TRINITY SUNDAY 2021 Matthew 28:16-20

Matthew ends his gospel with the command of the Risen Jesus to his disciples to baptize in the name of the Trinity. Notice that they will not be baptizing into the Roman Catholic Church. There was no such Church at that time, and certainly not Roman since the early community was all Jewish and concentrated in Jerusalem. Luke’s second volume, Acts of the Apostles, take up from here.

Baptism is an incorporation in the family or community of the Trinity. The better we understand the Trinity the better we will understand our baptism. The Trinitarian formula that Matthew uses occurs nowhere else in the gospel tradition, but the individual members of the trinity have been distinguished and active throughout Matthew’s story.

Baptism is to be in the name of the Father. For Matthew, this is the God of the Old Testament, whose providence ensured the birth of Jesus at the end of a long line of ancestors. He is the Father who makes his sun shine on the just and the unjust, who knowns the Son and is known by him. He hides his revelation from the wise and the prudent but reveals it to the little ones. In Gethsemane, he had the power to send twelve legions of angels to defend his Son, but he did not. He is the Father to whom the disciples were to pray. Notice today when we read the Canon of the Mass, that is, the part after the Offertory, that it is mainly directed to God the Father!

Baptism is also to be in the name of the Son. This Son was the one whose birth came about through the Holy Spirit. During his life, he lived in intimacy with the Father. Before his death, he prayed to the Father, pledging himself to the Father’s will rather than his own, an example to the disciples who would be judged on how far they had done the “will of my Father.” The name of this son was Emmanuel because he would be God with us until the end of the time.

And Baptism would be in the name of the Spirit. This Spirit, active at the creation and in the lives of the prophets descended on Jesus at his Baptism, enabling him to cast out demons and make the presence of the kingdom a reality. In time of persecution, this Spirit of the Father would speak through the troubled disciples. Matthew did not speculate about how God could be three and one. He was content to tell his readers what the individual members of the Trinity did.

It is this knowing of who the individual members of the Trinity are by what they do that gives us the confidence in calling them Persons or Individuals. We can not only pray to them individually, but we can also talk to them individually. We pray to Jesus all the time, I hope, especially in times of trouble with our little utterances of “O Jesus be with us.” We pray the Our Father at the Eucharist and at least once a year we pray “Come Holy Spirit.”

The word person is the best approximation of our understanding of the Trinity, but no one can say for sure what that means. Only Jesus and Scripture gives us our best understanding of who God is in the three persons, and that understanding is usually in a relationship of the heart, not in the head as for theologians!

It is through this relationship with the three persons of the Trinity that we slowly come to a better understanding of who we worship in the Eucharist. “What we pray is what we believe and visa-versa.” The Trinity is still a mystery and how we understand this mystery comes slowly over the centuries.

One good example is that our Western Christian understanding of the Trinity is in a form of an equilateral triangle, where each person is assigned an angle with God the Father at the top. As Roman Catholics, our understanding of the Trinity comes from Saint Augustine, where the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.

The Eastern Christian understanding of the Trinity is a straight line, where each person is placed on this line beginning with the Father, then the Son, and then the Holy Spirit. Their understanding is that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son. So strong was this belief in the Procession of the Holy Spirit, that it became the breaking point in the historical schism between the East and the West when in the Latin translation of the Creed from Greek the famous ‘filioque’ was inserted to emphasize in the Western Church that the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father and the son. In Latin, the ‘and’ combines with ‘Son’ to form one word called “filioque.”

How ironic that this bone of contention of the Procession of the Holy Spirit is what split the communion between the East and the West. The Trinity of Community became a symbol of the split between the Eastern and the Western Church. At Vatican II, the church was reconciled to the two differences in understanding the Trinity, thanks mainly to Pope Paul IV almost a thousand years later. Trying to understand our Mysteries of Faith should be pondered rather than figured out. They should be pondered in our hearts as Mary did, since the Trinity is in a loving relationship with us inviting us in, not a math problem to be solved.

It was Mary who best understood this mystery and pondered it: Mary, daughter of Zion, the beautiful thought in God’s mind; Mary spouse of the Holy Spirit and renewed at Pentecost; and Mary, Mother of Jesus, Emmanuel-‘God with us’ and Mother of the Church. May we like you allow our hearts to be embraced by God, Three Persons in One – Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier. Amen.