanent or steadfast or “boring” than the creation of the Church, for in this newly established entity, the Spirit animates the Body of Christ. The members of the Church are inspired, led and empowered to fulfil the mission that Christ commanded before His ascension—go make disciples of all the nations. In the work of transforming the world, the Holy Spirit is powerfully at work in the Sacraments that Christ bequeathed to His Body. He is reflected in the teachings of the Church. He assists the members of the Church through His gifts so that every Christian may bear fruits.
In a world where individual autonomy is sacrosanct, all the more we must be reminded that the Holy Spirit is tied to the Church. In the last 60 years, greater emphasis has been placed on discerning how the Holy Spirit works “extra ecclesiam”, that is, outside the Church. We must be open to discover where God’s Spirit is working. However, correspondingly, there arose a tendency to “liberalise” the Holy Spirit, that is, to set the Holy Spirit free, partly because we have failed to convince others that the Church, founded by Christ, is His instrument of salvation. In fact we are bogged down by our inability to convince others that we are reduced to searching for commonality in terms of the good we can do. It is as simple as “Since I cannot convert you, let me see how we can cooperate to bring about good”.
In no way is this a demeaning of the other religions. The stress on respect for experiences outside Christianity has given rise to certain theological strands that supports the speculation that Jesus Christ is not necessary for salvation “extra ecclesiam”. This is our conundrum. If every religion leads to God, what role does Jesus play in salvation and how relevant is the Great Commission in our present climate of religious plurality? The unspoken reality is that many Catholics believe that all religions are the same.
The Holy Spirit works “intra” and “extra ecclesiam”. The failure of evangelisation is not the failure of the message but the failure of the messengers. The Holy Spirit can work outside the Church but He cannot work without the Church. In fact the Holy Spirit’s task is to draw all people to God and the chief instrument that He does so is through the Church, the Body of Christ.
Thus, the Holy Spirit did not come to confirm our “inspiration”, that is, the way we want to organise or structure reality. Instead, the Holy Spirit confirms the desire of Christ for His Church through the gifts we receive. From these gifts, we bear fruits to offer to God our Father. The point is not to tie the Holy Spirit down. There is a trend these days which is captured by a concept bandied around. We hear of “paradigm shift” as a process of renewal and transformation.Latent within this concept is the idea that old is to be discarded because the new has arrived. Coupled with novelty is spontaneity—freedom, carefreeness or even “disobedience”. My novice-master once said to a fellow novice—do not use the Holy Spirit to sanctify your disobedience. If I do not want to obey what the Church teaches, I can easily use the Spirit to rationalise or justify what I want to do. While novelty is inherently exciting, the Holy Spirit is also boring or predictable because He has His work cut out—in the Sacramental economy of the Church. In the work of redemption, we need the Holy Spirit to ensure that we have full access to the Sacraments of Jesus Christ. If we celebrate the Spirit’s work “extra ecclesiam”, all the more we must give thanks to Him for the work “intra ecclesiam”. Come, Holy Spirit and fill the hearts of your faithful and enkindle in them the fire of your love.
Next Sunday is Pentecost. We are just a few days after the Ascension and the Disciples are hanging around waiting. However, the Gospel is taken from before Christ’s ascent to the right hand of the Father’. The central teaching of Christ is on the unity of the Church expressed through a communion of faith and love.
Recently I suggested, at the morning Mass of the memorial of St Bernardine of Siena (20th May), that the congregation should buy “empat nombor ekor”. The number was 8647. It seems that 86 is the code for killing and 47 denotes the current US President.
The background of this lottery number is that it was spotted by the former head of the FBI while he and his wife were walking along the beach. He posted it on X and it created a political kerfuffle. Those who hate Trump supported Comey’s claim of blissful ignorance. Apparently he did not know the real meaning of 8647. Those who love Trump felt that it was yet another incitement to assassinate the President.
There is an unprecedented level of hatred arising from a political fissure that is rending that country apart. Sadly, it is not only a land far away. Hatred is also something which we may be familiar with. The whole election of the Pope was rife with speculation on who the next Pontiff would be. The betting that took place merely indicated the cracks and crevices that we have been experiencing.
