Today we celebrate the great Feast of the Holy Trinity, or Trinity Sunday. The Church thereby invites us to contemplate not so much a difficult doctrine as the wondrous God who has revealed himself to us as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
We believe in one God in three persons—the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
We know that this is not easy to explain or grasp with our limited understanding. Critics of Christianity—for example Jews, Muslims or Jehovah’s Witnesses—say: “You are not really monotheists. You believe in three gods.” We answer: “No, we believe in one God in three persons.”
We believe this not because we devised it ourselves or arrived at it by logical deduction, but because this is how God himself has revealed himself to the world.
In today’s Gospel Jesus says, “Abide in me.” Just as a branch cannot bear fruit apart from the vine, neither can we live a truly fruitful life of faith without remaining united with Christ.
For us, the Triune God is not a distant theological idea. His is the name we bear. We became his own in Baptism. When we are immersed in water, we become wet. When we are baptised into the name of the Triune God, we become children of that same God. Every time we make the sign of the cross, we remind ourselves of this great reality.
Trinity Sunday also recalls our Baptism. We have been baptised into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and called to share in the love that unites the persons of the Trinity from everlasting to everlasting. This is not only a promise of heaven to come, but a reality in which we may live even today.
May our prayer be that this beautiful feast draw us ever closer to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, so that day by day we may grow in the love for which God created us.
See you at church, where several young people from Tapiola Parish will also be with us today!
