The Trinity and Christian liturgy

The doctrine of the Trinity summarizes the central truth of Christianity: we are saved by God through Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. 

The liturgical and scriptural sources explore the central mystery of Christian faith and life. God is the mysterion who is approached in faith and met in the koinonia of the Church. Out of this encounter flows the Church’s leitourgia, diakonia, martyria and evangelization. But before the Church was, God is.

We come to know that God’s great leitourgia or “work” on behalf of all creation is redemption itself. The Trinity’s work of redemption is made known to us through the leitourgia, diakonia and martyria of Jesus, the Christ of God and his Spirit. 

The Church is the recipient of this revelation; this is the mysterion– or wonder – we Christians participate in and out of which we live and worship. It is the source of our evangelization and mission. 

In Christian worship, the mysterion must find itself spoken – out to the world by the worshipping community, because it is the heart of Christian engagement in the world.  It ensures that worship is not the private act of an individual or a special group. 

Instead, it is the response of a people who, through their worship, are engaged in God’s work of salvation in God’s playground – the secular, ordinary and human world.  

When we take the Trinity as the starting point for our understanding of worship the Trinity becomes our source or archetype of incarnational worship. It is the incarnational element that enables worship to be human participation in the liturgy of God.

Trinity at the heart of the liturgy

At the heart of our worship is the Trinity. Not a triumphalist Trinity, but a Trinity of service who enables us to understand the interrelationship between where we pray, the rituals we use to pray, the culture we pray in, the society that surrounds our prayer and the humanity we – as individuals – bring to the act of worship.  

The Sacred Liturgy is a commemoration of Christ’s whole orientation towards the Father in the intimacy of the Pascal Mystery. The articulation of this mysterion in worship is “done” through symbols, gestures, signs, music, architecture, art and words, each of which plays an important part.  

These elements are external to the foundational requirement, which is a deep, personal experience of God. Without this primary experience, the secondary elements can become prey to nostalgia, reducing the liturgy to a sum of its parts. 

Where aesthetics take over, arguments about form, style and texts dominate. And people forget that Christ, not aesthetics, is the meeting point between the world and God, of which the liturgy is the sacramental expression.

Christian worship ultimately takes its meaning and function from the leitourgia or service of the Trinity. The Trinity’s leitourgia is revealed to us in the person and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. Our worship is distinctly “Christian” and sacramental because it is essentially trinitarian and because it “responds” to the Trinity’s work of redemption. 

Redemption is mediated to us in many ways, but has one source. Liturgy gives space to these many and varied experiences so that they can reveal themselves as redemptive. Christ, the mysterion of the Trinity’s encounter with the world, reveals the mysterion of redemption in human form and challenges our worship to reflect the wonder of these redemptive encounters.  

Our participation in Salvation

In Christ, the Way to the Father, we encounter the Spirit of God and become aware that salvation is a Spirit-filled experience: the Son causes his Spirit to descend upon the Church for our salvation; the Church, in the Spirit of the Son, returns praise to the Father.  

Liturgy allows us to “see” the Spirit at work in the life of God, in the life of the Church, in the creation and in other people, as expressions of salvation. The Spirit’s “creative nature”, which unites the Father and the Son, unites the Church.  

Irenaeus of Lyon, when addressing the question of monotheism, explored the meaning of human history in the structure of salvation. He wrote of Christ and the Holy Spirit as the “hands” of God's involvement in human history. Human history is the location of God’s providential leitourgia, diakonia and martyria in time and space.

Our capacity to participate liturgically in the mysterion of salvation is the gift of God's Spirit. The character of Christian worship is always pneumatic, or Spirit-filled, because the narrative of salvation is a narrative of the Spirit-filled event of creation, incarnation, death, resurrection, and glorification. 

It is the presence of the Spirit, dwelling in the Christian community as the foundation of its existence, who enables the gathered community of the baptized to address the Father in prayer. The Spirit reveals how a human-baptized-believing-sinful community can participate in the mysterium God’s leitourgia of salvation. 

Sunday liturgy

When Sunday liturgy is understood as the response to God’s liturgy of salvation it takes on a whole new demand that can be overwhelming. Where worship is little more than ritual performance, Sunday Mass poorly articulates the mysterion it celebrates because it uses weak, ritualistic symbolization, or excludes the baptized community itself.

Essential to strong liturgical symbolization is the community’s own awareness of itself as the community gathered in Christ. How the community meets, where it meets, and the place it meets, must be able to carry the weight of the truth signified at both the anthropological and the theological levels. 

The community is the place of meeting between the liturgy of God’s salvation and the liturgy of thanks for the world’s salvation. How it does this will vary depending on whether the community worships in the Pauline (post-Vatican II) or the Tridentine (pre-Vatican II) Tradition.

Ultimately, the place of meeting between the divine and the human is the worshipping person him- or herself, in the communion of other worshipping people. The more we worship, the more we become a worshipping person; the more we worship as a people, the more we become a worshipping people.  

Thus, we need to ensure that our liturgical experience is maturing us to “preach Christ and…show forth the Church to those who are outside” (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 2). The challenge here is to understand, at the deepest level, that liturgy directs itself towards the world in apostolic and missionary ways.

The baptized community’s participation in worship is through their anamnetic-participation. Anamnesis is the memory that enables the community to participate as ministers in God’s service of salvation. 

The community’s active sacramental memory (anamnesis) unites the service of praise (leitourgia), the service to the world (diakonia) and the self-giving (martyria) to each other — making them a single reality.  

In the liturgy we enter ritually into the Trinity’s leitourgia, martyria and diakonia and discover the source and meaning of the Church’s leitourgia, martyria and diakonia.

Liturgy is a place of profound encounter between persons – between the living God and the believing person.  

In this place the redeemed humanity of an individual’s “I am” is adopted into the “I AM” of God in a non-egoistical way, and God becomes incarnate in us through our “yes”.  

Liturgy celebrates the turning point of faith and becomes both source and summit of belief because it has become prayer itself and expresses the most profound nature of the Church, our participation in the Pascal Mystery.

J.P. Grayland has been a priest of the Diocese of Palmerston North (New Zealand) for nearly thirty years. His latest book is titled: Catholics. Prayer, Belief and Diversity in a Secular Context (Te Hepara Pai, 2020).