The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit - Bishop Barron's Sunday Sermon

0:00 Peace be with you, friends. We come to Trinity Sunday, one of my favorite Sundays of the year. They often call it the preacher's nightmare. I don't agree with that. I think we should preach the Trinity all the time because the Trinity is not just a little puzzle for theologians. It's the heart of the matter in many ways. Keep in mind, you know, Catholics and Orthodox, too, whenever we make this sign of the cross, what are we doing? But we're invoking the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. We're invoking the Trinity. So every time we pray, we pray in the name of the Trinity. We can't consider that, therefore, a little side concern of a few theologians. No, no, it's central to the way we pray. Okay, so I suppose appropriately, I'm going to propose three images, three models, three ways of getting at this idea of the Trinity. I'm going to do so by beginning with three things that I think we would all take for granted and say, well, yeah, of course that's true of God. And I want to show that each one leads to the idea of the Trinity. Okay? So let me start with the idea of personhood.

1:10 Do we say that God is a person? Well, yeah, of course. I mean, we don't think God is just some vague metaphysical force or some vague cause way back when, some impersonal, you know, source of existence. No, no. We would hold that God is a person, mind and will and freedom, right? Well, think about that word for a second, person. Where does that come from? Well, Latin word persona, where does that come from? Well, from a verb, personare, which means to sound through. And you say, well, how are those related? Well, here's how. A persona in Latin, ancient Latin, designated a device, a device used by actors in ancient theater.

2:06 So obviously before, you know, microphones. If you wanted to be heard, you held up in front of you a persona, which was a kind of mask with a little megaphone fitted to the mouthpiece so that when you held it up and you announced your lines, it could personare, it could sound through to the audience. All right, that's kind of interesting, isn't it? Persona, person, personare has to do with communication. It has to do with speaking to another, the actor speaking to the audience so he can be heard. All right, is God a person only in relation to the world he's made or only in relation to us, his intelligent creatures? Well, no, I mean, he does communicate to us, but wouldn't we say God's a person independent of the world?

3:12 God's a person, even if he never created the world, God's a person from all eternity, right? Okay, yeah. Well, if he is, what? Somehow in the unity of God, there must obtain some play of communication, of speaker, spoken to, and speech. Something like a speaking to another must be true of God if God is a person from all eternity. Hmm. Who's the speaker? We call him the Father. Who's the one spoken to? Call him the Son. What's the speech they share? We call him the Holy Spirit. Here's something else interesting, and maybe you've sensed this. I've always loved etymology from the first time as a little kid, third grade maybe, and the teacher said, you know, this word of ours comes from an earlier word.

4:29 I've always been fascinated by etymology. Well, the Latin persona, personare, the Greek word, and of course the gospels are written in Greek, the epistles and all that, is prosopon. Prosopon. That's derived in turn from a Greek phrase prosopthe. Now, opthe, think optics, Think ophthalmologist, right? Opthe is to look. Pros is toward.

5:00 Who's a prosopon, therefore? A person is someone who looks to another. And isn't it true, everybody? You can't, Ratzinger put it this way, you can't speak of a person in the absolute singular. It doesn't make sense. A person qua person communicates personare, prosopthe, looks toward. All right, again, is God a person only in relation to the world? No, no. God's a person in himself from all eternity. Therefore, what? There must be within the unity of God something like a looker, a looked at, and the look that they share. who's the looker, the Father, who's looked at, the Son, what's the shared look, the Holy Spirit. If God's a person, and I think we'd all agree with that,

6:04 something like the Trinitarian play must obtain within God. Okay, so there's my first model, person. Here's a second one. I think we'd all be very much at home with that great statement from the first letter of John that God is love beautiful God is love John is not saying, mind you that God loves I mean, all religions say that in some form or that love is one of God's attributes yeah, okay, I think every religion would say that no, no, it's stranger, the claim of St. John that God is love. That means in his own most nature and not simply in relation to the world. So you'd say, sure, God loves us.

