Homily Holy Trinity

God is greater than we can understand

Today is what I consider the most important solemnity for the current age and I preach on that theme every year, even if I change my homily annually.

We just finished Easter when the main focus is understanding the resurrection of Jesus Christ and that eternal life if real for all. As I explained during Easter Season, this is common knowledge now but it was not then. This news was a radical change in our human understanding.

Let's go back to the Book of Leviticus and to Exodus, what is the focus there? The rules of the faith and the journey to the Promised Land. The journey helped the Jews come to embrace the new wisdom taught by God to the people. This is the only wisdom we understand to come from the divine to the human.

So, the Jews are learning to live by the wisdom so that they can fulfill God's purpose which is to witness to the whole world of the one true God.

Jesus comes and teaches more and then he is executed but he resurrects. The message then is that there is eternal life.

Jesus revolution of understanding

Remember, the words of Peter after all, but the Apostles, abandon Jesus in the sixth chapter of John: “To whom shall we go, you alone have the words of eternal life?” Why did they stay, they wanted eternal life. What did Jesus teach by his death and resurrection? Eternal life is real.

Today, we learn something else that the ancient Jews did not know. That God is three persons in one God. What does that mean? Well, I could explain it to help us understand it to some level but truly it is virtually impossible to understand it to its fullness. How is God one but also three?

That is the point. The message of the Holy Trinity is that our ability to understand the universe in all its fullness from the divine to the atom is limited. We are not gods and, therefore, we are unable to understand the world to the level of God. That message is extremely important. The universe is bigger than our ability to understand it. If we don't accept that, then we risk living in ignorance of the truth around us.

So, if we accept the truth of the Holy Trinity and our inability to fully understand it, then we accept that we are not gods, that the universe is bigger than our capacity to understand it, that our human understanding grows over the millennia and that truth is bigger than our ability to accept it.

This is where humility comes in.

Let's contrast this with those who mock what we believe. Let us look at Russell's Teapot. Bertrand Russell was an atheist and preached his atheism strongly. In regard to God, he taught that you could believe there is a teapot in the solar system between Earth and Mars but we have no proof that is true. If you want to believe, it is your choice but we cannot prove that it does or does not exist.

Russell being an atheist believed that only the material world existed and that is why he posited his teapot. However, understand his proof of his position is also in the material world. He has no concept of anything beyond the material. Jesus taught that there is also a spiritual world. In fact, Jesus defined God as spirit.

If I were an atheist like Russell, I too would reject the spiritual world but I am not because I cannot accept as one who understands evolution that we can definitely say we can understand all reality. Our understanding grows over the millenia, our knowlege grows over the millenia but it is limited by the thoughts of someone like Bertand Russell, sorry, I can't accept his perspective.

This is why this day is so important. It communicates to us an understanding of our reality that is bigger than our perception. It teaches us the virtue of humility and leads us to be open to a growth in our understanding of truth that Russell with his teapot will never appreciate.

This is the whole point of faith. We accept a reality bigger than our perception and believe in it more than we can understand.

Many years ago in 1979, I was in CIC of our ship heading from the Philippines to Pearl Harbor. We had been given a task. Report when radar picked a couple of B-52s flying by. B-52s are huge. They are also a color gray that makes them hard to see during the day. We completed the exercise and then went on the bridge wing to see them fly by. They were black. When stealth technology was made public, I realized, we were part of an experiment testing its use on a B-52.

Something bigger was happening that we did not know, eventually it all made sense.

The Solemnity of the Holy Trinity is for us today in our scientific age a monument to the truth that we are always seeking. It is beyond our full understanding but not to be limited even by those who are celebrated by the elites.

Fr. Robert J Carr is pastor of St. Anthony Parish in Allston, MA

The parish podcast is at CatholicAudioMedia.com

He is the author of several books including: Christ in Your Humanity