Fr. Ed Liptak, SDB

The Father is God. The Son is God. The Spirit is God. There is only One God. Only Faith can say that. Our human capacity has identified the sameness by the word, God. What is different in the one God is so distinctly different that we have assigned different names to the one Being: God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. All three are one same God. Yet, because they are so markedly distinct, we identify them as individual Persons. Our one God is a Unity of Three Divine Persons.

Let us see if our scriptures this Trinity Sunday can help us to better understand and accept this mystery of Threeness and Oneness. First, a whole people, beginning with Abraham, have worshipped a God who revealed Himself. Then Moses, 1500 hundred years before Christ, codified that faith in the one God. Christianity has prolonged that belief into these times of Christ and added two thousand years to the belief in one Creator God. Moses wrote, “Know,  and fix in your heart, that the LORD is God in the heavens above and on earth below and that there is no other.”

Insistently, our great scholar St. Paul urged in his letter to the Romans that we live our faith. He asks that we allow ourselves to be led by the Spirit and that we become truly sons and daughters of God. We are chosen not to fear Him but to hold Him in affectionate respect, even to call Him by the much-loved name for one’s Father, Abba. In faith, join yourselves to Jesus, says Paul, so that united with Him in this world, you will enter the next as coheirs with Him, united both here and above. For Paul, the Spirit impels us to be God’s Children. By being united to the true Son of God,  we share His glory with Him. We share Divine Life!

Jesus is the key to understanding the Holy Trinity. Often, especially in the Gospel of John, Jesus refers to Himself as God, One with the Father. He spoke of the Holy Spirit as His Spirit. To accept Him who came in the Name of His Father, who asked His Father to send the Holy Spirit as teacher and guide, this must be enough for us. Confronted with the mystery of the Holy Spirit, our brilliance fades. In Jesus, we find rest for our restless minds. To accept with faith who Jesus is, is to accept that God is One, but He is also Three. Leave it to Jesus.

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – in Them, we are Baptized.