The Mystery of the Trinity
by Fr. David M. Knight
June 19, 2024
Wednesday of the Eleventh Week of Ordinary Time
Lectionary 367
2 Kgs 2:1, 6-14/Mt 6:1-6, 16-18
2Kings 2:1-14: Elisha knew that Elijah could speak and minister as he did only because he had the Spirit of the Lord. When Elijah was being taken up to heaven, Elisha asked for a “double portion” of his spirit: in Judaism the share inherited by a firstborn son.
When we “cross over” the water of Baptism, we echo this. We ask Jesus, the “firstborn Son” of the Father and of Mary, the “firstborn of all creation,” who, as “firstborn of the dead” is the “firstborn within a large family”—that is, of the “assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven”—to send on us the Spirit of the Firstborn, his own Holy Spirit, who belongs uniquely to the Father and Son but is poured into our hearts at Baptism with the gift of sharing in God’s own divine life.
This is the mystery of Christianity: the mystery of the unique made common; the exclusive shared; the unknowable known; the inimitable multiplied; the One found in the many.
The “assembly of the firstborn,” the family of the redeemed body of Christ, who are described at the “end time” as being Christ himself “come to full stature,” is a kaleidoscope of apparent contradictions. The unique life exclusively God’s is the life common to all who share in it by grace. We are sons and daughters of the Father “in Christ,” who is the “only Son of God.” As such we can know the Father, whom “no one knows [or can know] except the Son.” This is because “the Son chooses to reveal him” in the only way possible: by letting the chosen share by the “gift of faith” in his own unique, divine act of knowing the Father as only the Son can.
God’s life cannot be duplicated: there is no “partial reproduction” of the infinite. And yet Jesus said he is the “grain of wheat” which by “falling into the ground” rises multiplied. He, with the Father and Spirit, are the “One God” found in the many.xxxii
This is all rooted in the mystery of the Trinity: the Absolute (the opposite of “relative”) that is nevertheless differentiated through relationship between the Three Persons. In practice, we accept this mystery by believing we minister as the “firstborn,” gifted with his Spirit. We have “become Christ,” and he expresses himself in and through our human words and actions.
In Matthew 6:1-18 Jesus tells us that prayer, fasting and almsgiving—which represent all our “religious” acts—need to be “Trinitarian”; i.e. acts of relationship, of conscious interaction, with the Father, in the Son, by the Spirit.
Initiative: Accept the mystery of “being Christ.” Let him express himself in you.
Reflections brought to you by the Immersed in Christ Ministry
