GOSPEL, FIRST READING & PSALM TRANSCRIPT (Subscribe or Login for Full Transcript):
Today I would like to begin with a question.
What is the central mystery of the Christian faith?
I think if you asked most Catholics that question they would probably say, “well either it's the incarnation, so the mystery of God becoming man in Christ,” or they would say “it's the mystery of the Eucharist because it's the source and the summit of the Christian life,” and those are obviously extremely important, very central, very profound mysteries of the faith.
What is fascinating though is that if you look at the Catechism of the Catholic Church it actually teaches that the central mystery of the Christian faith is the one we celebrate today, it's the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity.
So I would like to begin today just with a quote from the Catechism about this mystery before we look at the Scriptures that the church is going to use today to illuminate the mystery.
This is what the Catechism of the Catholic Church 234 says about the mystery of the Trinity:
The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of Christian faith and life. It is the mystery of God in himself. It is therefore the source of all the other mysteries of faith, the light that enlightens them. It is the most fundamental and essential teaching in the “hierarchy of the truths of faith.” The whole history of salvation is identical with the history of the way and the means by which the one true God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, reveals himself to men…
So notice that it is a pretty staggering statement that the church is making there; that the mystery of the Trinity is the central mystery of the faith, it's the foundation of all the other mysteries, ultimately because it's the mystery of who God is in himself.
There are lots of other mysteries of our faith that tell us about what God does or what God has done, but this mystery is about who he is, One God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
So with that in mind let's look at the readings for today's lectionary and let us try to see why does the church choose the readings she does and what does it reveal to us not just about what God has done but who He is and what is this mystery that we call the Trinity...
SECOND READING TRANSCRIPT (Subscribe or Login for Full Transcript):
...in both Paul and in the Gospel of Mark there, Jesus says “Abba, Father”, so literally in Greek it would be abba,
patér. So
patér is the Greek word for father, and Abba is the Aramaic word for father. But what Mark appears to be giving us here is a window into the language of Jesus’ own prayer life — that when He cried out to God in the anguish of Gethsemane, He actually reverted to the Aramaic. He used the Aramaic word for father.
And as a side note, you’ll hear it commonly preached that the word
abba — the best English translation of the word
abba — is “daddy” as a way of kind of revealing the intimacy of a child. One of my teachers, however — James Barr, who’s very famous, Hebrew philologist — once wrote a famous article called “Abba doesn’t mean daddy.” And he kind of criticized that tendency to make the Aramaic word into simply a word that children used for their fathers.
But it does have a certain intimacy to it, but it’s just the Aramaic word for father. And we’ll see Jesus, actually — when He instructs His disciples to pray, He tells them to say “Our Father (
patér hémón in Greek) who art in Heaven” …. or
pater noster in Latin. He didn’t speak Latin. Well, he might have said Latin. Anyway, I don't want to go into all that right now. Latin would not have been the primary language of Jesus and the disciples, for sure. Greek and Aramaic are the two main candidates, and many scholars think they were bilingual. So, apart from that, the point is, calling God Father alone is an act of intimacy.
If you go back to the Old Testament, God is described as Father on a number of occasions, a handful of occasions. And he’s even addressed as Father by the prophet Isaiah and also the book of Sirach. So there are a couple of occasions where God is addressed as Father in prayer. But, it’s not common at all. The primary mode of addressing God in prayer is as Lord and God — Lord being the translation of the Hebrew tetragrammaton, the four sacred letters, YHWH. So in the Old Testament, thousands of times in the Psalter, God is addressed as Lord. But when Jesus comes on the scene, He teaches His disciples to address God as
patér, as Father. And He Himself addresses God as Abba.
Why? Because the prayer of Jesus and the teaching of Jesus is an introduction — an induction — into the mystery of the Trinity. Jesus calls God Father more times in the Sermon on the Mount alone than God is called Father in the Old Testament. Why? Because He’s revealing the mystery of God’s fatherhood as one of the principal teachings He’s given to the disciples. So when they say, “Teach us how to pray,” He says, “Pray like this:
patér hémón” — Our Father, who art in Heaven.
Okay, so Paul’s piggy-backing on this, and what’s fascinating is, the only two times Abba occurs in the New Testament is in Mark 14 and Romans 8 — if my memory serves, I think that’s right — which shows that He can assume the Greek-speaking Christians in the Church in Rome are using the Aramaic language of Jesus in their prayer. In other words, Christian prayer — this is important — is an
imitatio Christi, an imitation of Christ. We’re going to pray to the Father in the Spirit, even using the very words that Jesus Himself prayed while He was on Earth, above all in His agony in Gethsemane. And Paul says this all makes sense because:
...it is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ… (Romans 8:16-17a)
I’ll pause there. What does that mean? Here Paul’s using kind of standard Jewish imagery of the idea of the firstborn son getting a double portion of the inheritance. So if you remember in the Old Testament, you have lots of conflict between sons like Jacob and Esau over who gets the blessing, who gets the birthright… you know, conflict between the sons of Jacob (the twelve sons of Jacob) over inheritance and gifts from the father.
So what Paul is doing is he’s depicting Christ as the firstborn son but then all those who are baptized into Christ are not just believers. They are children of God who have been made children through the gift of the Spirit of the Son, and who, because they are children, are now fellow heirs with Christ. In other words, we have an inheritance.
Now, if you’ve ever gone through the process of dividing up the inheritance between your brothers and sisters — maybe if your parents pass away — or you’ve watched relatives divide up the inheritance after parents have passed away, it’s a delightful and wonderful experience, right? No, there can be a ton of conflicts. Families can be divided over who gets what portion of the inheritance. And what Paul is saying is that because we’re Christ’s younger brothers and sisters, then we’re not just children of God; we’re heirs. And what are we heirs to? The kingdom of Heaven. We’re heirs to the glory of Christ with one provision: provided that we suffer with Him. Ouch.
I wanted to be an heir without any suffering, Paul. What are you talking about? Well, because in order to inherit that which is ordained for us, which is the life of the kingdom, the life of the Trinity, we have to be conformed to the image of the Son as Paul will say later in Romans 8 — which means conformed to His cross
and glory. So in order to receive the glory, we have to suffer with Him on the cross, because that’s what sonship looks like. That’s what the mystery of the Trinity looks like. If we want to enter into the mystery of the Trinity, we have to conform ourselves to the love of the Trinity. And the love of the Trinity was expressed in the love of the Son, who cried out in agony in Gethsemane:
“Abba, Father, all things are possible to thee; remove this cup from me; yet not what I will, but what thou wilt.” (Mark 14:36)
So I can’t help but wonder here too that if Paul, when he says:
For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear… (Romans 8:15a)
...that if he’s speaking there of a spirit of fear of suffering. And so that when he says when we cry Abba Father, he’s not just saying, “Hey, in a general way, when we pray, we pray to God as Father.” I think in a specific way, he might be alluding — I’m just speculating here, but it’s just interesting to think about — to the one time we know Jesus prayed “Abba, Father” is when He’s praying in Gethsemane. It’s through the suffering of Christ that He enters into the glory of sonship, and the same thing is true for us as well.
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