Homily for the Most Holy Trinity

Deuteronomy 4:32-34

Romans 8:14-17

Matthew 28:16-20

The mystery of the Holy Trinity is one that many preachers and many theologians have tried to explain through the centuries, many well-intentioned and fine teachers of the faith have attempted to explain to us this mystery of the nature of God, and when a great many of them attempt to do this, a good number of them of them through the centuries (perhaps the majority) have lapsed into heresy. This is usually because when people try to explain the Trinity, a reality which is the very nature of God himself, they often try to explain in a way that is simple to understand, and they are explaining something that is not to be fully explained on this side of Eternity.

The bishop Arius tried to explain the nature of God by explaining away the Divinity of Christ. He got a wide following, too. Indeed, so wide was the following that Arius had that years after the Arian controversy, St Jerome commented that "the whole world groaned, waking up one morning to find itself Arian." It took the persistence of Saint Athanasius, who actually held the minority view in those days that our Lord Jesus is one in being with the Father, to ensure that the orthodox position as we know it today remained the teaching of the Church. 

Nestorius, who was the Patriarch of Constantinople, attempted to explain the complex nature of God in the person of Christ by trying to say that Christ had two persons, one human and one divine. Of course the Church holds that Christ is the second person of the Trinity and that he is both human and divine, and that he is only one person, and The Trinity is made up of three persons with one divine nature.

A lot of people know the old story that Saint Patrick evangelized the people of Ireland by explaining the Trinity with a shamrock. Truth be told, that's kind of an apocryphal story. We don't know if Saint Patrick used a shamrock to explain the Trinity, but the story became so widely circulated and accepted that the shamrock became one of the national symbols of Ireland, and one of the best known Christian symbols of the Trinity. We have to be careful, however, when using the shamrock or any other such symbol to try and explain the Trinity because very often people lapse into another heresy called sabelianism or "modalism" when they do so. This is the idea, widely circulated even in some Protestant sects today, that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, are merely three modes or aspects of the Divine Revelation, rather than three distinct persons which coexist in the Divine Nature.

An Arabian tribesman called Muhammed in the 7th century couldn't explain this critical understanding of God's nature at a time when much of the known world had become Christian. His solution was to reject this teaching, to deny that Christ was divine or even that Christ was sacrificed for our sins, but merely to say that Jesus was the greatest of all the prophets… until Muhammad came along, of course. A lot of people followed Muhammad's teaching, many of them willingly, some of them by force.

All of these attempts to explain- or to explain away- the Trinitarian understanding of God's nature forget the reality that Sacred Scripture is clear… Jesus himself said that the Father and he were one. He told the Pharisees "before Abraham was, I AM." That declaration caused many of the Pharisees to take up stones to stone Jesus, because if he wasn't God, he had just committed blasphemy. 

Jesus used the Divine Name to identify himself. He even did it in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night he was betrayed, this was why the Gospel accounts tell us that the soldiers- members of the Temple guard- who came to arrest Jesus fell back when after asking for Jesus of Nazareth, he replied "I AM." Jesus makes it clear that he is one with the Father, that He is equal to God and He is God, something no mere human could ever say.

The nature of God is unchanging, God says Himself in the Scriptures that "I am the LORD, I change not." (cf. Malachi 3:6) This means that God has always been one Divine Nature, but Three Persons in one Divine Nature. The unchanging nature of God also means that God has always been all merciful, all loving, but also all holy, and all just. If anyone ever tells you that the God of the Old Testament was vengeful and full of wrath but the God of the New Testament is loving and merciful, you should know immediately that that kind of teaching is complete and utter nonsense. God was not any less loving or merciful in the Old Testament. We know this because just as soon as Adam and Eve committed the first sin, God promised them a Savior for the human race (cf. Genesis 3:15), and that meant that immediately God was letting humanity know that even though we had to live with the consequences of our sin, He loves us enough that he will never give up on us as long as this world tarries. 

Conversely, there are lots of people who want to preach the love and compassion of Jesus and the apostles, but they are not interested in the moral pronouncements of Jesus and the apostles because the merciful and loving Jesus was also the perfectly just Jesus. The Jesus who loved us enough to save us and make himself a slave so that we could be free loved us enough not to keep us in our sin. Jesus and his earliest followers gave us a clear picture of the moral life that we are supposed to live as followers of Jesus Christ. This was so important to the earliest followers of Jesus that it was made repeatedly clear that those who did not repent from sin could be and should be cut off from God's people.  Today we call that excommunication… Are we supposed to believe that Jesus and the apostles were unloving people? No, Jesus was the most compassionate person who ever lived and the apostles certainly followed in his footsteps. But God is both merciful and just. 

The Holy Trinity is something that we were not meant to completely understand in this life, but it is a reality because the persons of the Trinity are real, we can really experience them, and they are really God, and really one God. Rather than trying too hard to explain something we will only fully understand when - by God's grace and mercy- we are with God for Eternity, it might do us all well to remember God's Word to the prophet Isaiah, that God's ways are so far above our ways as the Heavens are above the Earth. (cf. Isaiah 55:8-9)