Readings:
Exodus 34:4b-6, 8-9
Daniel 3:52, 53, 54, 55, 56
2 Corinthians 13:11-13
John 3:16-18
THE TRINITY FOR US
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you. (2 Cor. 11:13)
The apostle Paul’s prayer-benediction to the Corinthians, assigned as it is as the second reading for the Church’s liturgical celebration of the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, may easily be interpreted as expressing Trinitarian doctrine. Strictly speaking, it does not (for one, the text mentions the “love of God, not specifically “the love of God the Father.”). The New Testament does not contain a formal doctrine of God as Triune, in fact, the term “Trinity” is attributed to the Church Father Tertullian of Carthage who lived more than a century later. That said, the trinitarian pattern in the way the disciples and the early Church experienced the economy of God’s salvation is unmistakable. Elizabeth Johnson offers an illuminating way to describe this: “In shorthand, we might say that they experienced the saving God in a threefold way as beyond them, with them, and within them, that is, as utterly transcendent, as present historically in the person of Jesus, and as present in the Spirit within their community.”[1] Thus, the Scripture reading is grafted onto Trinity Sunday for a very good reason. It anticipates the further development of the Tri-unity of God as a doctrine, thus far, as a kind of proto-Trinitarian understanding of faith experience.
What the Scripture reference communicates eloquently is the super-abounding grace of God who will stop at nothing to offer saving love to the entire eco-human community. Today’s gospel reading (John 3:16-18) attests to this divine self-giving in the person of Jesus Christ.
The birthing of Trinitarian doctrine was a protracted theological journey freighted with disputes and speculative thinking. To get into the historical timeline is simply beyond scope, it is enough to say for our purpose that both Greek-Eastern and Latin-Western thinkers wrestled with the mystery of the intra-trinitarian relations to such an abstract and speculative degree — “complex celestial mathematics,” as Johnson notes — that by the period prior to the second Vatican Council, a contemporary retrieval of Trinitarian doctrine had become a critical imperative. Otherwise, the Trinity, which early Christian communities experienced as Deus pro nobis, “God for us,” ironically, would have continued to be hidden and detached from us.
Contemporary Catholic theologians such as Karl Rahner, Walter Kasper, and Catherine Mowry LaCugna, drawing inspiration from the legacy of the last of the Church Fathers John of Damascus or “Damascene” (675-750 AD), contributed greatly in restoring, almost brick-by-brick, the mutual relationship between Trinitarian doctrine and the faith life of the Church. The liberation theologian Leonardo Boff, inspirited by a preferential option for the poor in the Latin American context, specifically builds a bridge between the saving Trinity and the praxis for social equality and inclusion. In his groundbreaking work Trinity and Society, Boff clarifies this vital correlation: “The community of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit becomes the prototype of the human community dreamed of by those who wish to improve society.”[2] Thus, in a moving prophetic-liberating message, he concludes: “To the extent that anyone creates communion, that person becomes a sacrament of the Holy Trinity.”[3]
Does this Trinitarian theological reflection have referents in faith life or does it remain on the level of beautiful phraseology? Allow me to bring this into the context of my birth country the Philippines. For over 60 days from October to December of 2007, 166 poor farmers from Sumilao in the Southern Philippines, marched a total of 1,035 miles to the capital Manila to fight for their right to ancestral lands that were questionably sequestered and purchased without their consent by a major corporation with government approval. For the farmers, this represented a decade-long battle to maintain ownership of the land they had been cultivating for generations. Moved by their plight, then Archbishop of Manila Gaudencio Rosales met to greet them and, in a powerful witness to servant leadership, stepped forward on their behalf to mediate an agreement. In what may be called a Trinitarian conspiracy of grace, the parties involved agreed to a fair settlement. “All protagonists have won,” bannered the official report. The corporation abided by its social responsibility and gave back a good portion of the original land with the remainder compensated from another property, the government remained committed to its land reform program, and, as noted in the report, “the Church, led by Cardinal Rosales, also played its role as a Church of the poor and peacemaker on earth.” Serendipitously, the name “Sumilao,” the hometown of the farmers, translates in the vernacular as “when light comes again.”
The accompanying photo shows a tearful middle-aged woman farmer, the years of hard labor etched on her sun-beaten skin, hugging Cardinal Rosales, who had a wooden cross hanging around his neck. The report did not mention exactly what the Cardinal told her and the farmers. Either way, the synodal communion that was brought closer to home that day already bespoke the wordless depths of the Trinitarian benediction — The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.
Antonio D. Sison, CPPS
Professor of Systematic Theology and Culture
Vatican II Chair of Theology
[1] Elizabeth Johnson, Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God (New York: Continuum, 2007), 204.
[2] Leonardo Boff, Trinity and Society (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988), 205.
[3] Leonardo Boff, “Trinity,” in Systematic Theology: Perspectives from Liberation Theology, eds. John Sobirno and Ignacio Ellacuría (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2015), 86.