6:58 He wills our good. Okay, but the claim here is that God is love in his own nature from all eternity. Therefore, what? There has to obtain within the unity of God something like a lover, a beloved, and the love that they share.

7:24 Who's the lover? We call him the father. Who's the beloved? We call him the son. What's the love that they share but the Holy Spirit? You know, as G.K. Chesterton said that, that a lot of people are uneasy with all this technical language about Trinity, but oh, they love the claim. They love it, that God is love. How beautiful. But see, Chesterton said, Trinitarian doctrine is but the conceptually precise way of articulating that God is love. All right, so God's a person. God is love. They both imply something like the Trinity. Here's a last one. Wouldn't we all agree, we biblical people anyway, that God is a revealer? And Karl Barth, the great Protestant theologian, said the deus dixit principle is fundamental to the Bible.

8:19 It's Latin for God has spoken. And it's true, isn't it? Again, we don't think God's a distant force. We don't think God's just dumbly out there. No, we think that God has spoken in creation, yes, but spoken through the history of Israel and then spoken finally in Christ. What do we hear in the letter to the Hebrews? That, you know, in times past, in varied and fragmentary ways, God spoke to our forefathers. But in these last days, he's spoken to us through his son. don't we hear in the prologue to john's gospel in the beginning was the word and the word was with god and the word was god so now look look look is god speaking his word in all of creation yes yes that's why creation is imbued with intelligibility because it's been spoken into being by god's intelligence does god speak his word even more intensely and dramatically in the history of Israel.

9:27 Yes, in Torah and temple and prophecy. And then, in the fullness of time, God, who has spoken in various and fragmentary ways, now speaks the whole of himself, the totality of his word. The word that is God is spoken in Christ. okay if all that's true what do we have in god well there's a speaker someone who speaks we call him the father and there's a word spoken listen which is co-equal to the father because in this word god has utterly communicated himself there's a speaker and there's a word spoken but now take the third step here which is very interesting to me so god has spoken his word How can we, finite, historically conditioned, limited human beings, possibly understand the word that the Father has spoken?

10:42 My mind is small. I'm fallen. I have trouble understanding basic mathematics. How in the world do I understand the Logos in person? Well, there's got to be an interpreter of the word. We call him the Holy Spirit. You know, in John's Gospel, Jesus says, the Father and I are going to send, in the Greek, a parakletos. Kalein means to call. Para means like over. So the paraklete, the parakletos, is someone that you call over to help you, as in a court of law, for example, which is why parakletos, Again, we'll do etymology. Paracletos gets rendered in Latin as advocatus. Vocatus, called, ad, toward, right? He's been called over to the table to help me make my case here. That's the idea. The Father and I, the speaker and the word spoken, are going to send an advocate who will lead you into all truth, who will help you understand the word spoken.

12:02 Ah, we got speaker, spoken, and interpreter, Father, Son, Holy Spirit. So again, everybody, that God is personal? Yeah, sure. God is love? Yeah. God reveals himself? Yeah, I accept all those, then you've got to accept the Trinity. You can't have those three descriptions without affirming at the same time the Trinity. Okay, that's a little bit of an abstract theological lesson, but again, let me make this salvifically relevant. Look at our gospel for today, brief, but so important. It contains that famous John 3, 16. God so loved the world, he gave his only son, that everyone who believes in him might not perish, but might have eternal life. Now, parse this out. God so loved the world. Who are we talking about?

12:59 The Father, the speaker, the lover, the one who looks, right? The Father, God, so loved the world that he gave his only son, he sent his son out, he spoke his word out, he loved the world in the son. Why? Why? That we might not perish, but might come to eternal life. The father sent the son all the way to the end of God forsakenness, of our sin, of our rebellion, of our sadness, of our rejection. Watch. So that as I run away from the Father, I'm running, whether I like it or not, right into the arms of the Son. And now the Father is sending the Son. The Son gathers in, even the most reluctant sinner can gather us into the love that is the Holy Spirit.