Fathers and Sons and the Spirit of GodRead Time 10 min

SOLEMNITY OF THE MOST HOLY TRINITY

PROVERBS 8:22-31
ROMANS 5:1-5
JOHN 16:12-15

“Everything that the Father has is mine.” (John 16:15) So Jesus declares in our Gospel this week, providing not only a beautiful invitation into a deeper consideration of fatherhood as our nation celebrates Father’s Day this Sunday but also the perfect entry point into a deeper consideration of the mystery of the Trinity as the Church celebrates the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity.

Beautifully, this window into Jesus’ relationship with the Father finds its echo in the culmination of the parable of the prodigal son, where the father says to the older son, “My son, you are here with me always; everything I have is yours. But now we must celebrate and rejoice, because your brother was dead and has come to life again; he was lost and has been found.” (Luke 15:31-32)

“Everything I have is yours,” says the father. “Everything that the Father has is mine,” says the Son. In our fallen world, the relationship between fathers and sons are often less than ideal. But the paradigm of a good father is to find delight in sharing all he has with his children. Good children receive all that their good father pours out on them, in honor of the father, to the praise and glory of them both. The prodigal son must learn this the hard way, experiencing death and loss in his rebellion against it, and new life — resurrection — in re-finding it. Christ humbly (and unwarrantedly) walks this path on our behalf to show us the way out of our quagmire and into true sonship.

The beauty of our doctrine of the Trinity is the revelation that this dynamic of total gift between Father and Son has been going on interiorly within the Trinity since before all time and eternity. It is the ground of all that is.

To be a son is to be like in nature to the father. We say a son receives his nature from his father. A horse begets a horse. Giraffes beget giraffes. They bestow their nature on their sons. And a son proceeds from within his father, not by being assembled from external matter, as one might assemble a chair. Frank Sheed masterfully describes all of this in his classic work, “Theology and Sanity,” if it interests you.

When we call the Son of God a “son,” we profess that he is like in nature to the Father and proceeds from the Father. He is not created, as if assembled from parts external to the Father; and since the Father gives everything He has to the Son, and the Father’s nature is infinite, omnipotent and eternal, so too the Son must be infinite, omnipotent and eternal. Therefore we say that the Father and the Son are co-eternal. They were never not Father and Son! This is mind-bending to us. Whereas in human beings, a man becomes a father — I’ll never forget the day I became an uncle — the Son of God receives His nature from the Father, but not in time. He is eternally begotten of the Father, “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made,” as we say in the Creed.

The idea of the Son being also the “Word” of God helps us understand how He is not only like in nature to the Father but also one in nature with the Father. God is pure spirit, so any word He has will be an interior word, rather than the stuff of lips and breath and vocal chords. We also say that He is omniscient. He knows infinitely. But what does He know? Well, Himself, of course! God eternally and perfectly knows and expresses all that He is, and we call this the Word of God. Whereas our ideas are finite, God’s idea of Himself is infinite, total — it lacks nothing of the Being of which He conceives. “Thus the Idea, the Word that God generates,” Frank Sheed concludes, “is Infinite, Eternal, Living, a Person, equal in all things to Him Who generates It — Someone as He is, conscious of Himself as He is, God as He is.” (p.79)

We’ve said nothing of the Spirit, but the concept is similar. Whereas the Son proceeds by way of knowledge from the Father, we in the West say that the Spirit proceeds by way of love from both the Father and the Son, as the two know and love one another totally. Again Frank Sheed puts it well: “[J]ust as the act of knowing produces an Idea within the Divine Nature, the act of loving produces a state of Lovingness within the Divine Nature. Into this Lovingness, Father and Son pour all that They have and all that They are, with no diminution, nothing held back. Thus this Lovingness within the Godhead is utterly equal to the Father and the Son, for They have poured Their all into it. There is nothing They have which Their Lovingness does not have. Thus Their Lovingness too is Infinite, Eternal, Living, Someone, a Person, God.” (p.80)

These are sacred mysteries — mind-bending and beautiful — not entirely understandable but also not entirely unknowable. God’s revelation of them to us is such a precious gift. He invites us to come to know the goodness He knows, the love He shares, and to enter into it through the gift of His Incarnation by which He shares His nature with us, and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, by which He shares His life and love with us. As St. Paul says in our reading from the Letter to the Romans this week, “[W]e have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith to this grace in which we stand, and we boast in hope of the glory of God.” (Romans 5:1-2) This “hope,” he says, “does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” (Romans 5:5)

Perhaps we can thank our fathers today for all they have shared with us, and our Father for all He has shared with us in giving us His Son — His everything — and pouring out His Holy Spirit into our hearts.