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Welcome to Unpacking the Mass with Keith Nestor. On this podcast, we dig into the week's readings for the upcoming Sunday for the Catholic Church so that when you go to Mass, you are ready to hear what God has to say to you through the scriptures. So grab your Bibles and let's get digging. Hey, friends. Welcome to Unpacking the Mass. My name is Keith Nestor. I'm so thankful that you are here with me today. We're looking at the readings for the solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity. And the Trinity is one of those things. Of course, I don't have to explain this to anybody. Everybody knows this, that it's really hard to understand. I remember when I was a pastor, we had this part of our worship service. Maybe some of you had this, maybe some of you haven't called the children's time. And of course, it's not hard to understand what that means. It's a part of the service where the little kids would come up and there would be a mini lesson for the kids that the adults could always hear, because it was done in front of the church with everybody, and they were. It was always sort of a introduction to the sermon. And to be honest with you, some of the people that did the children's lessons, usually it was done by a volunteer, not necessarily always the pastor. Sometimes that was better than the sermon, to be honest with you, because they would just lay things out in a way that the kids could understand. And it was always interesting when the topic of the Trinity would come up, because they would, in a children's sermon, try to find these ways to explain the Holy Trinity that a kid could grasp. So, for example, they might say, well, God is like a Trinity. And people would be like, what does that mean? Well, think about this. They'd get an egg, maybe, for example, and they'd say, an egg. This is one egg. But it has three parts. A yoke, a wight, and a shell. That's what God is like. Or God is like water. You can have ice, you can have vapor, or you can have liquid. And those were amusing examples. But the reality is this, and I just hate to say it, they're all heretical. And, you know, you could debate me about that. But the truth is this. Anybody who's ever tried to really explain the Trinity in a way that they think they've got it figured out has probably crossed over into some line of heresy. Because the Trinity is not something that can be quantified or grasped from a human perspective. It's what we refer to as A mystery. And for some people, it is the reason why they're not Christians. Some people say, I can't believe in this whole idea of a Trinity. So there are some actual people who claim to be Christians, but they don't believe in the Trinity. But the truth is, when you look at the creeds of the church, when you look at what Christianity teaches, one of the things that almost all Christians agree on, at least any Christians that are going to rightfully trace their faith backwards to the time of the apostles, is the Trinity. They're Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, they're all going to believe that. When I say Protestant, you have to say most Protestants. There are some Protestants, like oneness Pentecostals, who don't believe in the Trinity. And it's typically one of those doctrines that is is the benchmark for what is required for Christianity. People will argue about baptism, they'll argue about the Lord's Supper, they'll argue about the end times or the ecclesiology, the right ecclesiology, that means the study of the church. But most Christians are going to at least plant their flag on the idea of the Holy Trinity. And today, as we look at these readings we celebrate. That's interesting. The readings that we have today, they look at it from a different perspective. They're not trying to prove the Trinity. And this is something you gotta understand. People say things like, where's that in the Bible? When they look at the doctrines of our faith. And Catholics rightly point out that you're not going to find a Bible verse that says God is a trinity. And yet this is something we believe because the teaching of it is in the Bible, although the explicit definition of it is not. And what do I mean by that? I mean that there's no Bible verse that says God is a trinity, but yet you are going to find Father, Son, Holy Spirit in the Scriptures as God. You're going to see that. So really what can happen with the Trinity is so important is if you try to explain it too much, you wind up in heresy. If you try to explain it too little, you wind up in heresy. What do I mean by too little? By to say, well, we're not going to say that, that, you know, Jesus is God. If you try to say, well, Jesus is the Son of God. Okay, and this is what that means exactly. And you try to dig, you might go too far and explain the Trinity. And that's what I was talking about, like with the children's time sermon. Oh, well, God is like this, this, this, this, this. Well, when you Break those things down. You look at church history, a lot of the heresies are because people try to explain it too much. Like, for example, the Arian heresy. Well, no, we couldn't wrap our minds around Jesus being God because God can't be begotten. Right. Or, you know, Jesus hasn't always existed, but yes, he has. But if you explain it too little, oh, well, you know, God's just easy to understand. Three different parts, you know, egg yolk, white. Well, then you cross over into a heresy called, like, modalism, where God just seems to act this way or he takes on these different modes. I know this might seem boring to you. We're going to get to the scripture reading