The Christian holidays
by ENZO BIANCHI
Communion is the fruit and the manifestation of the love that, flowing out from the heart of the eternal Father, pours itself out on us through the Spirit that Jesus gives us

FEAST OF THE TRINITY

“The Church is full of the Trinity,” Origen already affirmed. On the Sunday after Pentecost western Christians celebrate this mystery. Yet, from the beginnings of its reflection on faith, the Church has appraised the poverty of human language in rendering fully an account of the mystery of love and of life that exists in the Tri-unity of God, in the Trinitarian communion that molds man’s very existence and establishes the ecclesiology of communion. Yes, because Christians are monotheists and from the very first centuries all their efforts to express their faith tend towards protecting that precious gift of monotheism which they received from Israel: a gift that is combat without truce or quarter against idolatry, against manipulation of the divine, against distortion of the image of God deposited in man, which can disfigure it into a caricature of a god in the image of man.
For the disciples of Jesus God — the God of the fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of the living and the dead, the God who made Israel issue out of slavery and whop gave it the Law of life on Sinai — is One and has shown himself fully in Jesus, Lord and Savior. This means, according to the adage of the fathers of the undivided Church, that God has made himself present in him without becoming confused with him: in Jesus, true God and true man, humanity does not absorb divinity and divinity does not cancel humanity. These are the fundamental terms of that enormous effort of theological reflection of the first Christian communities and are also the fruit of the ineffable spiritual and ecclesial experience that will lead to the definition of the Trinitarian mystery.