This week, we celebrate the solemnity of the Holy Trinity, and we often tiptoe around this date, as if it were an inaccessible mystery, one that is impossible to understand or apply to our lives. However, exactly the opposite is true: this mystery is key to understanding ourselves, the world, and God.

Mystery or problem?

A mystery is not a problem to be solved, but a reality that overwhelms us, that envelops us, and that, far from being absurd, illuminates us. It’s not that it cannot be understood at all, but that its comprehension is never exhausted. As the philosopher Gabriel Marcel said, “A problem is something I have before me; a mystery is something in which I am involved.”

The Trinity is not a mathematical enigma, but a living reality that speaks to us of a God who is not solitude, but communion, who is not cold power, but a relationship of love.

Progressive revelation in the Gospel

Jesus doesn’t explain the Trinity theoretically.  He reveals it through living. In the Gospel, we see how the apostles perceive his divine authority, how he calms storms, forgives sins, and raises the dead. But at the same time, they hear him call God “Father”  —as many as 170 times!—not as a symbolic title, but as an expression of radical intimacy: “My Father,” “Abba,” “Daddy.”

Peter, on behalf of the Twelve, confesses: “You are the Son of God.” This was an unthinkable statement for the Jewish mentality, which had never known a literal “Son of God.” It was something new, incomprehensible, and at the same time evident to those who lived near Jesus.

From apostolic experience to theological reflection

Already in the early centuries of Christianity, the Church began to delve deeper into this mystery. The Letters of Saint Paul and the liturgy of baptism (with its triple question: “Do you believe in God the Father, in God the Son, in God the Holy Spirit?”) show how the Trinity was not a later construction, but an original experience of Christians.

Amidst persecutions and councils, the Church defended this truth against heresies that sought to simplify the mystery. Some (the modalists) claimed that the Father, Son, and Spirit were merely “faces” of the one God. Others (like Arius) denied the divinity of the Son and the Spirit. Both positions diluted the mystery and turned it into a problem.

The Councils of Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381) clearly formulated the Trinitarian faith:  one God in three Persons. To this end, they used the concepts of “nature” (what is it?) and “person” (who is it?). Thus, they proclaimed:  one divine nature and three distinct persons : the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

God is relationship. God is love.

Far from being absurd, this truth is profoundly transformative.  God is not an eternal solitude, but an eternal communion of love. As Saint John affirms in his First Letter:  “God is love.” Not just any love, but a love that is given, received, and shared from all eternity. That is why we say that the Trinity is not only a mystery to understand, but to worship, to live, to imitate.

The family, the Christian community, the Church itself, are called to reflect this unity in diversity, this love that is given without measure, this mystery that explains more to us than we can explain it.

In celebrating the solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, we do not seek to solve a riddle.  We allow ourselves to be embraced by the Love that sustains the universe. A Love that has a face, a name, and life:  the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.