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This Sunday and next Sunday are somewhat different than most other
Sundays during the liturgical year. Why? The scripture readings
don’t lead us, as we are accustomed, to formulate a theological
understanding or resolution about how we need to change the way we
think and how we live our lives. Instead, the liturgies of these
two Sundays present theological understandings—the doctrines of Most
Holy Trinity and the Real Presence Jesus Christ in the Eucharist—and
demonstrate how each is spoken about in the texts of sacred
scripture. Our challenge is to think—and it does require thinking
real hard—about these central mysteries of our faith that, for many
of us, seem so abstract and beyond the grasp of our minds, if not
completely unrelated to the reality of our daily lives.
However, if we are to think about these two doctrines profitably
over the next two weeks, we need to shift our focus away from loving
God with all of our hearts. As important as that is, and I
don’t
mean to cast it aside,
our challenge is to embrace the other aspect of the “greatest of all
the commandments” (and, I might add, the bane of those who detest
having to take religion classes in Catholic schools or having to
attend CCD classes if they go to public schools), namely, to love
God with all of our minds. Let us never underestimate or
discount how important it is to love God with all of our hearts
because, as St. James reminds us, without good works our faith is
dead (2:17). But in doing so, let us also not forget to love God
with all of our minds because, after all, when our good works
testify to our faith, we give glory to God. Again, as St. James
reminds us: “But someone will say, You have faith, and I have works.
Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my
faith out of my works” (2:18).
The lesson? God gave each of us a heart and a mind that we
might know and love God in this world as a preparation for the next.
During these next two weeks, the liturgy will challenge to use our
minds to think—and to think real hard by loving God with all of our
minds—about two doctrines of our faith, the Trinity and Real
Presence. Believe it or not, each doctrine took nearly three
centuries to develop, as the members of the early Christian
communities struggled to understand the truth concerning their
experience of God. While the early Christians had scripture, our
forebears in the faith did not have the intellectual inheritance
which they have bequeathed to us today, what Catholics call the
“Tradition.” This developed as our forebears in the faith
applied Scripture to the realities of their day in their effort to
understand better the truth concerning their experience of God.
So, as Catholics, let’s
always remember that
Scripture is central to our faith, no doubt about it. But the
application of God’s
revealed word by the Church to the realities of human existence, as
these have changed through the centuries, provides an equally
important font of divine wisdom for Catholics. Our faith is
not based solely on Scripture, as it is for Protestants. No,
our faith is based upon Scripture and Tradition.
The Tradition continues to develop in our generation as we apply
Scripture to the realities of our day in our effort to understand
better the truth concerning our experience of God.
This Sunday, we will seek to grasp and understand better using our
minds what those Christians meant as they gradually developed the
theological understanding of the “Trinity” to describe their
experience of God. Next Sunday, we will seek to grasp and
understand better using our minds what it means when we say that
Jesus Christ is truly present in the Eucharist. With regard to
these two fundamental doctrines of our Catholic faith, our objective
is to consider what Jesus said to his disciples in today’s
gospel:
“I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now. But when
he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to all truth.”
So, let’s don our “thinking hats” today by allowing the Holy Spirit
to guide us as we adopt the mindset of those early Christians who
believed in one God, but whose experience was challenging them to
think in categories they heretofore had not considered. Remember:
the early Christians didn’t have answers, only experience.
Remember: the early Christians had scripture, but no tradition.
Remember: the early Christians tested out many ideas—some very good
and some very bad—in the attempt to explain their experience of God
and justified what they believed was true by using what they called
the
“rule of faith,”
namely, scripture. The good ideas, now called “doctrine,” were
rooted in Scripture and have lived on to become the tradition of our
faith. The bad ideas, now called “heresy,” were not rooted in
Scripture and have been relegated to the dustbin of Christian
history. In all of our thinking today and next Sunday, let’s be
mindful of what Jesus said concerning the second part of the
greatest of the commandments, “You shall live the Lord your God...with
all of your mind....”
Let me begin with a joke about the Trinity which, I believe, conveys
how this concept developed. The joke adapts the gospel passage
where Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?”
Some of Jesus disciples answered, saying: “Some say you are John the
Baptist returned from the dead; others say Elias, or another of the
prophets.”
