John 3:16 - 18
There have been many attempts at explaining the Trinity. I’ve even tried to do so a few times myself. I’m convinced it can’t be done. If you say the Trinity is one God acting in three different ways, as Creator, redeemer, and Sanctifier, for example, you are committing the heresy of modalism. If you say that the Trinity is comparable to a shamrock with three leaves that remains one plant, that’s the heresy of partialism - the idea that the three persons together make up the one God. If you believe that the three persons are independent of each other, then you are a trietheist. So is the best thing not to think about the Trinity at all?
Well, obviously the Church does not think so. We have a whole Sunday devoted to this mystery. So I’ve given up hope of objectively understanding the mystery. But I think the Gospel tells us something about how we fit into it.
God (the Father) loves the world. The world is everything that is, everything that he thinks about, because God holds it in existence. Everything owes its existence to God’s sustaining power, which is tied up in love. But here is the surprise. God causes everything to exist, but does this with overwhelming love, and desires to fold everything into himself. As Jesus said, and he only says what the Father tells him, “If I am lifted up, I will draw all things to myself”. Or as Saint Paul says, “the whole of creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time”. Why? Because all of creation awaits redemption --which means to be taken up by God into himself. And that is why God gave us the Son, his Son. By becoming part of creation, the Son now makes it possible that creation, including we human beings, be redeemed, be taken up into the heart of the trinity.
But God in his love for us leaves us with the final say. Whoever believes in him will not be condemned. And that is the critical part for you and I. What does it mean to believe in Him? It’s more than just to admit to a fact. How do we understand this? Well, this gospel comes from a larger section in which Jesus is explaining to Nicodemus his mission. Right before what you hear, Jesus refers to something in the Old Testament, when the Israelites became angry with God over the food he had given them. God then allowed serpents to infest the camp and many died from their bites. One scholar said that the serpents were always there, God just removed his protection. When they came to Moses in repentance, he was told to make a bronze image of a serpent and place it on a pole. If you got bitten, you had to look at the image in order to be cured. What did all this mean? For God to work his miracle of healing, he demanded an action which showed that the repentant person had faith.
That’s what Jesus is talking about. Believing in him means doing something because of that belief, however small. What do we really do because we believe in him? If I don’t steal, is it because that’s God’s commandment or because I don’t want the consequences of getting caught? To believe in Jesus means that we have to resemble Jesus in the way we live. In his time and down through the years, if you were the disciple of a teacher, you were expected to be recognizable, which meant that you took on the mannerisms of the teacher, even to wearing the same kind of clothing, in addition to learning and practicing what the teacher taught.
So the Father loves the Son -- Saint Thomas says it’s because the Son is God and as such is completely loveable. And the Son loves the Father and offers himself and the world of which he has become a part out of love. And this connection between the World and the Son is created by the Holy Spirit, who caused Jesus to be formed in Mary’s womb and who acts to transform bread and wine into the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity ol Jesus at every Mass.
And we who believe in him become part of this Trinitarian mystery.
Imagine a family which consists of the parents and their biological son, and several adopted children. The Son, the oldest, takes all that he has and buys an elaborate gift for his parents out of his love for them. Before he gives the gift, he invites his adopted brothers and sisters to sign the card and thus be part of the givers of the gift. Some do, some don’t. That’s something like the invitation we have today, to believe in the Son.
So on this Trinity Sunday let’s think about the wonderful invitation God gives us -- to join in the gift the Son gives to the Father, by believing in him, by imitating him, by looking like him. And let us ask the Holy Spirit to do to us what he did to Mary and form us into other Christs.
