What do you imagine God to be like? When you hear the word, ‘God,’ do you have a picture in your mind?
For many people, God is a kind of Santa Claus figure: an elderly, bearded figure, who keeps tabs of our good deeds and our naughty deeds and either rewards or punishes us accordingly. Others imagine a kingly figure seated on a throne with angels attending. Or they imagine a judge sitting at his bench weighing the merits of our lives before sending us to heaven or hell.
We all have a different vision of who God is – those visions have been formed by our parents and families, our upbringing and education, and especially by our religious experiences. And in our democratic, pluralistic society we tend to think that everyone is entitled to their own definition of God. God is whatever we think God to be, and no one person’s idea of God is any better or worse.
At first, this seems like a reasonable and logical way of thinking. But if we think about this a little more deeply, there are some obvious problems with this line of thought. What if my God is the type of God who tells me it’s okay to kill? We’d probably all agree that we simply can’t admit that understanding or definition of God.
So maybe, just maybe, it’s not best for us to each have our own definitions of God. Perhaps we should let God have some say in how we understand Him, rather than trying to fashion God in our own image and likeness.
For Christians, this concept of God instructing us in how to understand who He is, is called Revelation. God reveals or shows Himself to us so that we might know, love and serve Him. God revealed Himself to Abraham, Moses and the prophets; inspired the authors of Scripture; and gave us the Law and the commandments as a way of knowing Him.
But for Christians, God’s self-revelation reaches its fulfillment in Jesus Christ. Jesus is God’s only begotten Son and He shows us the human face of God. As we celebrated last week, Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to us, when He returned to the Father – so that He would also remain here with us until the end of time, and so that we might come to more fully understand all that He had said and did.
Thus, it’s not at all a coincidence that we arrive one week later at today’s feast – the feast celebrating the Holy Trinity: our Christian belief that God reveals Himself to be a triune god: Three persons; Father, Son and Holy Spirit; in one Godhead.
For centuries Christians have grappled with how to understand and explain this great mystery of the faith.
Of course we know the primary example of this is St. Patrick, who used the shamrock; three leaves, in one plant; to signify the Trinity. But since the Trinity is a mystery of the faith, and we will never be able to fully comprehend the depths of its truth, we may be tempted to ask ourselves: “What does it really matter? How does it affect my life? What’s so special about believing in a triune God anyway?”
The mystery of the Trinity reveals to us that at His most basic level of being, God is not a singular, static deity – as we often imagine Him to be. Instead, He is a community of persons – God is in dynamic relationship: the Father gazing upon the Son, the Son beholding the Father, and the Spirit, the love that unites them.
God is not a distant, isolated, or lonely being. God is a loving relationship, a community of three persons. That is why we are bold enough to say that GOD IS LOVE!
What is more, Jesus not only came to reveal this definition of who God really is, He sent the Holy Spirit to bring us up into His relationship with the Father. Jesus makes us a part of the Trinity: in Christ we become God’s beloved whom He gazes upon, and in whom He is well pleased.
That’s why St. Paul says in today’s second reading: “you received a Spirit of adoption, through whom we cry ‘Abba, Father!’ The Spirit bears witness that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.”
That’s how the Trinity matters, and affects our lives. Our belief in the Trinity fundamentally alters how we understand and relate to God, ourselves and one another: our lives, since they are caught up in the life of God, are defined by being in communion with the other.
More concretely, this changes the way we understand the Church and our participation in it. As I say so often, the Church is not a Kiwanis club. The Church is the community of believers formed when the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles at Pentecost.
And so the Church, like God Himself, is at its most basic level of existence a mystery of communion. St. Cyprian put it this way: The Church is “a people made one by the unity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”
Even more fundamentally, the same is true of your families – which we properly call, the domestic Church. In marriage a husband and wife form a communion of persons with God, and their union itself becomes an image of the Trinity.
Perhaps, this can all be summed up best by quoting St. Augustine, who said simply: “if you see love, you see the Trinity.”
As complicated and incomprehensible as the doctrine of the Trinity can be, the whole point of today’s feast is that because God is a community of persons, God is love – and we share in that divine communion of love.
Whatever visions our imaginations may conjure about what God is like, they have to square with this Trinitarian faith that God reveals about Himself. Despite whatever discord and disunity we may experience in our own lives, and in the life of the world, today’s feast reminds us that the more we strive to live the life of the Trinity that is within us, the more and more the world will be refashioned into the kingdom of love that God intended from the beginning.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
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