God: A Relationship of Persons
Dear Sisters & Brothers in Christ,
Today the Church celebrates Trinity Sunday which invites us to reflect on just who and what God is. Jesus revealed to us in numerous places in the Gospel that He, as the Son, is one with the Father who is God. He also revealed that the Holy Spirit is God. In God there are three relationships that we call the three “persons.” Thus, early Christians realized through what God had said through the Jewish prophets and through what Jesus said and did that God is one, but that God exists in three Persons.
The doctrine of the Trinity is the foundational doctrine of the Catholic faith. During the first several centuries of Christianity, the Church had to deal with several conflicting ways of defining God and how Jesus related to the Father. The result of this was clarification of what had been handed on from the apostles and the Church resorted to more sophisticated language to talk about God. This provided a more accurate way of speaking of God and included terms such person and nature to make distinctions about God. The Creed that is recited every Sunday reflects the Church’s continued thinking about the Trinity.
God is a great mystery; our human minds cannot fully grasp everything about God. But knowing as much as we can about God helps gives us insight into His creation. The very nature of God is a relationship of persons, an icon of sorts of family.
The family is one great analogy for the Trinity. The family is united in love, and the three Persons of the Trinity live in a relationship of love with one another. A pregnant mother contains another person within her, which is similar to how the Divine Persons cannot be separated from each other. The Holy Spirit is sometimes defined as the love between the Father and the Son, and when a husband and wife express their marital love, sometimes a new human person results. We even use the familial terms Father and Son to describe two Persons of the Trinity. However, this analogy also has its limits.1
We remind ourselves every time we make the sign of the cross that the One God exists in three divine persons that we call the Holy Trinity. Heaven will be a participation in the life of the Holy Trinity .
Sincerely yours in Christ Jesus, the Way, the Truth and the Life,