Liberals wanted a Pope who will continue the pace of change so that the Church can keep up or conform to societal norms. Conservatives preferred a Pope who can roll back the perceived deviations that we had made under Pope Francis. It is lamentable that there exists such a sad division in the Church where opposing parties simply disdain the other.
Sadly, our division is sign of forgetfulness too. We have forgotten who the Church is supposed to be. Instead of praying for a Pope that we need, some have hoped for Pope to mirror their philosophical or theological stand. Right or wrong may not be the issue here. Forgetfulness is. The Church belongs to Christ. Rightly so, that before the descent of the Holy Spirit, Christ prayed for His Church to remain united.
There are two great sins against the Body of Christ. The first is the sin of heresy. Heresy is a sin against the unity of faith. The second sin against the Holy Spirit is schism. It is a sin that breaks up the Body of Christ.
Perhaps it is fortuitous that we have a son of St Augustine who has ascended the throne of Peter. Divisions are aplenty but charity must trump all else. Politics which is supposedly the art of friendship, of negotiation, of compromise has become, for many of us, a poisonous chalice. We not longer enter into a conversation but instead we are on the look-out for weaknesses to exploit, in order to gain the upper hand. Ultimately this does not serve the people because the politics of poison cannot build up the community. It destroys and renders the community even more fractured than it should be.
We are living in an age where our philosophical persuasion or theology tendency are divided and fractured which makes reaching across the aisle rather arduous. The result is that minds alike tend to create bubbles or echo chambers where tribes of the same bent can hear their biases confirmed or even amplified instead of being challenged. These safe havens provide security rather the promote self-reflection. In the end the good that we want to achieve and hope to gain is negated by the divisions we have.
Christ was correct for He prayed for the unity of his followers or of his disciples. Anyone who claim himself to be a Christian must be an apostle of love and of unity. It is true that that things can be wrong. It is true that we need to say things as we know it. In other words, we are held accountable by what we know to be true. But it is also possible that we speak the truth with love.
The challenge we face is that “truth” is now a servant of an economy hinged on material wealth geared towards entertainment and amusement. Thus we have billionaires and celebrities lecturing us on how we should organise our lives. To be fair, possessing wisdom and being a personality, a celebrity or billionaire are not mutually exclusive. A billionaire or a celebrity can also be wise in the ways of the Lord. But by and large these so-called elite have arrogated upon themselves a platform which they believe is theirs by virtue of their status or they feel themselves entitled to, to berate us on how we should live. Yet, we know that some of their private lives cannot even muster a simple scrutiny of morality.
The ability to speak truth must come from a position that recognises that we are in the world but we are not of the world. Thus, it is not wealth or fame that allows one’s voice to be louder. Rather, whether we be richer or poorer, what is crucial is that we are united in the love of Jesus Christ and animated by a faith we profess in Him. The world is diverse and plural. If there is unity to be forged, it must come from persuasion rather than pressure, conviction rather than compulsion. Differences or diversity do not have to result in division whereas imposition of uniformity will not result in unity. Instead, it will foment divisive resentment. More than ever, in a world diverse and divided, what is needed is charity and in a quote somewhat attributed to St Augustine which we might take note of: In all things inessential, let there be diversity. In all things essential, let there be unity. Above all, let there be charity.
I would like to start with Napoleon and check-in with him towards the end of homily.
Apparently Napoleon threatened a Cardinal of the Church. “Your eminence, are you not aware that I have the power to destroy the Catholic Church?” According to tradition, the cardinal was sanguine in his reply. “Your Majesty, we, the Catholic clergy, have done our best to destroy the Church for the last 1,800 years. We have not succeeded, and neither will you”.
“I will be with you always, until the end of time” is the explanation for Cardinal’s response. Christ promised just before He was taken up from the view of the Apostles that He would be with His Church until the end of time. No power on earth will prevail against her.
