Trinity Sunday
Dt 4:32-34, 39-40: Rom 8: 14-17; Mt 28: 16-20
Deacon Larry Brockman
“Behold, I am with you always until the end of the age”. This is Jesus promise to each and every one of us.
You know, as Christians, we share in the unique belief in the Incarnation. This means that we believe that God became man in the person of Jesus Christ, and lived and dwelt amongst us as one of us. He suffered, died, and was buried, only to rise again on Easter. After spending 40 days with his Apostles, He then ascended into heaven. But he left us two very important gifts: The first was the gift of the Eucharist, the Body and Blood of Christ. We will celebrate that gift next week on the feast of Corpus Christi; and the second gift of the Holy Spirit, which we celebrated last weekend on the feast of Pentecost.
Today we celebrate the mystery of the Trinity- the fact that there is just one God, but He is three separate persons- the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. You know, most of us don’t think much about the Trinity. It’s a mystery that “bends our brains”; it defies reasoning. How can God be one, and yet still be three distinct persons?
And yet, the Incarnation and the Trinity go hand in hand in defining the uniqueness of Christianity as a Religion. And I’d like to bring up a few things about why that uniqueness is so important to each of us.
You see, most religions believe that God is far above us. They use the word “transcendent” to describe His distance from us. That simply means that God is far above us, has always existed and always will exist; He is infinitely good, knowledgeable, and He created all things. And so each of us is humbled by the “bigness” of such a God. It would be hard to imagine how to relate to a God who knows everything, and is all good, because he is so far above us. Where would one begin?
Some religions think God just set things in motion and has left things to run their natural course- and that he is uninvolved. These people are called Deists, and Unitarianism has Deist roots. Other people believe that it takes a special kind of person to communicate with God, a person who divorces himself from the world and all things of the world, because God is a spirit, he is not of this world. He is above the world in all ways.
But Christians have this special gift- the Incarnation, in which God sends Jesus into the world to live as one of us. Jesus is both fully human and fully divine, the second person of the Trinity. And so, the Trinity and the Incarnation are interrelated mysteries. We are not capable of understanding either of these mysteries. But what they mean for us when we believe in them is very important.
You see, if God’s son Jesus lived amongst us as one of us; and was both human and divine, then God’s Son was not transcendent. Rather, he was just like one of us. God became what is called immanent to us by living right there alongside of other human beings in his time. That means that real people could relate directly to God. They did so directly with Jesus. And the 4 Gospels record how Jesus taught us to relate to God; to other people in the world, and to the world itself.
While the Incarnation and the Trinity are mysteries; God took away the mystery on how we can all relate to Him. He gave us himself incarnate as Jesus, who was the living example of how humanity can be close to God. And just to make sure that all people of every age that followed Jesus shared in the immanence of Jesus’ earthly presence, He gave us the Eucharist, Holy Communion, his own Body and Blood as a sacrament so that the living God, Jesus would be close to everyone after his time as well.
Now he also promised us the second great gift, the Holy Spirit; the breath of life; the comforter. The Holy Spirit is the third person of the Trinity, and lives forever. So, if we have the Holy Spirit dwelling in us, we will live forever just as the risen Christ lives forever. This, too, is unique to Christianity- the promise of life ever after with the Spirit of God dwelling in us, another sign of the immanence of God in our lives.
And so, let us all be grateful for the mysteries of the Incarnation and the Trinity. We choose to believe without really understanding- we call that Faith. And the fruits of that faith are the two great gifts Jesus left us- Holy Communion and the Holy Spirit.
So, Rejoice, because truly, as Jesus said in the Gospel: “Behold, I am with you always until the end of the age”
