Gospel Reflection for Sunday 30th of May

In this weekend’s Gospel we hear Jesus saying to his disciples and to all of us: “Go, therefore, make disciples of all the nations; baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”. The liturgy chooses this Gospel because we celebrate this Sunday the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity.  The Holy Trinity is a mystery. What do we mean by a mystery? The way Christians use the word mystery is different to how it is popularly used today to mean something that cannot be understood, something baffling or unexplainable. There is a biblical understanding of what it means to call something a mystery which is different to this meaning. It is a word we use all the time in our Church language so it would be good for us to grasp what it means. When Christians speak about mystery or mysteries we speak about a supernatural truth or truths that we could not know unless divinely revealed to us. It does not mean it is something that cannot be understood because since it is revealed, we can understand it. It is true that we cannot comprehend mysteries in the sense that to comprehend would mean to exhaust all understanding of it.

It is true to say that everything about Jesus Christ is ‘mystery’ because everything Jesus said and did was an act of divine revelation revealing many truths that by reason alone we could not know. Jesus could do this because He was not only human but also divine. He possessed the divine mind which alone could tell us things about divine truths. The most fundamental truth he taught us was that God is a Trinity of love. When we call the Holy Trinity a mystery we are saying that there was no way for us humans to know about the inner life of God as a Trinity of loving persons unless such truth was made known to us.

How can we make sense of the truth of the Trinity? Of course, it is something we accept on faith, but we can still think it out though in a limited way. The Trinity of love is three because God is love. Jesus revealed this to us about God’s very nature. As a result, St. Augustine famously preached that If God is love then God must involve three things. The first is that there must be a source from which love flows and this we know to be the Father. The second thing is that love is always of something or someone. In the case of the inner life of God, the Father the source of love, loves the Son for all eternity. Hence the Son is the object of the Father’s love and so he is the beloved (the being loved of the Father). The third thing is the love itself which we know to be the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the love and bond of unity between the Father and Son. With this said, we have the source, the loved one and love itself. This leaves us with a Trinity of love. It is in this Triune love, the inner life of God, that Jesus has called us all into through baptism.  Baptism communicates God’s life to our souls. Hence the commission by Jesus to baptize all nations in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.