Homily during the Celebration of the Eucharist in the occasion
of the Assembly of the Joint International Commission
for Theological Dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church
(Alexandria, 3 June 2023)
LIVING IN ECUMENICAL FELLOWSHIP
IN THE NAME OF THE TRIUNE GOD
“In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” We usually say these words when we begin a prayer and when we end with the benediction. We make the sign of the cross and allow ourselves to be drawn into the communion of the Triune God. Or we sign other people with the cross when we wish God’s blessing for them and link it with the hope that they will stay within the sphere of this blessing. Or we make a sign of the cross over objects that are important to us, that accompany us in our lives and that we, so to speak, receive again with God’s blessing. Making the sign of the cross is the actual gesture of blessing for us Christians. The sign of the cross is therefore also the sign with which we show ourselves to be Christians, our sign of identity, as it were. It is the most elementary form of confession of our faith in the Triune God. When making this sign, we always invoke the Triune God and express the core of our Christian faith in visible form. Trinity Sunday reminds us of this in a special way.
Trinity as a festival of everlasting love
This confession of faith gives us, above all, the wonderful insight that God is not a solitary being sitting on a throne beyond our world – but, rather, is a being of relationships, communion and communication. All the time, the Triune God is communicating and pouring out streams of life. God is, in the divine Self, mutual love between the three persons of the Trinity, and this love occurs as love (by the Father), being loved (the Son) and co-loving (Holy Spirit). In the communion of the Triune God the Father lives entirely with the Son and the Son with the Father, and they both find the unity of their love in the bond of the Holy Spirit. So the Christian confession of faith in the Triune God is the consistent interpretation of the core New Testament statement about God: God is, as we heard in the reading, the “God of love and peace” (2 Cor 13:11); and as John testifies, God has gifted his love above all in giving his Son for our salvation (Jn 3:16-18).
The life of the Triune God is the fulfilment what we human beings profoundly long for in our lives − that we need not be alone but may live in a loving community so that our lives can ultimately be a festival. Indeed, our deepest longing is directed towards the possibility of celebration in our lives and our living together. Let us try to explore this longing by asking what a festival is and what it consists of. Here I know of no more fitting description than that rendered by German philosopher Josef Pieper. He interpreted Fest or festival as “assent to the world”.[1] That expresses primarily two things.
A festival, first, always means an affirmation and confirmation of life. It is always a festival when I say yes and when I can assent to life itself and myself within it, because I assent to the ground of myself and the ground of all life, namely God. Believing in God is therefore a positive and life-affirming act. It is saying yes to the world, from its depths, from God. Faith in its true sense is a festival. In this festival we re-enact God’s assent to the world and thank God for willing the whole of creation, for unceasingly sustaining its life and affirming it.
Then there is a second basic element. Personal relations between people are an essential precondition for celebrating a festival. On principle, we cannot celebrate festivals on our own. Instead, we humans celebrate festivals together again and again, in order to reaffirm both our own lives and those of others, and to be affirmed by other people. The profound human significance of celebrating birthdays or wedding anniversaries, for example, consists in this reaffirmation.
Putting the two elements together results in the following insight. If the actual topic of the festival is mutual assent to life and if the festival presupposes personal relations, then it is first and foremost the Triune God’s very Self who has, since time immemorial, celebrated God’s eternal festival. After all, where else than with the three divine persons of the Trinity could the mutual, joyful assent to the life of a person as expressed by other persons happen more intimately and intensively? And where else than in the Holy Trinity do we find such a complete confirmation of the goodness and beauty of a person by other persons? God’s everlasting life is the completion of an overflowing, living love relationship between the three persons of the Trinity and thus a “play of perfect love”.[2] In this love play, God celebrates the divine Self in the mutual joy of the three persons in one another; and the divine affirmation of the life of the whole creation has its ground and its sphere in the three persons’ unending mutual assent to each other’s life.
Church as image of the Triune God
The everlasting life of the redeemed consists in participating in this heavenly festival. The consummation of our life and the world will be an eternal feast. Yet in this life we are already privileged to share in this heavenly festival, primarily in the earthly liturgy of the Church. The church liturgy celebrated on earth is sharing in the eternal festival of the heavenly liturgy in the fulness of life of the Triune God. The liturgy can, of course, only have this meaning when it is really a celebration of faith in which God is praised as the Creator and Saviour without any other intention or any ulterior motive, such as to obtain a specific benefit. The liturgy therefore finds its true purpose in the worship of the Triune God, which we express as follows primarily in the Gloria in the Eucharist: “Gratias agimus tibi propter magnam gloriam tuam”. We do not begin by thanking God for what God does for us. Rather, we give thanks that God exists and is glorious in the Trinitarian fulness of life. Then we experience that the liturgy itself is a festival.
Such a liturgy naturally seeks to radiate out into the everyday church life. Trinity Sunday therefore contains the great challenge to us as a church community to be a credible image of the Triune God and to become it more and more. If God is, in the divine Self, an intensely relational communion and a festival of love, then, too, our life of faith in the communion of the Church can only mean: being there with, and for, one another. Then the Church will appear as the Second Vatican Council wanted it, namely as “a people made one with the unity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit”[3] and hence as the image of the Triune God, as an icon of the Trinity.
Baptism in the name of the Triune God
That is the calling of us all through our baptism. We are also reminded of that when we make the sign of the cross and thereby confess our faith in the Triune God. Since we are baptised in the name of the Triune God, we receive a share of God’s fulness of life. In order to express the great significance of baptism in Christian life, Scripture uses a phrase from the banking sector meaning “credit to someone’s account”. This is because in baptism we are personally credited to the Triune God. Baptism therefore contains the wonderful promise that the Triune God offers the covenant to each one of us personally and invites us into a personal relationship with God.
Being assigned to the Triune God in baptism is linked to another important element. Baptism marks not only someone’s conversion to Christian faith but also entry into the faith community of the church. The assigning of a baptised person to the Triune God and fitting them into the church fellowship belong indissolubly together. Baptism is the entrance to the Church.
Baptism is, at the same time, also the entrance to ecumenism, because baptism creates a sacramental bond of unity between all those who, through it, are born again to new life. At the heart of ecumenical fellowship is the mutual recognition of baptism, in which we are united with the Triune God. The more deeply we are drawn into this divine communion, the more we will also find the path to one another. The ecumenical movement can only grow in breadth when it is rooted in the depth of baptismal unity with the Triune God. This has been fruitfully shown by our dialogue, which since the document of Munich in 1982 has considered the mystery of the Church −and the unity that has to be regained − in the light of the mystery of the Divine Trinity.
On the basis of baptism, we are also committed to regaining unity in faith. After all, the Apostles’ Creed was originally a baptismal confession and its structure is consistent with the mystery of the Triune God: We Christians believe in God, the Father, we believe in Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son, our Lord, and we believe in the Holy Spirit. We are baptised, signed and sealed on this faith. We are reminded of it when we seal ourselves with the sign of the cross. This applies especially when we sign ourselves with holy water and accept again the covenant that God has made with us in baptism.
Baptism makes us again and again aware that the essence of Christian faith is faith in the Triune God and that the sign of the cross is a fundamental confession of faith on the part of us Christians. It is the confession of faith in the Triune God and a living reminder of our baptism that we accept ever anew in faith in the Triune God: In the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
[1]. J. Pieper, Zustimmung zur Welt. Eine Theorie des Festes (Munich, 1963).
[2]. M. Kunzler, Leben in Christus. Eine Laienliturgik zur Einführung in die Mysterien des Gottesdienstes (Paderborn, 1999) 54.
[3]. Lumen gentium, No 4.