Sunday Reflections

The important 20^th century theologian, Karl Rahner, S.J, once wrote that speaking about the Trinity is almost unintelligible to Christians today, and if Christians were to wake up one morning and find that there really is no Trinitarian God, it would hardly matter to most!  Because of this state of affairs, Rahner worked tirelessly in his writings to explain why it does make a difference to believe in a Trinitarian God.

One place to start to understand that it DOES make a difference that we have a Trinitarian God is Genesis 1, where man and woman are made in the image and likeness of God.  If God is a community of persons in a relationship of self-giving love—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—then it makes sense to imagine that we as human beings, made in God’s image and likeness, are “hot-wired” to be in relationship (with God, with each other, and with the entire cosmos) and that we will be most fulfilled as creatures when we participate in relationships of self-giving love.

We come to learn of the Trinitarian God through the revelation of Jesus, the incarnation of the eternal Son.  It is Jesus who reveals the Father and the Holy Spirit to us.  The Resurrectionist Constitutions give testimony to the life of the Trinity within us when it describes the paschal mystery as we being “reconciled to the Father, united in the one body of Christ, and enlivened with the life of the Spirit” (#1).  Further, it is the Father who calls us to conversion through a personal resurrection in union with Jesus and to a new life filled with the power of his Spirit (Resurrectionist Charism Statement).

Participating in this paschal dynamic will lead us to live lives of ever deepening self-giving love.  Whenever we do this, we give evidence that we are made in the image of the Trinitarian God who loves precisely in this way.