In other church memorials, feasts, and solemnities, like Christmas, Easter, and Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, we celebrate what God is to us; or what God has done for the sake of human beings or how God’s grace has triumphed in people. But in celebrating the solemnity of the Most Blessed Trinity, we are celebrating what God is in God self (that is the inner life of God). We are saying thank you to God for being God! The revelation that there are three Persons in one God is a divine revelation. The Eternal God, the Alpha and Omega, the Omnipotent and the omniscience God lives in communion with Himself: Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. John told us in his first epistle that God is love. What it means is that the one true God lives in communion with Himself.

This revelation of God as a Trinity took a gradual process. Genesis 1:1–3, presented us with rudimentary form of the Trinity. It stated that in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, God’s Spirit hovered over the waters, and “God said, let there be light.” Here we see God the Father, God the Spirit, and God the Word depicted. After his resurrection, at his ascension, Jesus commanded his followers to go and make disciples of all the nations and baptise them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Thus, to restore again the glory of human beings who were created in God’s image and whose glory has been distorted by sin, God the Father sent his Eternal Begotten Son through the power of the Holy Spirit to redeem the world. To ensure that we remain in the state of grace God the Father and the Son left their Eternal Holy Spirit with us.

Across the ages, some members of the faithful including the clergy have struggled with the doctrine of the Trinitarian God – One God in three Persons: The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Arius, a priest, born in Libya, taught that Jesus Christ was subordinate to the Father. This gave rise to the heresy known as Arianism which caused great division in the church leading to the First Council of Nicaea called by Emperor Constantine in 325AD during the Pontificate of Pope Sylvester 1. About 300 bishops participated in the Council. The Council in the light of the Scripture and the Church Tradition, declared the equality between the Father and the Son. They used a Greek word homoousios, which means of one substance to describe the relationship between the Father and the Son. Hence, the Apostle’s Creed simple confession of our belief “in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord” was then expanded as follows; “I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages. God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father; through him all things were made.”

Later in the 4th century Macedonian heresy arose which denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit. This led to the First Council of Constantinople called by Emperor Theodosius I, during the pontificate of Pope Damasius 1 in 381. It was a gathering of 150 bishops mostly from the East. Basing on Scripture and Tradition they defined the divinity of the Holy Spirit. Thus, it expounded our simple confession of “I believe in the Holy Spirit” in the Apostles’ Creed to our profession of faith in “the Holy Spirit who is the Lord and giver of life which proceeds from the Father and the Son. Who with the Father and the Son is glorified and adored, and who have spoken through the prophets.”

May our Trinitarian God bless you, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen