How wonderful your name in all the earth!
How do we understand a God in Three Persons?
We struggle to get our human logic around the concept of the Trinity, but logic only gets you so far when you’re talking about the perfection of love. For that is the Trinity: a perfect and intimate union of three Persons bound together by love. This concept was unknown to authors of the Old Testament, although the Book of Proverbs offers us a portrait of a personified Wisdom that is at the root of our concept of the Trinity. Proverbs tells us that the Wisdom of God was present at creation itself: When the Lord established the heavens, I was there; when he fixed fast the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him as his craftsman, and I was his delight day by day. God created us out of the intimacy of this absolute and perfect love, an act echoed in Psalm 8: You have made man little less than the angels, the psalmist sings. O Lord, our God, how wonderful your name in all the earth!
In John’s Gospel, Jesus hints at the complexity of the Trinity during his Last Supper Discourse, in which he states that what humankind will receive from the Spirit is the same truth Jesus himself received from the Father and handed on to his disciples. In his Letter to the Romans, Paul offers an early Trinitarian statement: we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Moreover, the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. Father, Son and Spirit are all active in the love that save us; faith gives us access to and awareness of God’s love present in our lives. Ultimately, we are called to ever greater union with God and closeness to God, because of the love that connects us to the Father, Son and Spirit, and to each other. We can’t find our way there by logical thinking, only through our access by faith to this grace in which we stand.
Faith leads us to a paradox and asks us to step one step beyond it. Will you let God’s love take you beyond your own human boundaries, so that your faith journey may continue its glorious trajectory of expansion?
This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com
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