Saturday, June 20, 2015
Trinity June 1 2015
Trinity
June 1 2015
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
Make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the Name of
the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit
.
+ In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity
It is
customary to observe that Trinity Sunday is the only, Prayerbook feast
dedicated to a doctrine instead of a Biblical event or person. While this is strictly true, it could also be
argued that the Feast of the Holy Trinity celebrates the ongoing fulfillment of
our Lord’s biblical promise to send the Holy Spirit to lead us into all
truth. The event it commemorates is a
process.
Jesus commanded us to baptize all peoples in the Name of the
Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
We noticed that the Creation story in Genesis told of God, God’s Spirit,
and God’s Word. Pondering all this, the
Church eventually arrived at an open-ended and partial understanding of God,
which we expressed in the philosophical terms of the time (the Fourth century),
not without enormous controversy. One of
the greatest minds participating was Hilary of Poitiers, who wrote:
We are compelled to attempt what is
unattainable, to climb where we cannot reach, to speak what we cannot
utter. Instead of the bare adoration of
faith we are compelled to entrust the deep things of religion to the perils of
human expression.
Trinity
Sunday celebrates the historical event of the Church’s experience of this
compulsion by the Holy Spirit.
To say anything at all ran the risk of error. To say nothing was impossible, because of the
Holy Spirit. As on the First Pentecost,
when the Apostles could not keep silent, but found they had to speak in many
languages, so their successors were "compelled to entrust the deep things
of religion to the perils of human expression." The dogma of the Most Holy and Life-giving
Trinity was the result. This Festival
celebrates not only the dogma itself, but the event of its development.
Hilary spoke of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit as "and
the infinity of endless being, the perfect reflection of the divine image, and
the mutual enjoyment of the gift."
He also insisted that the Three Persons were really distinct, but only
in their origin. Each person participates
completely in the other two: a total permeation of each one by the others, so
that they differ only by the relationship of origin: the Father has really
generated the Son without losing anything of His Nature. The Son and the Spirit have received and
contain in Themselves everything of the Father, equal to Him in every way. The Life of the three Divine Persons is a
"dancing within one another," as St. John of Damascus would say 400
years later.
The gradual revelation of the inner Life of
God, though ultimately incomprehensible, is far from meaningless. The dogma glorifies God as Infinite
Community, in which the Persons are united in Infinite Love. This could be what the Apostle meant when he
said "God is Love." Since it
is also a matter of dogma that human beings are made in the image of God, it is
suggested that our life as God’s image means communal life, what one modern
Greek theologian called "being as Communion." All humanity — and through us all creation —
are called to be one as Jesus and the Father are One, that is, neither losing
our distinct identities nor separating from one another in any way.
Today we celebrate the Divine Unity in Trinity; next week, we
celebrate the incorporation of all creation into that “Infinity of endless
Being” in the Feast of the Body of Christ.
HOLY! HOLY! HOLY! IS THE LORD OF HOSTS,
WHO WAS AND IS AND IS TO COME
