It is fitting that on the Sunday following Pentecost (last Sunday)- the sending of the Holy Spirit – that we have the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity (this Sunday). It honors not an event but a truth revealed by Jesus. It is the most important truth of all. The Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us that “the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of Christian faith and life. …It is the most fundamental and essential teaching in the ‘hierarchy of the truths of faith.’…it is the mystery of God in himself.” (CCC 234)
From its beginning the Church has worshipped God as a Trinity of divine persons in undivided unity. Many of the prayers of the ancient Church include repeated doxologies to the Trinity.
When we make the sign of the cross, we pray, “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” When we baptize we do so with the same Trinitarian formula. Two of our most well-known prayers are the “little doxology” (Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit…) and the “great doxology” (Glory to God in the highest…).
In a baptismal sermon, St. Gregory Nazianzen said:
Above all guard this great deposit of faith for which I live and fight…I mean the profession of faith in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. I entrust it to you today. By it I am going to plunge you into water and raise you up from it. I give it to you as the companion and patron of your whole life…I give you but one divinity and power, existing one in three and containing the three in a distinct way…
It is through the incarnation that God revealed himself to be an eternal communion of persons. God’s self-revelation in Jesus, the Eternal Word, is not simply a disclosure of information; it is a sharing of life – his life. Through baptism we come to share the life of Jesus and in living in God’s eternal Son, we share in the life of the Blessed Trinity.
View/Download this week’s Liturgy of the Word Celebration.
Be enlivened by his word!