Faith series, Episode 105

 

First we need to understand that ‘Mystery’ is something you cannot totally understand. Thus, we cannot totally understand the chief mystery of the Catholic faith. The Catechism of the Catholic Church speaks of the TRINITY as the chief mystery of faith. It is the mystery of faith in the strict sense, one of the mysteries that are hidden in God, which can never be known unless they are revealed by God and it declares the mystery of the most holy Trinity as the central mystery of Christian faith and life.

The Trinity is the mystery of faith because of the unity that exist in the Trinity.

WHAT IS TRINITY? The Trinity consists of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. This is a community of love. The Trinity according to our Catechism is that there are three persons in one God.

The Trinity is a dogma of three persons in one God. Although in God there is one nature, the Father, the Son who proceeds from the Father by generation and the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father and the Son by Spiriation. The three divine persons are coequal, coeternal and so-substantial. Thus, they deserve coequal glory and adoration. All life begins in the Trinity, come from the Trinity and is destined to end with the Trinity.

The mystery of the Trinity is woven around the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ. This is why the profession of our faith (the creed) is on God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.

 

Incarnation

The word “Incarnation” (from the Latin caro, “flesh”) may refer to the moment when God became flesh, in the womb of the Virgin Mary that God assumed a human nature and became a man in the person of Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the second person of the Trinity that Christ was truly God and truly man.

The essence of the doctrine of the Incarnation is that the preexistent Word has been embodied in the man Jesus of Nazareth, who is presented in the Gospel According to John as being in close personal union with the Father, whose words Jesus is speaking when he preaches the gospel.

The doctrine maintains that the divine and human natures of Jesus do not exist beside one another in an unconnected way but rather are joined in him in a personal unity that has traditionally been referred to as the hypostatic union.

Belief in the preexistence of Christ is indicated in various letters of the New Testament but particularly in the Letter of Paul to the Philippians 2:7-11(read) in which the Incarnation is presented as the emptying of Christ Jesus, who was by nature God and equal to God (i.e., the Father) but who took on the nature of a slave (i.e. a human) and was later glorified by God.

Similarly, we also read from the Gospel of St. John 1:1-3-14, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God, He was in the beginning with God, all things were made through Him and without Him was made nothing that was made…. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we have seen His glory, the glory of the only Son coming from the Father full of grace and truth.

Paschal Mystery

The paschal Mystery or Easter mystery refers to Christ saving actions through His blessed passion death, resurrection and ascension (or glorification). Through Jesus’s death, our death was destroyed; through His resurrection, our life will be restored.

What Jesus Christ has accomplished for us through the Paschal Mystery is the supreme act of God’s love for us that is our salvation and redemption. This dying and rising circle is the very heart of the good news of the gospel of Christ.

A sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, celebrate the paschal mystery and enables us to live it in our own lives.