We Celebrate and Glorify the Trinity by our Worship
Today we celebrate the Holy Trinity. We celebrate that there is one God in three Divine Persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. (TLM side note: Holy Spirit and Holy Ghost are both valid translations of “Spiritus Sanctus,” but emphasize different things. Holy Spirit emphasizes his immaterial nature; Holy Ghost, his personal nature.) These three divine persons are equal in all things: dignity, power, and glory. None are created or made. These three divine persons are distinct. The Father is the origin, who begets the Son. The Son is the one begotten of the Father. The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son. The Son is the Image and the Word of the Father who seeks to make the Father known. The Holy Spirit is a procession of love from the Father and the Son who seeks to move our hearts to turn back to the Father and the love Him.1
This is the most important mystery of our faith because it is the mystery of who God is. This mystery can be challenging for us, because it is beyond our ability to understand. Every analogy we use falls short, and most attempts to explain the Holy Trinity fall prey to one of many heresies that the Church has confronted over time. My summary just now was an attempt to explain the Holy Trinity in the simplest terms I can. But even though it is hard to understand the Holy Trinity, we should try.
Why should we try? As you know by now, I love how the Old Testament helps us to understand the New Testament.2 In the Exodus, God sent Moses to Pharaoh to ask for the Israelites to go into the desert and worship Him. The Israelites eventually received this freedom to worship God after the Sacrifice of the Passover Lamb. They left behind their sinful ways and passed through the waters of the Red Sea. They then wandered for 40 years in the desert while offering worship to God and purifying their lives. Finally, after conquering the enemies who sought to destroy them (and who worshiped demons, by the way), they entered the promised land.
God has called us forth from this sinful world to be with Him in Heaven. The Book of Revelation teaches us that in Heaven we will offer true worship to God. So, we, like the Israelites in Egypt, are being called forth to worship God. Our path to this worship mirrors the path of the Israelites in Egypt. The ruler of this world does not want to let us go, but the Lamb of God–Jesus Christ–became the New Sacrifice of the Passover. Just as one lamb was offered for each family in Egypt, so to was one Lamb offered for the family of God in the New Passover. The ruler of this world, Satan, let us go free and just as the Israelites passed from death to life through the Red Sea, so do we in Baptism. Finally, we spend our lives on this earth working to leave behind the sins that attack us and conquer the power our enemy has over us while worshiping God so that we can participate in true worship when, one day, we are invited to the New Jerusalem: Heaven.
You might be wondering at this point, “OK Father, that’s neat, but what does this have to do with the Holy Trinity? Why we should try to understand?”
God saved us from sin so that we can worship Him in freedom. Our humanity reaches its greatest heights and flourishes most fully when we worship and glorify God, because when we worship God, we participate in His inner life. This means we get to spend this time at Mass in the midst of the Holy Trinity. It means that at Mass we get to be present at the Son’s “sacrifice of praise” to the Father in the Holy Spirit. It means that at Mass we get to spiritually glimpse the reality of Heaven. Our worship of God at Mass should transform us to be more like God, because Mass is the action of God. That is why we humans do not have the authority to change the Mass, and why it should, frankly, seem a little unfamiliar to us. The Holy Trinity is beyond our ability to fully understand. If the Mass is a participation in the Holy Trinity’s life, it stands to reason that it is beyond our ability to full understand too.
Today, at Mass, we celebrate the Holy Trinity by meditating on the mystery of God, we glorify the Holy Trinity by our receiving the gift of participation in the life of God at Mass, and we are given salvation as we are transformed us to be more like the Holy Trinity who we will be united to for all eternity in Heaven. The best part, though, is that soon we will receive the Eucharist, a visible and real participation and true reception of the life of our Trinitarian God. May it give us the strength to give all praise and glory both now and for our entire lives to God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Homily for the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity