Trinity Sunday: God is a Verb not a Noun

“There is no subject where error is more dangerous, research more laborious, and discovery more fruitful than the oneness of the Trinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” – St. Augustine.^[1]

Its Trinity Sunday! It’s a dreaded day for Catholic preachers the whole world over. Every preacher is faced with the daunting task of preaching about the Trinity: One God, three persons as the central mystery of our faith. The temptation is try to explain the trinity through abstract intellectual terms and erroneous analogies. It is not an exaggeration that Trinity Sunday is sometimes called heretical Sunday. Because on many Trinity Sundays a lot of heresies have been heard, of all places—from the pulpit.

On the other hand, this should not discourage preachers to talk about God as Trinity. This Sunday, preachers should not run away from preaching on the Trinity even if they know that no human language can ever fully describe let alone explain the mystery of the Trinity. Trinity talk is inexhaustible both in its intellectual and practical implications.

So despite all the risks, I would like to talk, even if it is a mere speck, of the infinitely inexhaustible mystery of the Trinity. I would like to share not what the Trinity is but how is the Trinity in action. So here goes …

First of all, Trinity is God’s language about God. It is how God talk about Godself. God revealed himself in Jesus. It was Jesus who talked about God as Trinity. Thus Trinity is not a human invention but originated from God.

Secondly, God the Father, Son and Holy, that Jesus revealed is always active before, during and at the end of time. Thus, God as Trinity implies that God is a verb not a noun. God is not a thing but an action and activity in the world. God as a verb is an ongoing even eternal action, in a word, mission, God is mission. God is eternally loving each other within Godself (missio ad intra) and eternally loving us, all his creation (missio ad extra). The life of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is endless communication and self-giving to the other. God is ever loving and ever helping each other, ever forgiving and ever welcoming the other, ever relating, ever cooperating and ever communicating with each other. God does not stop, he is always in action. God is not static, he is ever dynamic.

The Council of Florence in the fifteenth century described the ever dynamic, ever-loving, ever-welcoming, relationship of God within Godself:

“[T]the Father is entirely in the Son and entirely in the Holy Spirit; the Son is entirely in the Father and entirely in the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit is entirely in the Father and entirely in the Son.”

The three person in one God in the Trinity is totally focused on the other, live totally for the other, welcome totally the other into one’s own, make room totally for the other, and totally love the other. Because of this, God is one and three persons. Perfect hospitality. Perfect selflessness. Perfect unity in diversity.

The simplest expression that captures the notion that God is a verb not a noun is: God is love. Love in God the Trinity, however, is different from what we understand and experience as love as human beings. Love in reference to God is never a static word. It is an action word, forever dynamic. In other words, God is a relationship, God is a community, and God is love.

We as church originates from the trinity. In today’s Matthew’s gospel, the Risen Lord commissions the disciples to go forth and baptize the nations “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Mat 28:19). The distinctive identity of the Church is we are baptized in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, that is, we the church arises out of the singular mystery of divine self-communication.

The whole emphasis of Trinity Sunday is not how to comprehend the Trinity (although this is very important) but how to live and participate in the life of God the Trinity. God, the Father + Son + Holy Spirit, is the highest paradigm to how we should live our lives. What are the challenges in following the life of God the trinity?

The first challenge is go beyond a static, objective or even scientific way of talking about God. An example of a static way of talking aboit God is that God is out there so far away from us, as the popular song goes, “God is watching us from a distance.” Trinity Sunday tells us to let go of all of our human categories about God. Many of our language about God is heretical. God is unfathomable, inexhaustible and ineffable. No human language or categories can ever fully talk about God. God cannot be colonized. We cannot make God in our own image (reverse creation is impossible). We should let go, let God!

The second challenge is to see God not outside of ourselves but to see ourselves in God. The problem is we always see God outside of ourselves, outside of this world, outside of our realm. We are all in the trinity, As St. Paul said, “For in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17: 28). God is something that we participate in. God as a verb, means we participate in God’s action of bringing to the world love, justice, mercy, joy and goodness.

We are created in the image and likeness of God, the Father + Son + Holy Spirit. As God is a community, relationship and love, we ought to live as a community, opening ourselves always to the other, always relating and cooperating with one another. The Holy Trinity is the model of the family, community, relationships and all collective endeavors. As God is one and connected to each other, we are also one, we are interconnected to each other; we are not just interconnected to each other but to whole of God’s creation. As God is unity and diversity we should be united even as we open ourselves to diversity and celebrate difference. As Pope Francis articulated in his encyclical on creation, Laudato Si,

The divine Persons are subsistent relations, and the world, created according to the
divine model, is a web of relationships. Creatures tend towards God, and in turn it is
proper to every living being to tend towards other things, so that throughout the
universe we can find any number of constant and secretly interwoven relationships.
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[1] De Trinitate, Book 1, Chapter 3, 5.