Last Sunday, Pentecost or Whit Sunday, we celebrated the coming to the Church of the Holy Spirit, an event which came about in answer to our Lord’s prayer to His heavenly Father after the Ascension. We have just heard about that great and wonderful event in the Gospel, as our Lord left his final instructions to his Apostles. Pentecost was the final event in the Paschal mystery, that is, the entire work of our salvation, which began as far back as the Fall of our first parents, which brought about God’s first promise to send us a Saviour. In yet another sense we can say that the entire work of Salvation, God’s work, began not with the Fall as such, but even earlier still with the creation itself. As the psalmist put it in today’s Responsorial psalm: ‘By his word the heavens were made, by the breath of his mouth all the stars.’ As with all such passages from the psalms, the Holy Spirit himself guided the human author to reveal a hidden truth in those apparently simple words: for the ‘word’ of God by which the heavens were made, is none other than the Word who eventually became flesh and dwelt among us; whilst the ‘breath of his mouth’ is the Holy Spirit of God, for God’s own breath is life itself, symbolised by the spirit hovering over the creation in the Book of Genesis, and the mighty wind heard by the Apostles on that first Pentecost Sunday.
How fitting it is, then, today to look back over the last few months’ celebrations of the coming of our Saviour at Christmas, of His saving death and resurrection, His ascension and the sending of the Spirit, and to consider the underlying meaning of everything that we have celebrated together from Advent to last Sunday. For today we celebrate the greatest of all mysteries of the faith, and one which is given to us so that it may fill us with light and joy: the mystery of the Blessed and undivided Trinity, one God.
I say that this is a mystery. But don’t think God is a puzzle. By ‘mystery’ the Church quite simply means that although we will never succeed in completely understanding who God is, we will never cease to know and understood more and more of Him throughout eternity. This, incidentally, is why eternity cannot be in any way monotonous. It is precisely because we will always be discovering ever deeper and deeper aspects of the truth about God, who the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are, and how we are able to relate to this wonderful God of ours, that eternity can never be anything less than a continuously unfolding miracle of wonder for each of us.
But to go back to the beginning. It is God who alone exists of Himself, unlike absolutely everything else which He has made; all things invisible, like the angels, and all things visible, from the entire vastness of the universe, to the tiniest living microscopic creature, all comes not from any necessity, but solely from the will of God. It is God alone who exists simply because He is, and there has never been a moment when He has not existed.
God is not part of the universe, or else he would be one ‘thing’, so to speak, among many. But His being is something quite different from any other kind of being, known or as yet unknown to us. This is usually why some people don’t ‘get’ the idea of God, they think that because there seems to be no room inside the universe for him, that therefore he is a figment of human imagination. Yet God is not something mankind has invented to fill up the gaps about what we don’t know. God is above all the One who reveals Himself to us. He began to reveal Himself in the Old Testament. We heard in the first reading how Moses taught the people to reflect on God’s revelation. ‘Understand this today, and take it to heart,’ he says, ‘Has any god ventured to take to himself one nation from the midst of another by ordeals, signs, wonders, war with mighty hand and outstretched arm, by fearsome terrors – all this that the Lord your God did for you before your eyes in Egypt?’ To put it another way, the God who saved them from slavery and brought them to the Promised Land was the same God who gave them the commandments, not as a curse, as a new form of slavery, but on the contrary, so that by keeping his laws and commandments, they and their children might prosper and live long in the land that God gave them.
But God had not finished revealing Himself. He was preparing them to receive an even greater revelation: the gift of His Son, who though He is God just like himself in every way, would come among us as a man like us in every way, except sin. The Word through whom all things were made, the perfect copy of the Father, showed us that God is indeed a Father, first of all to His beloved Son Jesus, and then through Him to all mankind. Jesus taught His disciples about the Father, teaching them to call Him ‘our Father’, thereby fulfilling what Moses had done in the Old Testament. ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, make disciples of all the nations; baptise them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teach them to observe all the commands I gave you.’ But He also had prepared them for yet another gift from God after He was to be taken from them: ‘I will send you another advocate, the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father, who will lead you into the complete truth.’ It is this Holy Spirit whose coming at Pentecost we celebrated last Sunday, who finally made the fullness of the one God known to us, insofar as we can know it in our limited way in this life.
Yet why does the One God want to reveal Himself to us as Father, Son and Holy Spirit? Doesn’t this complicate things for us? No. That is not God’s intention at all. It is because God, who is inifinitely good, wants only to share Himself fully with us just as He is. The Father has given us two immeasurably great gifts: His Son and His Spirit, thereby revealing to us that while He is three persons, He is absolutely one single undivided God. The Father shares His unique divine nature with His Son and the Spirit, which is what we mean by calling them ‘consubstantial’. This means that even before He created anything out of nothing, God was never ‘alone’, never lonely. He was always a communion of three persons. And this communion is the source of their love which they rejoice to share with each other. This love, this giving of Father, Son and Holy Spirit to each other, is the real reason why they willed to create the universe, so that they could share that love with their creatures, and so that creation might share in the glory that is His. This is why God has called us, too, whom He has made in His own image, to love one another as He has loved us, and in that way to come to the perfection that He intends we should enjoy for all eternity in heaven with Him. May His Will be done in us for ever!
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