in a minute. But why am I saying all this? Because we have to not understand the doctrine of the Trinity. We have to understand how we understand what we understand about the Trinity and why it's even important. And before I jump into the text, because once I jump into the text, we're just going to fly through it. Understanding the Trinity is important not because the Trinity helps us understand what God is like, because the Trinity helps us understand God. There's a difference between what God is like and who God is. And that's what I should have probably started off by saying, because that's the key thing that we have to understand about the Trinity. And too many times people try to use this idea of the Trinity to explain what God is like. And some people even turn that into really good sermons. They'll be like, oh, well, if you need to relate to God as a father, he can be the Father for you. If you need to understand God in an emotional way, then you need to understand the Holy Spirit. And if you need to understand God with love, you understand Jesus Christ, who gave himself up for you. Almost as if the Trinity is something that God has given to us to help us understand Him. But that's not what it is. The Trinity isn't a mechanism to understand what God is like. The Trinity is who God is. And that's so important. And why is that important? Because if we want to be saints, we have to understand, as much as is our ability, who God is. The Scripture is the revelation of who God is. The deposit of faith is that revelation. Jesus Christ, friends, is the revelation of the Father, the Holy Spirit, given to us to empower us to do the work of the Father. We're going to get into some of that stuff, but I think that it's important that as we look at these texts, we understand what they're trying to do and what they're not trying to do. And the Bible isn't trying to explain God to you in a children's sermon type of a way. The Bible is trying to show you the reality of who God is. And some of that stuff is going to be hard for you to grasp. Let's pray and we're going to dig in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Lord, it's so important that we understand who you are so that we can relate to you, so that we can come to you in the right way. Because God, if we feel like you can be grasped by our finite minds, then that's what we're going to try to do and anything beyond that is going to get lost. But Lord, when we recognize who you are is beyond what we can comprehend, then we can look upon you with faith and receive what you say to us, what you call to us to be and to do in faith, even when we can't understand it, Lord, because if we could, then would you really be God? Lord, we revel in the fact that you are a mystery to us. We're thankful for it. In the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. All right, sorry for my long introduction, but I just wanted to set the stage here for this. All right, let's look at our first reading. And this is really about the name of the Lord, the name of God. Where did this come from? So the Old Testament reading in the book of Exodus, chapter 34. Listen to this text. So Moses chiseled out two stone tablets like the first ones, and went up Mount Sinai early in the morning as the Lord had commanded him. And he carried the two stone tablets in his hands. Then the Lord came down in the cloud and stood there with him and proclaimed his his name, the Lord. And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming the Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness. And Moses made haste to bow his head toward the earth and worshiped. And he said, if now I have found favor in thy sight, O Lord, let the Lord, I pray thee, go in the midst of us, although it is a stiff necked people, and pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us for thy inheritance. Our second reading from Second Corinthians 13:11, 13. It's actually 14 as well in the Revised standard. What we see in the readings is found in verse 14. So I'm just going to include that. Finally, brethren Farewell. Mend your ways. Heed my appeal. Agree with one another, live in peace, and the God of love and peace will be with you. Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints greet you. And the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. I love that. And our gospel, this is a pretty obscure verse probably no one's ever heard of, right? John 3, 16, 18. I'm kidding, of course. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him. He who believes in him is not condemned. He who does not believe is condemned already because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. Amazing. Amazing. And in these verses, of course, we do see the Trinity. Now, like I said earlier, people say, well, where does the Bible say that's a tr. You know, God's a trinity. Well, the bigger question or the better question I would ask is why has the Church always taught this? We can go back to the earliest Church fathers and see the trinities formulated and being taught. Of course, it was the work of the Church councils at Nicaea and Constantinople, of course, that dealt with these issues, you know. But even before that, we see people like Tertullian, who in the very early third century wrote things like this. The mystery of the dispensation is still guarded, which distributes the unity into a trinity, placing in their order the three Persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Three, however, not in condition, but in degree, not in substance, but in form, not in power, but in aspect, yet of one substance. Of course, Tertullian was the first known writer to use the Latin