The Catholic Weekly 14 June 2020

8 14, June, 2020 F rom the archbishop catholicweekly.com.au God is three and One We’ll never understand the mystery of the Trinity - not in this life - but it’s who God really is W e Christians didn’t invent monotheism. The ancient Zo- roastrians proclaimed a sin- gle uncreated and benevolent god of wisdom. The Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep IV, fa- ther of the famous Tutankha- mun, took the name Akhen/ aten after joining the Atenist It’s impossible to portray, but many artists have been inspired by the mystery of the Trinity.This depiction by Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen dates from the first half of the 16th Century. IMAGE:WIKIMEDIA COMMONS/PUBLIC DOMAIN A depiction of theTrinity in the cathedral of São Pedro deAlcântara in Rio de Janeiro. PHOTO: EUGENIO HANSEN, OFS/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, CC sun worshippers and he sought to impose their mon- otheism on all Egypt. Mean- while the Children of Israel were particularly staunch in insisting that Yahweh wasn’t only the best of gods, He was the only one! Many Stoics of the Hellenist period believed in one god as the font of all being, and the Neo-Platonists taught that all else flows from the single Divine Unity. When the Christians came upon the scene, they natu- rally aligned themselves with the monotheists, repudiat- ing the many gods on offer in most ancient religions. This put them immediately at odds with the Romans, who had a dozen major gods and goddesses in their pantheon and hundreds of minor ones adopted from the cultures around them or preferred in different families, professions or situations. The Jewish and Christian insistence on one god seemed niggardly to say the least, and their unwilling- ness to venerate the various deities positively uncivil. Yet to serious monotheists like the Jews or later the Muslims, the Christian notion that God is Triune seemed both extrav- agant and incoherent. Chris- tians had either too few gods or too many! Theirs was a strange God indeed. Yet this, they insisted, was the central mystery of their faith: they worshipped One God not in the unity of a sin- gle person, but in the Trini- ty of one substance. It was a mystery, they readily admit- ted, but not in the sense of unintelligible gobbledegook, nor like a murder-mystery to be solved. It was more like the way a person we love is a mys- tery so deep we can endlessly discover and deepen what we know of them but never ex- haust it, and so feed a love to be lived in daily life. Where did Christians get their ‘strange’ idea of God? Well, in salvation history the Jewish people learnt that God was simple but complicated. When He appeared to Abra- ham at Mamre (Gen ch. 18) it was as three beings yet one; the text captures this by hav- ing the divine voice speak sometimes as ‘I’ and some- times ‘We’. There are Old Tes- tament passages that personi- fy the Wisdom or Law or Word of God and others His Spirit or Breath or Presence. And the Prophets dreamed of a day when unto us a child would be born who would be “God with us …Wonder Counsel- lor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace” (Isa 7:14; 9:6).  Jesus it was, however, that revealed Himself as God the Son of God the Father, and promised the sending of God the Holy Spirit. He taught us a great deal about the three, Archbishop Anthony Fisher OP