15th June 2025 –
Orthodox Catholic Christians believe that the Trinity and the Incarnation are of greatest importance for understanding who God is and who we are. But if we find it difficult to understand God, it is, of course, equally difficult to fully understand another person. How do we come to some sort of understanding of other human beings? Surely it is through ties of friendship and love. Now Saint John tells us God is love, therefore the key to understanding God is a loving friendship with him. Such a relationship is the basis of faith. Of course we have to have an idea of what love is in the way that God is love. Through Jesus Christ such an idea is communicated to us. This Divine Idea is created anew in each human being. We know of its presence because it drives every human being to seek what is good. Sadly when that urge turns in on itself we identify it as selfishness and sometime as evil. This leads us away from the goodness of God and so damages our relationships, whether human or divine.
Our journey to our proper fulfilment as human beings relies on faith in the Most Blessed Trinity and in the belief that God became man in the person of Jesus Christ. We need the action of God’s power to change us and raise us up in Christ. It is not possible to do this by human means alone. This action of God is his free gift of the Holy Spirit. In Jesus we see the perfect revelation of God’s love. By being united with Jesus, through the power of the Holy Spirit, we come to a share in the Divine Life of God our Father. The revelation of the Trinity allows us to grasp the wonder of our destiny. It allows us to see, through Jesus of Nazareth, true God and true man, the nature of divinity as love. Through the transforming power of the Holy Spirit we are able to grow in that sacrificial love revealed by Jesus Christ on the cross and be clothed in the mantle of divinity ourselves.
Where does our belief in the Trinity come from? Saint Augustine firmly places our Christian belief in the Trinity in the scriptures. What we find in the New Testament is the expression of the faith of the writers who were responding to the experience of Divine Revelation. That is why our faith rests on the faith of the Apostles and that is why the Catholic Church, the body of faithful Christians that can trace an historic line back to first disciples, is termed an Apostolic Church. Through the faith of the early Church we come to know that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit by the unfolding of this truth in the events presented to us in the pages of the Bible. Our faith is rooted in the experience represented by events, visible realities in time and space, which the Scriptures record. If we love God we presumably wish to know Him better. God, our faith declares is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This then is what we desire to know better if we genuinely desire to know God better.
The offer Christianity makes is that we, by the power of the Holy Spirit, are being made sons and daughters of God, heirs of God, co-heirs with Christ, sharing His suffering so as to share His glory. For Jesus, the Divine Word made visible, became what we are in order to make us what He is Himself, and so enable us to be sharers in the Divine Life of the Trinity!
