Today is Trinity Sunday. It is not easy to preach on the Trinity because our lens is rather commercially pragmatic and functional. The Trinity can be spoken of in itself but since we are home with the practical, we generally understand better what the Trinity does. In other words, we prefer the economic (oikonomia) Trinity to the immanent (theologia) Trinity. God is easier for us to appreciate when we think of Him in terms of what He does rather than who He is. Who He is, is a mathematical nightmare!
But the separation between the immanent and the economic Trinity is false because both descriptions of the Trinity are important. Who God is in Himself, is important because the Trinity is not a concept that people can easily grasp, especially for those who claim their religion as monotheistic. Muslims have great difficulties understanding how God can be considered one in the face of Christians’ claim that He is a Trinity of persons.
It was mentioned earlier that the question about Agnes being the wife of Joseph or Helen being the wife of Stephen was not a focus on gender inequality or oppressive “patriarchy”. As contemporary society attempts to dismantle “patriarchy”, it begins with “degenderising” God. Since God is neither male nor female, some priests have resorted to using gender-neutral formulae for baptism: “I baptise you in the name of the Creator, the Redeemer and the Sanctifier” or “I baptise you in the name of the Maker, the Liberator and the Sustainer”. Such formulae basically reduce God to His economic functions, and they fail to elaborate the relationship between them. Without the context of relationship, the formulae themselves might imply that there are three gods. So, we may as well be worshipping Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma—the three deities of Hinduism.
In terms of operations ad extra, all the three divine Persons are Creator, Maker, Redeemer, Sanctifier, Liberator, and Sustainer. God’s action in the world is the common work of the three divine Persons. As the Trinity has only one and the same nature, so too does it have only one and the same operation (CCC #258). However, specific aspects of this one saving work can be appropriated to distinct persons according to their unique personal properties. Therefore, to the Father who is the principle, origin, and source, we attribute the work of creation. He sent His Son to be born of Mary in order to accomplish the work redemption. Together, they sent the Holy Spirit to sanctify those who have been saved. Think of the Father as He who plans our salvation; the Son as He who carries out that plan; and the Spirit as He who perfects the plan. These divine attributes that are “personal” to the Trinity are always in relation to us.
Note therefore that the Trinity does not designate three modes of a Person (for that is Modalism) but three Persons in One God. Hence, it is crucial to know who God is in Himself and not just how useful He is for us? Put it in another way, to love someone is to also know the person intimately because in loving there is always self-disclosure. Revelation is God’s self-disclosure and for us to love Him, we must negotiate the truth of who He is. A person is revealed through his actions and the more we know him, the better we understand his actions.
Perhaps it is testimony to how utilitarian we are that we are interested not in who God is but only in what He can do for us. In particular when we consider that we easily give up hope whenever our prayers are not answered. For example, in light of our pandemic, where is God? Does His silence not point to His impotence at best or His cruelty at worst?
So, to know Him more, we must go to the source of His revelation which is Sacred Scripture. For right at the beginning of Genesis, we already have an instance of God’s self-communication in the creation of man in the image and likeness of God. In the narrative of creation, there appears to be grammatical error in the way God speaks of Himself. “Let US make man in OUR image, in the likeness of OURSELVES…” (Gen 1: 26). In the New Testament, at the end of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus entrusted to the Apostles the Great Commission “to baptise in the NAME of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matt 28:19).
Sacred Scriptures in the Old Testament show us traces of the Trinity. In the New Testament, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are grouped under ONE name and not three names.
To understand this unity in Trinity, we enter into the mystery of processions and relations in God. The word person in the Trinity is a description of a relation that is distinct and not a description of an “individual” the way we understand it today. Each person of the Trinity is different from the other two by way of relationship. They are not distinct by way of nature or essence. They are one in nature or essence and therefore we believe in One God. But they are 3 Persons because they are distinct in their relations to each other. The Council of Florence, AD 1338-1445, defines that in God, there is one nature, two processions, three Persons and four relations.
The Son “proceeds” from the Father, and the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father and the Son”. These are the two processions in God. These two processions are the basis for the four relations that constitute the three persons in God. The four eternal relations in God are first, the Father actively and eternally generates the Son. Second, the Son is passively and eternally generated by the Father. Third, the Father and Son actively spirate the Holy Spirit. And fourth, the Holy Spirit is passively spirated of the Father and the Son.
In these four relations, there are only three persons because Father and Son are already persons. It cannot be that the Father and the Son become yet another super-person to spirate the Spirit.
Let me further explain on the meaning of relation in the context of the Trinity. We are creatures of time and our understanding is encapsulated by time. Take the example of Augustine and Gregory. Augustine is the father and Greg is the son. Who comes first? Many people will answer Augustine since he is the older of the two. But, when you think about it, both came into “existence” at the same time because the words “father” and “son” are relational terms. Augustine can only be a father if he has a son or a daughter. No one is father or mother before he or she has a child.
Is the concept of how the Trinity is constituted important for us to know? The short answer is yes. When interdependence and community is unappreciated. When we over-emphasise the individual, we tend to lose sight of the communal. For example, suicide (without judging a person’s subjective capacity or reason for it) is objectively the highest form of selfish individualism. Have you ever wondered who has to scrap off the splattered remains of a person who jumps off a 20-storey building? “Others” meaning the community has to clean up after an “individual freely” decides to take his own life.
Now in this pandemic, imagine this message we are receiving: “You are important to me only in so far as you are distanced from me”. Self-preservation is the god we worship today. How utilitarian have we become? Look at the SOP that they gave out. Those above 70yo are not allowed to attend Mass. Someone told me that he was denied entry into the supermarket because he was above 60yo. These precautions do make sense under the guise of protection and preservation of life but the vibe unwittingly sent out is this: “If you are above 70, you are better off dead than alive. You are useless and if you were sick, you suck up valuable medical resources”. If an elderly is restricted by his age and excluded from participating in “life”, then question to ask is what the preservation of life is for? So that they may die older and perhaps lonelier than they are now? It is rhetorical and not an advocacy of recklessness.
We hear complaints about politics in general. Current in our political discourse is the “backdoor” government. What is specific is how we all loathe politics in Church. Here we are not speaking of the Church’s involvement with politics but rather of the political intrigue within the Church. Anyone who serves can tell you that the Church is rife with politics all the way from Pope Francis down to the layman or woman on the street. Well, there is a politics which will not stab you in the back nor throw you under the bus when it is convenient. It is not utilitarian and it is the politics of the Trinity. The Christ who came to save and the Spirit who sanctifies invite us into their politics so that we may in that way divinise our body politics in such a way that the oikonomia (what we are in the way we organise life) might reflect what is theologia (how God is in the inner life of the Trinity). That we hear in the 2nd Reading today.
The politics of the Trinity is selflessness. The Father in begetting, the Son in being begotten; the Father and Son in spirating, and the Spirit in being spirated are all acts of selfless love. In the coming days, if and when the lockdown is completely lifted, we will see a lot more “self-preservation” than we are seeing now. More people will be laid off from their jobs etc. The politics of selfless giving is exemplified in Jesus laying down His life for others. He embodies what it means to be God’s love. We may sin and we will definitely betray that love, but that crucified love will never betray us. This is the body politics of the Trinity. We might do well to remember this on Trinity Sunday.
