05/30/2026
Dear St. Joseph and Christ the King,
Happy Trinity Sunday! On this feast of the most complicated and mysterious of Christian revelations, I found it notable that the readings for this feast this year are all notably short… shorter than almost any other Sunday. Hopefully that is not because the Church expects priests to preach extra-long homilies trying to explain the Trinity… ☺
To keep my own homily short this week, I will use my bulletin column to offer some thoughts on the revelation that God is three persons in one being. For me, the most helpful way to reflect on the Trinity is to look at the historical process of revelation that led to the teaching’s development.
The first step of that journey is the recognition that there is only one divinity. This was one of God’s foremost revelations to the Jewish people in the centuries before Christ. While other nations (and in moments of weakness, even Israel itself) would identify a god for each country (or each river or each season, etc.), the Old Testament is clear that there is only one God, the God of all people and all creation. Anyone who recognizes this revelation—as Jesus and all of his followers do—must affirm a basic principle: God is one!
However, as Jesus began to reveal his special relationship to God, it became clear that oneness could not explain all the evidence. We now had to account for Jesus’ ability to act with divine power (Mt. 8:23-27), his teaching with divine authority (Mk. 1:21-28), and his claims of Divine dignity (Jn. 10:30). Yet Jesus also acts in ways that cannot be explained only by unity with God. For example, he prays to the Father (Lk. 22:41-44), receives a mission from the Father (Jn. 20:21), and has a distinct knowledge from the Father (Mt. 24:36). This leads to a second principle: God is one, yes, but Jesus reveals that there is also distinction within that unity.
In the first centuries of the Church, bishops and theologians came to agree on language that could capture both of these principles: there is one being in God, but there is also a distinction of persons. The word “being” here means the same as essence, Godhead, or divine nature. It is the answer to “What?” God is: the all-powerful, all loving, all good singular Divinity. But that essence exists in different but equal persons.
Instead of a “What,” a person is a “Who”—a relational, rational individual that is irrepeatable. It is worth noting, though, that the Greek word translated here (hypostasis) does not have the same association with personality and psyche as the English word “person.” That is why we do NOT say that we have three gods, like in polytheistic cultures where different divinities could have personality conflicts, temper tantrums, or play favorites.
Then finally, after developing these terms, they were then recognized to apply in the same way to the understanding of the Holy Spirit, which Jesus promised to send to the Church after his Ascension (Jn. 14:26, Acts 1:8). By the end of the 4th century, each of the three were formally recognized as divine persons, equal in dignity, power, and beauty, leading to the Trinitarian formula of “One God, Three Persons.”
May we always be grateful for this revelation and may we be quick to pray to all the persons of the Trinity for aid in our concrete needs.
Prayers,
Fr. Chris
