HOLY TRINITY
PROVERBS 8:22-31
Thus says the Wisdom of God:
“The Lord created me at the beginning of his work,
the first of his acts of old.
Ages ago I was set up,
at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
When there were no depths I was brought forth,
when there were no springs abounding with water.
Before the mountains had been shaped,
before the hills, I was brought forth;
before he had made the earth with its fields,
or the first of the dust of the world.
When he established the heavens, I was there;
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
when he made firm the skies above,
when he established the fountains of the deep,
when he assigned to the sea its limit,
so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
then I was beside him, like a master workman,
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the children of man.”
Israel understands God as Wisdom, and transforms the Wisdom of God into a character that has been with God from the beginning, before anything was created. This personified wisdom admires Israel for its marvelous works (the sea, the firmament, the sphere of the earth…).
We cannot understand this as a “Divine Person,” but rather as a “personification” of a divine attribute. In the same way, there are many instances where “the angel of Yahweh” and other similar images are mentioned.
Similar interpretations will give rise (perhaps with a debatable causal connection) to more or less emanationist doctrines, which interpose other characters (the Logos, for example) between God and humanity.
We must be careful and not admit as Revelation, Word of God, the human words that try, perhaps only from reason, to interpret the divinity.
ROMANS 5:1-5
Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God.
More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
The text finds its place today because of the explicit mention of the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. This mention is given in the context of the theme of justification, but this theme is not the main focus of this reading in today’s context.
We are particularly interested in the formulation: The love of God – through our Lord Jesus Christ – because the Spirit has been given to us.
We are therefore faced with another Trinitarian formulation of the early communities (the text can be dated around 57-58 AD), and it shows the Trinitarian intuition already present in the earliest writings of the New Testament.
José Enrique Galarreta, S.J.