Trinity Sunday Yr A 2026

Title

Sensing the Trinity

Outline

The Trinity is difficult to grasp

Perhaps that is why in our present calendar while they have Trinity Sunday they have dropped it as the start of Trinity season and instead used Ordinary Time for both Epiphany and Trinity.

Be that as it may, the Trinity has stumbled many a theologian, sending them off into heresy and has so boggled our minds that we prefer not thinking about it. Look at our readings:

Moses experiences something he cannot conceive

He does not see a figure, for the Lord “came down in a cloud” but the cloud is not the Lord, but obscures the Lord. The Lord proclaimed his name, the name he wanted Israel to use, but it is a verb, “he is,” used as a noun and it is in the Hebrew perfect, he is not he was or better he is ising. It will take millennia before Thomas Aquinas grasps this in his ipsum esse, being itself or the sheer act of being. Moses knew there was a presence and that the presence was personal in that he is gracious and merciful, abounding in hesed and ’emeth, but it would take experience to learn what these are. And there is not a breath about the fact that God is one in the sense of both unique and simple and yet three persons.

Paul can name the persons and attribute a characteristic to each

But these characteristics shift, for John points to the love of Jesus and the Father and Paul to the grace of the Father and the Son, while “fellowship” is more a term meaning sharing, koinonia, and while we share in the Spirit, 2 Peter will point to our sharing in the divine nature in general. So while the characteristics are true and may fit the rhetorical objective of Paul, God is one and so all three persons have the same characteristics. No wonder we sometimes get confused about whom to ask for what - and it probably does not matter.

Finally in our Gospel John mentions the Son has a history

That is, John notes what we call the eternal generation of the Son (he is always Son in relation to the Father), but also that he was sent into the world that John has previously defined as “became flesh” and “living among us.” The Father just is, and so also the Spirit, and the Son both just is as Son and becomes one of us as Jesus joined to us. Therefore, he is the one whom we could (and, if he will, still can) see, he is the one who rescues us for he can take our sin, and he is the one to whom we can commit (believe in), for it is hard to commit to a cloud that is not the one whom it conceals. And as Son-come-into-the world he is not like Yahweh whom no one can see and live, who condemns by just being, but is a connecting point, receiving our allegiance.

How, then, do we relate to the Trinity?

With St Hilary, St Athanasius, and of course St Thomas Aquinas, among others, we do think about and muse about the Trinity. But for us, as I suspect for them also, our relating should be through Jesus the Son (I think of St Thomas Aquinas resting his head on the Tabernacle, for example) and through contemplation in which our spirit transcends our material limitations and just is in the love of the Trinity or is on the way to that relationship. Then we will touch a reality we cannot understand but sense as real in a way not all that different, perhaps, from Moses on Sinai.