Today's reading: Deuteronomy 4, 32-34. 39-40; Romans 8, 14-17; Matthew 28, 16-20.
The idea of God as remote from and uninvolved with the affairs of the world, stands in obvious tension with the Christian vision of God as one who entered human history to remain with us to the end of time.
The doctrine of the Trinity, central to our Christian profession of faith, weaves together the basics of the Christian vision of God as creator, redeemer and sanctifier. We know God from the way He has acted in history, through Jesus the incarnate Word, and through the gift of the Spirit. It took the Church centuries to formulate its doctrine on the nature of God in the midst of heresies and misinterpretations.
God does not fall within the realms of evidence. God cannot be known apart from faith, though faith is entirely consistent with human reason. According to the Scriptures, the foundation of faith is memory, remembering God's wonders. Experience, not the intellect, is the prime way of knowing God.
God is love, and it is only in love that He can be found. A thousand syllogisms are insufficient to show that one is in love. There are other ways of demonstrating that. In Deuteronomy we read: "Understand this today therefore, and take it to heart."
Among recent bestsellers, there has been an outbreak of provocative atheistic treatises. But the point today is not just whether we can prove whether God exists or not.
The issue is rather where can I find this God and to what extent He can change things in our lives or help us see things differently.
In the second reading, St Paul writes that the Spirit we received is not the spirit of slaves bringing fear into our lives. Our world is marked by fear, hatred and violence which can only lead to destruction. But what we are celebrating today reminds us that our true house is not one of fear, but the house of love where God resides.
In the modern age, humanity has relived the parable of the prodigal son, leaving the Father's home in search of emancipation and freedom. Not believing in God offered intellectual freedom. The spirit of modernity sought to liberate humanity from its religious past.
But we still feel homeless and in need of salvation. The early Christians experienced the saving God in a threefold way as beyond them, with them, and within them, that is, as utterly transcendent, historically in the person of Jesus, and in the Spirit within their community.
The experience of salvation coming from God through Jesus in the power of the Spirit set the framework for a powerful encounter with the Holy Trinity and it necessitated a new language. The New Testament contains no full-blown doctrine of the Trinity. More formal consideration took place in the 4th century as a result of a controversy over the divinity of Jesus Christ. Later, this was expanded to include a similar confession about the divinity of the Holy Spirit.
The first believers in Jesus were monotheists, members of the Jewish community who worshipped the one God whose name they did not even pronounce. In Jesus' ministry and person, they encountered this living God of their tradition with new intensity. As the early Church grew with the inclusion of Gentiles, these early Christians understood that what was happening resulted from a new gift, the Spirit who was giving form and shape to their community.
Today's celebration invites us all to enter the Father's house and, with new intensity, to let ourselves be touched by this mystery which has to do more with the heart than with the mind.