The Triune Being in Love

Super blue blood moon. This is the name given to the three lunar events that happened some three years ago (Jan 31, 2018) [incidentally a so-called blood moon also appeared recently (26 May 2021)].

Visible in many parts of the country, the moon was exceedingly beautiful, like a huge ripe Mabolo fruit hanging up in the sky—the least that one could say of a rare and awesome phenomenon.

When it comes as well to words to describe the central Christian belief called Trinity, they are like a finger pointing to the moon.

Thanks to the Old Testament, we have come to know the God of Jesus Christ even if only in words, like a finger pointing to the moon. This is the part of the bible where we read how God, for the very first time in history, reveals himself in a personal way—both what God does in the world (economic Trinity in theologians’ language) and who God is (immanent Trinity).

It is in the Old Testament that we learned that God is the creator of all, the parent whom later we confess as “Abba, Father” (Second Reading, from Paul’s Letter to the Romans). 

It is in it that we read that God summons a people to form a personal relationship with him by making a covenant. Thus we can speak today of the Church as “a people brought into unity from the unity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” (LG 4). 

We have come to know even his name. However ineffable it is, God’s name (YHWH) stands for his ever-presence among his people and for One who will be there always. The Gospel Reading for today, said to be a baptismal formula of the early Church, professes faith in that same name (and not names) of God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and who is to be eternally present in the world through Jesus (“I am with you always until the end of the age”). 

“Because he [YHWH] loved your ancestors,” so Moses reminds the Israelites as he ends the first of his three speeches in the Book of Deuteronomy (the First Reading). It is the first time in the Bible that the word “love” (Hebrew ’AHAB) is used for God.

The Israelites are on the plains of Moab waiting to cross over the Jordan to start life as a nation. Moses recalls for them how they get to this point in their journey, after spending forty years or one generation in the wilderness. Every good thing that they have experienced and will continue to do so is due to God’s love toward Israel. Moses even tells them that it was God who personally (literally, “with his face”) brought them out of Egypt (the Exodus).

It may sound corny today, but the reason Moses gives is because of love, God’s love, as mentioned above. This assertion comes many years before the New Testament tells us that “God is love” (in the First Letter of John) and before modern theologians would suggest that we may comprehend better the wondrous mystery of the Holy Trinity through the affirmation that God is One but also a "Triune Being in love."

It is not unfounded to therefore think that every creation, not only the human being, much less the baptized only, bears the mark of the Holy Trinity. 

Here we can reread what Moses tells of God to his people (in the First Reading): “Know and fix in your heart, that the LORD is God in the heavens above and on the earth below.” The author of the Book of Wisdom, the last written book in the Old Testament, says it best: “For you [God] love all things that exist.”