Christ has kept this promise. He may have ascended but we have never been alone. Sometimes we hear or read this, “He has left us the Church”. The fact is, He did not “leave the Church with us”. Instead, He has been present in His Church. At each Mass, He is present in the people gathered. He is present in His word proclaimed. He is present in the priest who acts alter Christus. Finally, He is present in the Eucharistic elements of bread and wine after consecration. This intense and abiding Presence is felt in tabernacles across cathedrals, churches, chapels or oratories that many choose to spend time in.
Either we forget this truth or Jesus has been ignored.
In these last few decades we have witnessed the explosion of news and commentaries that are very much in our faces. Politics is beamed directly into our living rooms. Even this statement sounds outdated. Events are streamed onto our devices so much so that we are experiencing an immediacy which has never been felt before. But this proximity is not entirely positive or life-giving. Given that information is power, the flow and dissemination of news and the prevailing narrative is dependent on who is in control. You may have heard of brain-washing, green-washing and now gas-lighting. More than proximity, the result is actually an increase in anxiety. A good example of an anxiety-inducing news or information is climate change. Any inclement weather is now attributed to global warming.
Whether or not global warming is real is debatable because our prevailing social or cultural narrative is dependent on who or which group holds power. The masses are just caught in the swirling eddies of prevailing political winds. How not to be depressed?
In an age of information and disinformation, a lie told one time too many becomes the “truth” and people stake their lives on whatever they want to believe. Depending on your philosophical persuasion, the Church is this or the Church is that. For some, this is a time of great trial or tribulation because their ideas are not embraced by the majority whereas those who are enjoying power believe that whatever is developing is all part of God’s will. Either way, we fail to recognise that the Church is not ours. We belong to the Church and the Church belongs to Christ.
Here we come back to the story Napoleon and his quarrel with the Church. On the side of the Church, we had Pope Pius VII who resolutely refused to submit to Napoleon’s demands. Resigned to the inevitable conflict with Napoleon, Pius VII wrote: “If our words fail to touch Your Majesty’s heart, we will suffer with a resignation conformable to the Gospel. We will accept every kind of calamity as coming from God.”
So, Pius spent 5 years in captivity until Napoleon’s final defeat and imprisonment in St Helena. There Napoleon complained to the now freed Pope of his ill-treatment and he asked Pius VII for the assistance of a chaplain. Napoleon wrote: “I was born in the Catholic religion. I wish to fulfil the duties it imposes and receive the succour it administers”. In the end, when Napoleon died, the first line of his will declared, “I die in the apostolical Roman religion, in the bosom of which I was born more than fifty years since”.
Politics will always be with us. In ecclesial context, politics reveals the human side of the Church. We can be distracted by the power changing hands failing to recognise that compassion makes the Church feel more divine. The Church as adivine institution is very much the presence of Christ in the world. Even if there are actors or players trying to destroy or annihilate Church within or without, our faith is in Christ who leads and guides His Church. The entire Sacramental economy manifests His compassion, mercy, redemption and salvation. While the Church may be powerful as an institution, she is animated not by might but by mercy.
Funny that we judge the Church through contemporary lens meaning that we tend to view the present as the worst of times. Noticed how no leader today is ever free from the inescapable phenomenon of their every word and action analysed, interpreted and explained. Everyone is an expert and everyone is a critic. For Catholics, the Pope is not immune to criticisms but we are assured that the Church has been preserved from error by the promise of Christ and despite bad popes in the past, the Church continues to survive as only a divine institution can. In her human side, she is slow and sometimes clumsy but she has never been defeated. Experiencing the human side of the Church, we can easily confuse and conflate it with temporal society and when there is failure, we also slip into despair. There is an important distinction that can prevent us from despair. The Church is not just the Body of Christ; she is forever the pure and immaculate Bride of Christ. Only we, the sons and daughters, are the sinners.
In conclusion, the Ascension signals Christ forging the path ahead for us. Through His Spirit present in the Church, we are guided to arrive where He is. Mary our Mother was the first to have reached where He is. The martyrs and the saints have followed behind. Nothing can separate us from this destiny. The Ascension is not a description of absence but a promise of Christ’s perpetual presence—a promise fulfilled at Pentecost. Hence, even if the Church weretested severely, we are not afraid but with the strength of the Holy Spirit, we fix our eyes upon Jesus so that we can run the race in which we have entered.
