Daily Reflections ...

Trinitarian understanding of God is a distinctive feature of all Christian traditions. Those religions that do not recognise the Trinity, usually because they don’t recognise the divinity of Jesus, are belief systems that cannot be defined as Christian.

Today’s gospel reading provides some biblical evidence for the divinity of Jesus because it reveals something about the relationship between God the Father and God the Son.

By referring to God as his Father, Jesus places himself on equal footing with the Father, which is either the truth or blasphemy. He also explains that he does what he sees the Father doing. So his whole life is lived in union with the Father. Jesus says that “whoever refuses honour to the Son, refuses honour to the Father who sent him.” So Jesus represents the Father; he is the fullness of God, which is why theologians have described Jesus as the sacrament of God.

We can’t expect to understand God fully because God is infinite, and we are finite. Thus, God is beyond our comprehension. As such, the Trinity will always be difficult to understand. One way to understand the Trinity, which we find in the writing of Pope John Paul II, is by analogy to ‘family’. In a family, we have a father, a mother, and children who have proceeded from the love between the father and the mother. In the same way, in the Holy Trinity, we find the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit that proceeds from the love between the Father and the Son. They’re three persons but one God.

Holy Spirit, enable us to understand the mysteries of God and live our lives in accordance with your will.

by Dcn Peter Pellicaan