term trinitas, which means Trinity. And another one that I like is Augustine of Hippo, of course, St. Augustine, the man in around the four, in the fifth century. So writing in like 415, he writes on the Trinity. He says, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are one and the same substance in an indivisible equality. So again, this writing or this teaching about the Trinity, these writings of the Church fathers, you might ask yourself, where do these guys get this? Well, remember, this view is pre canon of the New Testament. This is before anyone ever said officially these are the New Testament books from a church official perspective. Now, yeah, there were these books floating around. There were lists that people were putting together. But before the Church officially declared any of these things to be the New Testament. We already have the doctrine of the Trinity being promulgated, which goes to show you the power of the authority of the church that Jesus gave his church authority to proclaim the faith. And this is part of it. And it goes beyond what is written explicitly in the Bible. So whenever someone says to you, well, where's that in the Bible? Where is Mary's perpetual virginity in the Bible? Of course, you can point them to places that like the Trinity allude to it. But just because you don't see something explicitly laid out doesn't mean that it's not part of what the early church taught and believed and received from the apostles. This is a great example of that. There are others as well. But let's look at the readings a little bit here. Now, the first reading, of course, at Exodus, we're learning about God's name, the Lord. Now, if you ever look back in your Old Testament, you see the word Lord is kind of treated weirdly, isn't it? It's L, capital L, capital O, capital R, capital D. And have you ever wondered what does that mean? Well, I made a whole video about this actually the last time I went through unpacking the mass you in Year A, I did a deep dive on that. So I'm not going to do that right now, but I'm just going to link to that. So if you want to go back and look at old unpacking the mass of the same text, you can do that. But basically this is the English way of what the Hebrew word was trying to get the point across that they. That was sort of a weird way to describe the word Adonai, which is Hebrew for Lord, but it translates into, you know, Yahweh, the name of God, Y, H, V, H. And the word Lord is an English translation of that in that way. But notice it's not L O, R, D like lowercase, it's all capital. So basically, here's the idea. The big picture is this. This was a name that people couldn't relate to, they couldn't understand. So they created this word that basically said that guy, but we can't say his name. And what we see later, of course, in the New Testament when Christ comes along is now we have the name, the name Jesus, which is above every other name, right? So this is part of the teaching of the Trinity about who Jesus is, is that his name is above all names. He's given the name above all names that at the name of Jesus, every knee shall bow and every tongue confess on heaven and in earth and under the earth to the glory of God. So who God is, Right? We're getting this revealed in the Old Testament, of course, we're getting this revealed in the Gospel. And in our second reading, of course, we see how we are to relate to one another in light of the Trinity, because what God is love. And the Trinity therefore, is love. So in our second reading, we see St. Paul commanding us to mend your ways, heed my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace, and the God of love and peace will be with you. Okay. And I love how he closes. This is the point. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. This is the Trinity right there, given to us in the church in a relational way for us. Because as we understand who God is as a trinity, the more we can live in that reality which is not just meant to be. This thing where we ponder God and go, wow, that's so cool. But it's also something that we live out in community with one another. The grace of the Lord Jesus, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. What does that mean? This is inter dynamic relationship dynamics. This is the interrelational dynamic of God. We see the grace of the Lord Jesus, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. And those words, I don't think are arbitrary when we think about that God the Father in love, the grace of the Lord Jesus and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Think about what those things mean. Because of course, in our gospel, God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son. So we see that the Trinity is about the love of the Father, the grace of the Lord Jesus. What does that mean? The grace of the Lord Jesus. Okay, what is grace? Grace is a couple different things. Okay? Grace is undeserved favor from God, right? That's grace. When you give someone grace, that was a grace given. We didn't deserve that, okay? We didn't deserve Jesus. We were given Jesus because of the Father's love. The Son is the result of the love of the Father. And yet, what is another way that we understand grace? Grace is this supernatural power that we have that changes us so that we can become saints. Is that not a great description of Jesus Christ? Is that not consistent with who he is? He, by his merits, empowers us to become saints. How? Through the power of the Holy Spirit. Jesus himself would talk about that, primarily in John's Gospel. Later on he would say, the Holy Spirit is going to testify unto me. And of course in the Book