A Homily for the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity

+ The end of the Octave of Pentecost yesterday marks the conclusion of the great liturgical cycle of the mysteries of our redemption which we commenced with the obscure rite of burying the ‘Alleluia’ at Septuagesima in preparation for forty days of prayer, fasting and almsgiving in Lent so as to all the more be able to grasp the realities of the suffering, death and resurrection from the dead of Our Lord, before His glorious ascension into heaven and the sending of the Holy Spirit upon the infant Church, transforming somewhat shell-shocked men into strong and courageous apostles of the Gospel of Christ.
 
This part of the liturgical year is the most intense, as it were, and rightly so: it immerses us in and indeed confronts us with the fundamental truths revealed by God in human history for the salvation of every man and woman and child. Year after year through our active participation in the Sacred Liturgy of Our Holy Mother, the Church, in these great seasons and feasts, we are able to become ever more rooted in these great and world-changing salvific events so that our Christian lives can bear ever more fruit in the particular vocation to which we are called (or indeed, give us the courage and strength selflessly to pursue that vocation regardless of the various enticements of the world, the flesh and the devil).
 
In the faith and devotion of the Church, however, these fundamental feasts seem not to have themselves been enough, as it were. Just as the feast of Christmas is a later development than the ancient feast of the Epiphany, so today’s feast of the Most Holy Trinity is an early medieval development, an overflow if you wish, of the great Easter cycle of feasts, celebrating and contemplating the most profound mysteries of the nature of God Himself, just as the coming feast of Corpus Christi is a later medieval development that acclaims the extent of the gift of God Himself that is the Sacrament of the Most Blessed Eucharist.
 
It is instructive that the Church repeats part of the Gospel of the feast of the Ascension today. Most certainly this is because we have here the most explicit reference in the Gospels to the reality of the Holy Trinity—and there can be no question other than that this reality, this Truth, revealed by Christ, is the faith of the Church from her very origins, no matter how many centuries it took to find an appropriate vocabulary more fully and accurately to express it in the classical Creeds. God is one being and three persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. This Truth is fundamental. It is, and always has been, the literal foundation of Christianity. One cannot be a Christian without adhering to this doctrine—as the great Christological controversies of the earlier centuries underlined so clearly.
 
The Gospel of the Ascension (and of the Holy Trinity) contains more, though, than the explicit mention of the Most Holy Trinity. It consists of a command. No, it is the command, the imperative laid down by Our Lord before He ascended to heaven, in which He states that “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me,” and then orders the eleven to “Go…and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.”
 
This is the great missionary commandment. It is not a wish, or advice, or a desire. It is a commandment, an order. It does not ask the eleven to live good lives of quiet Christian witness in the midst of a polytheistic or pagan world in the hope that curiosity will lead people to conversion. No: it commands them. It directs them to make disciples of all nations, to baptise people, to teach them all that He who has all authority in heaven and earth has commanded. It commands them to be proactive in the proclamation of the Truth revealed by Jesus Christ, not to be passive in the private pursuit of a peculiar personal faith.
 
Because Truth is Truth! It is not an opinion or a theory. And the Truth revealed by Jesus Christ is the Truth that saves all of mankind from the just effects our sins, from eternal damnation, and which opens to us the doorway of forgiveness and eternal life and joy of which the best of this life is but only a foretaste. As the Office of Matins has repeated so many times in recent days, “Whoever believes and is baptised will be saved”! And as the Office of Prime sang this morning in the crystal-clear words of the all too often sidelined and somewhat inconvenient Athanasian Creed: “Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the catholic faith. Which faith unless everyone do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly. And the Catholic faith is this: that we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity…”
 
This is not to deny that, in God’s mercy, salvation may, in certain exceptional circumstances, be possible without the explicit profession of the Catholic faith in the Trinity. But it is most certainly to say that we have no permission to presume such extraordinary acts of God. We are commanded to “Go…and make disciples of all nations…”—nothing less. We must each be missionary, calling people to the Faith, inviting people to discover the Truth that salvation may only be found with certainty in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. +