Deacon Ray - Father of All
The dogma of the Trinity is the central mystery of our faith, and it is inscrutable to reason alone without Divine Revelation. That is why it is only in the light of the Holy Spirit received at Pentecost that we can even begin to grasp how Three Persons can be One God. The early church beginning with the Council of Nicaea 1700 years ago labored for centuries to articulate a framework for understanding, but fundamentally, the Triune God can only really be known in relationship: the eternal relationship among Father, Son and Holy Spirit; and our relationship with God.
The Catechism gives us a place to begin and a direction. The Divine Name revealed long ago to Moses means that an essential, and perhaps the central, attribute of God is eternal Being. Yahweh means “I am who am.” God is the fullness of Being and of every perfection and of all truth, without origin and without end. Human beings receive our being from God, for without His Being we cannot be. But God alone is his very being; He is of himself everything that he is, always and forever. And yet, as Proverbs tells us today, in God’s very being, God found delight in the human race.
The Catechism goes on to explain that “God is one but not solitary.” The three divine persons do not share the one divinity among themselves but each of them is God whole and entire. Father, Son and Holy Spirit, by nature one God, are distinct from one another in the relationships that relate them to one another. It is the Father who generates, the Son who is begotten, and the Holy Spirit who proceeds. All of the work of God is the common work of the three divine persons, yet each of the divine persons performs the common work according to his unique personal property.
Thus, the Church confesses “one God and Father from whom all things are, and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom all things are, and one Holy Spirit in whom all things are.” And the ultimate end of the work of God is the entry of God’s creatures into the perfect unity of the Blessed Trinity. We are created, and redeemed, and sanctified to join the eternal Being, to dance with and delight in the Most Holy Trinity: to become One with God! Last Sunday’s Gospel holds the key to our eternal union with the Triune God, and that key is love: “Whoever loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him.” Saint Paul echoes the same refrain in today’s reading from his letter to the Romans:
“We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ
… because the love of God has been poured out into our
hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given over to us.”
Because of the intimate relationship inherent in God’s very Being in Three Persons, it necessarily follows that God not only loves, but that God is love. Indeed, throughout sacred scripture, God’s love for his people is compared to a father’s love for his son.
Even our calendar this year helps us connect the dots: this Sunday is both Trinity Sunday and Father’s Day. It is in relationship that we come to know our fathers and Our Father. Indeed, by calling God “Father” the language of faith indicates that God is the first origin of everything and transcendent authority, and that he is at the same time goodness and loving care for his children. These things we celebrate this weekend not only of God but also of our human fathers, imperfect as they may be.
But recent events remind us that there is also the spirit of another father at work in the world: a father not of truth, but of lies, a father not of love but of hate and murder. In John 8:44, Jesus also spoke of evil in personal terms and of fatherhood gone terribly wrong. In that passage, Jesus called out Satan as a murderer from the beginning, in whom there is no truth because he is a liar and the father of lies. In so doing, Jesus drew a sharp dichotomy between children of our heavenly Father and children of an infernal father. The divide is one of truth and love versus lies and hate, and the eternal stakes are life or death. Gloriously and perilously, the choice is ours.
Today, sadly, one twisted man chose lies, and hatred and murder. He killed a state representative and her husband, and a state senator and his wife also are fighting for their lives. And for what? Some warped and twisted political ideology that poisoned his mind and his heart? He chose to be an anti-father: to take life, rather than give life. He acted impersonating a police officer, masquerading as an authority figure (a false father in another sense), to gain trust and entry into their homes. Sadly, he is not alone. This week also has seen violence in many other places. Political violence manifested in riots in many cities across our country, where rioters torch police cars and hurl rocks and bricks at police in the name of an ideology that they claim justifies hatred and violence. Meanwhile, the political authorities (also father figures) fan the flames of anger by word and action and inaction. That is not what true fathers do, patterned after our Heavenly Father. A true Father is a peacemaker, not an instigator; a uniter, not a divider; a life-giver, not a life-taker; a lover, not a hate-monger.
Neither can we forget the wars that rage now in Europe and the Middle East. These are unworthy of God’s children, in whom God delights. War is not honor, it is shame. Violence has become a wildfire that threatens to destroy us from without and to isolate us in fear. But I fear more the insidious infection that threatens to consume us from within: the emotional manipulation and spiritual deceit that entices us, oh so easily, to rush to judgment, to choose sides, to embrace anger and then before we know it, hatred, which not only tears us apart but which also tears us away from God. Hatred is incapable of union with the Triune God who is love. So what can we do? Pray. Pray for peace: peace in our world, in our nations, and in ourselves. And let go of anger, of choosing up sides, and turn instead to our Heavenly Father, who is already and always pouring his life and his love into our hearts. Then, filled with God’s love, we can quench the fires of hatred and violence, one fatherly encounter at a time.