of Acts we see at Pentecost the Spirit being empowering to the disciples so that they can do the work of God. And St. Paul of course would talk a lot about the gifts of the Spirit, the fruits of the Spirit in our lives. So the love of God sends the Son who is grace incarnate to us. And the Holy Spirit enables and empowers the church to live in community to the glory of God the Father, reminding them what the Son had said. Who the Son brings glory to the Father and the Father exalts His name above all names. You see how all this interdynamic, relational things work within the Trinity. It's amazing when you think about it. And it's all right there. Again, not given to us so that we can have a little mechanism to understand God, but to show us that he's beyond our ability to understand. And that's important. I can't remember which church Father said it could have been Augustine who said that. I believe because I don't understand, because I don't understand the nature of God. If I could wrap my mind around God's essence and who he is and the nature of him in a full quantified way as a human being, then what kind of God would that be? The fact that we can't comprehend who he is. I mean, imagine that you were making up a religion. Some people say that Christianity was a made up religion. Would you make it up and you wouldn't be able to explain it? Of course not. If Christianity were a made up religion, it would look a lot differently. First of all, there would be no call to suffering because nobody's going to follow a religion. I mean, if I was going to make up religion, it would be a religion that's like, hey, just do what I want you to do and all these great things will happen. Wait a second, I think I've seen that one on tv. If I were going to make up a religion, I would say, oh, I understand God perfectly. He, he's like this, this, this. And if you come to me, I'll be able to grasp everything and explain it all to you perfectly. I think I've seen that one on TV as well. If I were making up a religion, I wouldn't have any part of it be a mystery. I would make it easy to understand and relatable to the whole world so that everybody could come to it freely without having any sort of conviction or require to Change. Hmm. I think I've seen that one, too. Are you catching my drift here? My friends? You see, when the world wants to deny these aspects of who God is that are uncomfortable or difficult to explain, you water down the faith to the level where, sure, it might be easier for people to come to that. But what are they coming to? Not Christianity, not the God of the Bible and the God of the deposit of faith given to Christ Church. No, they're creating their own thing. That's why even when we run into those things that we don't fully understand, we fall back on what we do. And what we understand is this. God is love. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son. Whoever should believe in him would have not perish, but have life everlasting, friends. That's what we see. For God sent His Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him. I love this. He who believes in him is not condemned. He who does not believe is condemned already, because he's not believed. In the name of the only Son of God. Remember back from Moses the name of the Lord. Here he is. His name is Jesus. And if you deny him, if you don't believe in him, he doesn't. He's not coming to judge you. You're already judged. He's not coming to condemn you. You're already condemned. He's come to save you. And you need saving, and I need saving. And the Trinity is the nature of God and also how we're saved. Isn't that beautiful? Because God is love. The Trinity is love. And I'll tell you something. Love is not something that's so easy to understand all the time either. I think you might know what I'm talking about. Some of you have been in situations where you love someone and they don't love you back. They just hurt you, they reject you, they want nothing to do with you, and yet you love them anyway. Hmm. Who does that sound like? I think I've seen that one on TV too, right? Only that's the reality of who God is. He loves us when we can't even comprehend his name. He loves us when we want nothing to do with Him. He loves us and gives us grace. And the Holy Trinity is that reality of who he is. So don't try to get cute and explain it in a way that makes perfect sense. Remember, anyone who's ever done that in the history of the Church has probably crossed over into some form of heresy. Don't try to quantify it. Just believe. And that isn't some mindless burying your head in the sand and pretending no. That's the reception of a revelation that is beyond your ability to understand. And that, my friends, is a good thing. So celebrate the solemnity of the Holy Trinity today. Give thanks to God, who has given you so much grace, who loves you and who desires to save you, desires to make you a saint. Draw near to the Trinity and that's what's going to happen to you, my friends. Thank you so much for watching here on Unpacking the Mass. Hope you have a great week. Please do me a favor, share this video, share this with other people far and wide. Let's continue to see Unpacking the Mask grow. It is. Thank God and I'm so thankful to God and to you for helping us get this out to so many people. So make sure you like and subscribe. If you're on a podcast, please leave a five star review and maybe invite someone that you know in your life to study this with you. Next week as we continue to Unpack the Mass so that we can hear what God has to say to us with ears to hear and hearts to receive. God bless you my friends. I'll see you next time.