Jesus answered, saying: “But who do you say that I am?”
Peter then answered Jesus, saying: “You are the eternal Logos,
existing in the Father as His rationality and then, by an act of His
divine will, being generated, in consideration of the various
functions by which God is related to his creation, but only on the
fact that Scripture speaks of a Father, and a Son, and a Holy
Spirit, each member of the Trinity being coequal with every other
member, and each acting inseparably with and interpenetrating every
other member, with only an economic subordination within God, but
causing no division which would make the substance no longer
simple.”
To which
Jesus responded: “Say what?”
Concerning the Trinity, putting words to their experience as well as
their developing understanding of God, the early Christians easily
grasped the idea of God, the Creator. They had inherited this
monotheistic belief from their ancestors in the faith, the Jews.
But, the early Christians also had experienced something beyond the
categories of the Jewish heritage and gradually came to believe that
Jesus was God’s only begotten Son, the Redeemer, born of the Virgin
Mary and having risen from the dead. This required greater
theological sophistication if the early Christians were to describe
these two “persons”—the “Father” and the “Son”—without destroying
the tradition of their faith, monotheism. This formulation took
nearly two centuries to craft. But, even this wasn’t sufficient,
because the early Christians also experienced God manifesting
Himself in another way, in the form of the Holy Spirit—the
Sanctifier—whose gifts fulfilled the promise we heard Jesus make to
his disciples in today’s
gospel. This required even greater theological sophistication,
assisted by Greek philosophy, if the early Christians were to
describe how their belief in these three “persons” could constitute
one God.
To judge whether their developing belief in a triune God was
orthodox, the early Christians turned to scripture, just as we did
this morning. As we heard in this morning’s first reading from the
book of Proverbs, God is revealed as the Creator whose name is
praised in all creation. St. Paul reminded us in his letter to the
Romans that God has revealed Himself as the Redeemer, whose love
“has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit….”
Then, in today’s gospel, God reveals Himself as the Holy Spirit, the
Sanctifier.
I think we make a mistake when we lull ourselves into thinking that,
because the doctrine of the Holy Trinity has been defined—after all,
we profess it each Sunday when we say the Nicene Creed as Christians
have since the fourth century—that we’ve now got all of the answers
we need and that we possess everything that Jesus revealed or
promised to reveal. The challenge for us today—by the way, the same
challenge confronting his disciples—is for us to grasp the truth of
what our belief in the Trinity means for us, here and today, just as
the early Christians had to grasp what the truth of their belief in
a triune God mean for them in their day.
Through the power of the Holy Spirit which Jesus promised his
disciples, our minds can lead us to God. The tradition resulting
from the questioning, probing, seeking, and attempting to understand
the mystery we call “God,” embodies all of the learning, experience,
and thought of all Christians who have gone before us as they
gradually came to understand, bit by bit, of those things Jesus’
disciples were not ready to understand when Jesus taught them. Our
challenge today is to imitate “those who have gone before us and are
now at rest marked with the sign of faith” by thinking about what
our experience teaches us in light of the
“rule of faith” for
Catholics,
namely, Scripture
and Tradition.
As we contemplate the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity—one God in
three persons: God the Father who Creates, God the Son who Redeems,
and God the Holy Spirit who Sanctifies—let us remember that true
religion is centered not in us and what we need, but in loving God
with all of our minds. As our minds soar beyond ourselves and our
needs and into the mystery of God—a Trinity—let us recall that God
is someone not something, a living God of three divine
persons who think, who will, who love, and who act in complete
communion with one another as they create, redeem, and sanctify us.
God alone is the source of our freedom.
In closing, let me offer a simple way each of us might remind
ourselves of this oftentimes overlooked and neglected essential
mystery of our faith. Let’s begin each day this week as we begin
every Mass, “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the
Holy Spirit.” In this way, we will not only reiterate the prayer
that speaks about an essential element of our Catholic faith, but we
will also, as the theologian Jaroslav Pelikan explained, experience
the tradition we have inherited as the “living faith of the dead”
rather than continuing to meander our way along the sterile pathway
of traditionalism exhibiting what Pelikan called the “dead faith
of the living.”
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HOMILY
