In order to know about the Trinity, we can think back to the great story that we have been celebrating for many weeks. Let us tell it one more time.

God the Father invited people on earth to a lasting and loving relationship with him and with each other. “I want to be your God and I want you to be my people. My love for you is tender and precious. Won’t you love me in return?”

People understood and entered into the agreement. Abraham, Isaac, Moses, Elisha, Elijah, just to begin the list. But we humans keep choosing things closer to hand: money and honors—barns full of them—which can also bear a refusal of God’s love.

How would God react to such refusal?

My people, what have I done to you? How have I offended you? Answer me. For your sake I scourged your captors and their first-born sons, but you brought your scourges down on me! My people, answer me! [from Good Friday, The Reproaches]

So, eventually God tried a new and quite brilliant way. To paraphrase, “I will show them what true love looks like. Since I am all love and nothing but love, I will go out to them completely, as love does. I will become one of them. I will live humanity to its depths, and they will see Love in its full truth.”

So God was born as a human called Jesus, who told the people to love God above all things and their neighbors as themselves. He was the very heart of God-made-flesh. One with the Father but different as well.

And so the world knew about two persons in one God.

Many human beings had been hurt and betrayed, forced to live with their own mixed-up motives, and selfishness and greed. Having to live with the faults of others. Love can get lost in such a world.

So God the Son plunged into this ocean of cruelty and loss, diving all the way down to death. This was a display of the most profound insides of God: give everything, receive everything.

So far, the disciples knew two parts of God, Jesus and his Abba; and they were not very sure about these. So before he left, Christ said the following to them (again paraphrasing):

If you know me, you know the Father. He is in me fully, and after I go back I will make a home in you by sending the Holy Spirit. It will comfort you, and will be the very love that I and the Father have for each other and for you. That way I will be with you until the end of time!

He was talking about the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. which snuggles close to our souls if we let it. If we let it. The Holy Spirit is like a blanket in cold winter. It is the love between Father and Son. So real that it is the third person of the Trinity.

So there are three parts to God. Ok, not parts but ... well, go figure.

But how could God interact with us in these three very different ways? By being “plural” (in a sense), that is, by being what believers have called three “persons.”

Alright, how can three persons in God be one? By not letting the number three be a divider but a plus sign. All three, in a great dynamic of love; come so close that they are One God.

Let us simply let God the Trinity touch us!