CALLED TO SHARE IN THE LIFE OF GOD, WHO IS LOVE AND COMMUNION

THE HOLY TRINITY - Ro 8:14-17

The Church gives us a special Sunday to celebrate the mystery of God, the Holy Trinity - a mystery that is present in everyday of our lives and in any kind of worship that we do. All Christians Churches give praise and thanksgiving to God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. 

One thing must be made very clear: we do not believe in three gods. The Christians, like all the Jews, are children of Abraham, believing like him and like all his descendents that there is only one God, the Lord Almighty, in whom everything lives and exists.

The mystery of God is a mystery that goes beyond our human capacity of explanation, no matter how hard we try; and this is so because of our smallness and limitedness in front of the greatness of God. About God’s mystery, Paul wrote:

“O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!

 “For who has known the mind of the Lord?

Or who has been his counselor?”

 “Or who has given a gift to him,

to receive a gift in return?”

 For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever. Amen” (Ro 11:33-36).

Using our human and limited reasoning, we can know some basic truths about God, but very little about his plan of salvation for humankind and much less about what kind of God he is. There is a Bemba proverb that can be applied to this: Munda ya mubiyo tamwingilwa, meaning: in the heart of a friend nobody enters, unless he opens the heart and reveals himself. God has revealed himself to us throughout history in his actions of salvation and he revealed his love and his plan of salvation in Jesus Christ, who is the beloved Son, the true image of the Father. In Jesus Christ, God reveals himself as relationship, a relationship of love that is total communion. In his actions of salvation, God reveals himself as the Father, the Son and Holy Spirit, one God.

In the early Church, immediately after the end of the persecution, the relationship between the Father and the Son became the source of endless theological battles, which had repercussions even in the political arena. The greatest heresy that shook the Church to its foundations was Arianism, that is the doctrine of Arius, a priest from Alexandria in Egipt, who denied the divinity of Chist, teaching that he was created; thus being a creature like other creatures. According to Arius, Jesus Christ is Son of God, only by adoption, in a similar way as we become children of God by adoption. The teaching of Arius was condemned in the first ecumenical council, the council of Nicaea in 325, where the Nicaenean Creed was formulated.

Through a long period of the Church history, the pendulum of theological debate went from one extreme to the other. Some claimed that Jesus was not the Son of God; others claimed that he is not a trully human being.

Already in the apostolic times these two opposite propositions were being defended and both of them are condemned in the first letter of John.:

• “Who is the liar but the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, the one who denies the Father and the Son. No one who denies the Son has the Father; everyone who confesses the Son has the Father also.” (1 Jn 2:22-23).
• “Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God.” (1 Jn 4:2-3; see 2 Jn 1:7).

Jesus is the Son who became a human being sot that we may be adopted as children of God. And in Jesus we can share in the life of God, who is love and communion.  In the second reading of this Sunday liturgy, Paul makes it clear that we are called to share in God’s life: 

“Everyone moved by the Spirit is a son of God. The spirit you received is not the spirit of slaves bringing fear into your lives again; it is the spirit of sons, and it makes us cry out, ‘Abba, Father!’ The Spirit himself and our spirit bear united witness that we are children of God. And if we are children we are heirs as well: heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, sharing his sufferings so as to share his glory.” (Ro 8:14-17).