Homily
for the Feast
of the Holy Trinity
May
30, 2021
Rom
8: 14-17
Holy
Name of Jesus, New Rochelle, N.Y.
“The Spirit
himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if
children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ” (Rom 8: 16-17).
We’re celebrating today the feast of the Most Holy Trinity, that core dogma of Christian faith that God is one and 3: one God of 3 Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit existing in communion with each other from eternity.
We can’t
understand, much less explain, this mystery of faith; we can only state that
it’s so. The sacred Scriptures affirm
it, like those we just heard from Paul’s Letter to the Romans and Matthew’s
Gospel (28:16-20).
Part of the
wonder of this mystery is that God has called us into communion with
himself. In the Old Testament he spoke to one
particular people, “took one nation for himself from the midst of another
nation” (Deut 4:34), called Israel out of Egypt to make them his own in a
relationship sometimes compared to a father and child; e.g., in God’s voice the
prophet Hosea exclaims, “Out of Egypt I called my son” (11:1); or compared to a
husband and wife, as in the Song of Songs.
God has created and ardently desires an intimate, family relationship
with his people.
That family
relationship has been intensified by the coming of Jesus Christ and his gift to
us of the Holy Spirit. We’ve been born
again of water and the Holy Spirit; we’ve been adopted into the divine family. We have “received a Spirit of adoption, thru
which we cry ‘Abba!’” (Rom 8:15), which means “Papa” or “Daddy.” By the association of the Son of God with us,
by the gift of the HS, God the Father has adopted us as his own children, his
sons and daughters alongside Jesus Christ “and joint heirs” (8:17) with Christ
of all the joy and glory of the kingdom of heaven.
In the Creed
we recite a phrase that some people find troublesome—not because they disagree
with it but because they don’t understand it.
We affirm that the “Lord Jesus Christ” is “begotten, not made, consubstantial
with the Father.” As a human being, of
course, Jesus of Nazareth was born in time, which we celebrate at Christmas;
his humanity was begotten, as the Creed itself states further on.
But God’s Son
who was conceived in the womb of the Virgin Mary and from her assumed our human
nature already existed, existed forever in his divine nature, his divine
self: begotten by the Father, not
created, not made. If he had been
created, he would have had a beginning; and if he had a beginning he is not God. St. John begins his Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word
was with God, and the Word was God. And
the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (1:1,14). The Word, the Father’s self-expression, is
eternally begotten as a distinct Person, the Son. Just how the Father begets the Son, we can’t
say. Obviously it’s not the same way
that human beings or other animals beget their offspring.
The Creed
states further that the Son is “consubstantial” with the Father. I.e., he is of exactly the same substance as
the Father; whatever the Father is as God, so is the Son. That substance is divinity, as your substance
and mine is humanity, and the substance of your pet is dog-ness or cat-ness or
parakeet-ness, etc. (I don’t intend to
run thru the whole Bronx Zoo.)
Our adoption
as God’s children doesn’t make us Christ’s equals. We’re not “consubstantial” with the
Father or with the Son, however much we share human nature with Christ.
How many of you have pets? Pet owners, dog owners especially, are prone to call their pets members of the family. They may even have gone thru an adoption process at the Human Society. The owner become doggy’s mommy or daddy (and after some training doggy becomes more obedient and docile than the little humans in the household; cats are another story). We all know, however, that the pet isn’t human, isn’t really a son or daughter by nature but only by adoption, so to speak.
Our relationship to God thru Christ is different. We are God’s adopted children, and we really are his daughters and sons by grace. Baptism makes a definitive difference in who we are, such as no Humane Society paperwork can do for puppy or kitty. God thru Christ really makes us heirs with Christ of the heavenly kingdom. We may laugh, or maybe cringe, when we hear that some—dare we say “crazy”?—person has left a big inheritance to a pet. Our inheritance is something firmer, more substantial, and everlasting. God loves us far more substantially—everlastingly—than any man or woman ever loved a dog or a cat.
St. Matthew tells us that, even after Jesus rose and appeared to the 11 apostles and they worshipped him, “they doubted” (28:17). Does that astonish you? We need have no doubts that God truly loves us, loves us passionately, and ardently desires us to belong to his family. His gift of the Holy Spirit binds us firmly to his own Trinitarian life and entitles us, as the liturgy reminds us before holy Communion, to “dare” to call him, in union with his Son Jesus, “our Father” and to look with “blessed hope” to the Son’s return on the Last Day to escort us to our place in our Father’s home,
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