Trinity Sunday – Year B
One Lord, One Baptism (Mt. 28: 19-20)
Some Fathers of the Church are to inspire us in this reflection. St. Jerome wrote: “All authority has been given to Jesus” who, earlier, was crucified and buried!” St. Bede expressed the same idea as that of St. John Chrysostom: “(Jesus) did not say “All power was given to me” by his divinity, co-eternal with the Father, but by his humanity that he has assumed with which he was rendered somehow inferior to angels”. St. Bede noted “Do not travel by the way of the Gentiles” (Mt. 10:5); there he is resuscitated from among the dead, ordering his disciples: “Go, and make disciples of all nations”.
“Baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. In Greek (like in Aramaic, we assume), “εν ονοματι”, in the name, not “in the names”: the only Name indicating (without defining or confining it) the Only Divine Being. The Arab Fathers of the Church provide a simple and eloquent explanation: the Trinity (a word that we do not literally find in the New Testament) is God; His Word (cf. Jn. 1:1) and his Spirit (in Hebrew and in Aramaic the Spirit of Holiness; i.e. God himself). St. Jerome developed this concept briefly: “Only one will be their gift (of the baptized) since the Divinity is one; and the Name of the Trinity is only one God”. Jerome cited Didyme: “With these words we understand how the nature of the Trinity is indivisible and inseparable” (sic St. Hilary of Poitiers). Again St. Jerome cited the first commandment given to the apostles: namely, to teach all nations and then baptize them, the bottom line is to teach them what they should do because “faith without action is dead”.