Trinity Sunday AD 2024
The first half of the liturgical year ends with the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity, the center of which is the doctrine of one God in three Persons: God is the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. On the one hand, this teaching is an attempt to place what God reveals about Himself in His Word within the framework of human understanding. On the other hand, it represents the message that God is immeasurably greater and richer in His nature than man could ever understand or even imagine.
Sometimes the Church is accused that her understanding of God is incomprehensible to the human mind and therefore it makes no sense. Such accusations are as silly as if someone were to complain about a spring of water that it cannot be drunk in one gulp. On the contrary, every reasonable person is happy that the spring has enough water for more than needed to quench the first thirst, and the less we try to “improve" the spring, the better – because the result of such “improvement” usually tends to be that the clean source becomes a miserable puddle.
It's the same with God. Instead of trying to take Him apart and explain Him, it’s worth simply bowing before Him and trying to draw as much as possible from His inexhaustible fullness, remembering that we will never be able to grasp the full richness of His being and, at the same time, even the little bit that we are able to see, experience, understand and receive is overflowingly great and wonderful.
It is sometimes asked how it is possible that three can be one at the same time. There is nothing impossible here. Let us take the most ordinary triangle, and we shall see that three are indeed one, and that one can be what it is only because there are these three, whether three angles or three sides.
The comparison with a triangle reveals to us something even more important about the nature of God – the three are one only when they are inseparably connected to each other. What binds the Triune God as one is love. The same love that is the only force that can bind us to God: His love in Jesus Christ – the love from which nothing can separate us.