Homily for Trinity Sunday
June 15, 2025
It’s A Mystery
One day St. Augustine was trying to understand the
Trinity – how could it be that there are three Persons but only one Divine Being?
How can we explain that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all fully God, but
God is not divided? Augustine was walking along the seashore pondering this
mystery, when he came upon a boy taking buckets of water from the ocean and
pouring it into a hole that he dug in the sand. The great bishop asked the lad,
“What are you doing?” The boy replied, “I’m trying to fit the ocean in this
hole.” “That’s impossible,” Augustine replied. “The hole is far too small.” The
boy looked at him and replied, “It is easier for me to pour the ocean in this
hole than for you to understand the Trinity.” – and then the boy disappeared! Augustine
realized he had seen an angel.
Mystery is essential in faith. There are many things we
will never understand in our Catholic Faith. How does bread become the very
Body and Blood of Jesus Christ? God knows everything we will ever do, but we
are truly free and not predetermined? How is it that the death of one Man on an
obscure hill in Israel has redeemed the entire universe? Why do bad things
happen to good people? Much of our faith is built upon mystery.
But some people think that “mystery” is a cop-out – perhaps
they think that “mystery” means “just stop asking questions.” But mystery is
absolutely essential to faith, because we believe in a God Who is infinite and
unlimited, and we are finite and limited. If we understood everything about God
and His ways, then we would be gods. I only want to worship Someone
greater than myself – so it is fitting that my small mind couldn’t contain the
fullness of who He is and what He does!
Mystery does not mean that something is unknowable, but
that it is infinitely knowable – just as we can drink from a stream
again and again without ever exhausting the water, we can ponder the Trinity,
or the Eucharist, or the life of Christ, forever while still discovering new
riches.
We have to remember, though, that mystery is present in
every aspect of human life. Even human relationships have mystery – can I
scientifically prove that someone loves me? Can we ever fully know another
human being, even our spouse? Of course not – these things must remain a
mystery – and that is good because mysteries are exciting, alluring!
These mysteries are not a mathematical equation to be solved; they are meant for
us to contemplate in love. Mystery draws us in and makes us excited about an
encounter – even movies know this – notice how Jaws doesn’t show the shark
until the very end of the movie? How boring that movie would be if you saw it
at the beginning and if you knew how it would end! How boring would be our
relationship with God – or even with others – if we knew everything about them!
Of course, mystery does NOT mean that we should stop
trying to understand our Faith. On the contrary, the Medieval Scholastics had a
wonderful phrase, Fides Quaerens Intellectum – faith seeking
understanding. We believe, so that we might understand more – not the other way
around, as some people say, “I have to understand first, before I believe.” No,
faith is primary, and then we seek to understand the Faith – and the whole
world around us. The Church has always encouraged learning more about the
mysteries of faith and the mysteries of the physical world – in fact, in 1079,
Pope Gregory VII decreed that every diocese needed to have at least one
Catholic school – this was rather revolutionary considering how rare education
was in those days! These Catholic schools became the foundation of the
university system – the first universities were Catholic schools connected to Cathedrals,
such as the University of Paris, Oxford, or Bologna. Our Faith is not afraid of
being questioned – we just have to realize that it is larger than our capacity
to understand, and we have to be content with not being able to explain
everything.
But even science has mysteries that science cannot answer:
why is there something rather than nothing? How did life originate from
non-life? What happens after we die? Science will not be able to answer these
questions – rather, we turn to our faith – based upon God’s revelation – to inform
us.
The Church teaches that God’s public revelation stopped at
the death of the last Apostle – apparitions like Fatima or Lourdes, mystics and
saints, do not add to the revelation but rather unpack it and explain it a
clearer way, but God’s Truth remains unchanged. If one were to plant an acorn,
an oak tree would grow – the acorn would, in a sense, become more of what it
was meant to be. But if it started growing pears, we would say that something
went haywire! Likewise, Jesus left the entirety of His revelation to the
Apostles, but it has unfolded and developed over the last two thousand years. But
it has to remain faithful to what He has taught. I sometimes drive by
Protestant churches who have signs out front that say, “God is still speaking.”
Well, yes, He still speaks to us in prayer and in our hearts, but they often
mean that God is revealing new (and sometimes contradictory) things, redefining
human life and marriage and gender and all sorts of fluid things. But God
cannot contradict Himself – He cannot say something in 2025 that contradicts
what He said in 1250. Rather, we can unpack what He revealed in Jesus Christ,
which is what we will be doing for all eternity! As it says in Deuteronomy, “Secret
things belong to the Lord our God, but things He has revealed belong to us and
our children forever.” Our faith is based upon these things He has revealed, such
as the Trinity!
I want to close with the story of an inspiring saint who sought
to uncover mysteries of the natural world – and ended up falling in love with the
mystery of God. Blessed Nicholas Steno was from Denmark in the mid-1600s. He was
a brilliant student and started studying medicine at the young age of 19 at the
University of Copenhagen. Science as we know it was still in a young stage, and
Nicholas started to question some of the prevailing theories of the day. For
example, scientists believed that tears came from the brain – so Nicholas
studied it and realized that they came from the eyes, not the brain – he was so
influential that a part of human anatomy is named after him, Stensen’s Duct. He
then turned his sights to geology – at the time, people thought that fossils
just grow randomly in the ground. He was the first to prove that fossils were
actually the remains of animals. In fact, he is considered the father of
geology.
His questioning mind eventually turned to religious
topics – he began to question his Lutheran upbringing. After years of searching,
he began to realize that the Catholic Faith had the answers he was looking for –
and even its mysteries invited him to love God more. He converted to
Catholicism, and continued his studies of the natural world while studying for
the priesthood. He ended up becoming a bishop and lived a very simple and pious
life, selling his gold ring and his cross so he could give money to the poor.
But he never stopped his inquiry into the natural world – even as a bishop he
would do scientific studies on the brain and on geology.
One time, Bl. Nicholas Steno was asked how he could be a
religious man and a scientist. He replied so well, “Beautiful is what we see, more
beautiful is what we understand, but most beautiful is what is still veiled.”
Do not be unafraid of mysteries in our faith. It does not
mean that our faith is not true, but that it is far greater than we could ever
conceive. We will spend eternity uncovering the mysteries of the greatness of
God!
