A: Trinity Sunday (7 June 2020) - ONE AND ONLY RACE? (Jn 3:16–18)

We are celebrating today the solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, a commemoration of our belief in one God in three divine persons, viz., the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. While the first two persons are clearly mentioned in our gospel today—God the Father sending the Son—the third person is apparently missing. Where is the Holy Spirit in this Father and Son relationship? Or at least, where is the union of the three persons in the text?

Jn 3:16–18 was selected as today’s gospel reading because of its last phrase: “in the name of the one and only Son of God” (cf. World English Bible). The term “one and only” is rendered in the original Greek as “monogenēs,” a combination of two Greek words “mono” (= “one”) and “genos” (= “family, race, kind, offspring”). While the term “monogenēs” hints that Jesus is the only son of God, it can also mean that the Trinity is composed of persons of one and the same “genos.” Accordingly, it reechoes the Nicene Creed’s very words: “I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God… consubstantial with the Father.”

It is a tall order to define the word “genos” since our current parlance suggests that it is equivalent to the human genes or genetic code. An alternative word used is race which infers that the same kind of blood flows within a group of individuals, particularly, families, clans, or tribes. However, invoking “monogenēs” or one race among ingroup members, in effect, incites only the exclusion of those who do not belong to that specific race. This primordial way of thinking, though initially devoid of any marginalization, becomes a breeding ground for further racism, ethnocentrism, and discrimination of so-called inferior races. Meanwhile, while Jesus is “monogenēs,” it does not mean that all the other “genos” are to be excluded. It is because “monogenēs” here means simply being the only offspring of a parent, in the same way as it is used in the Lukan gospel (7:12; 8:42; 9:38), and not as a reference to one race of people.

The whole world nowadays is troubled by the death of George Floyd, the African-American who died of suffocation after a white cop knelt on his neck for almost 9 minutes in the city of Minneapolis. Many protests were staged from the day of his death last May 25, 2020, seeking not only justice for his brutal killing, but also for racial equality in our societies, particularly on the perennial discrimination of the so-called black race. While race is never colored, some continue to classify people according to skin-color, which, sadly, is used by some purists to advocate the principle of white supremacy over other skin pigments. This thinking is of course merely a mental construct. Aside from the fact that bloodline is scientifically indeterminable, one’s worth is not measured by the color of one’s skin, but by the actions performed in life.

Racism, however, is not limited to the actual marginalization and persecution of purported inferior races—along these lines we think of the systematic genocide of at least six million Jews in the Shoah by those who advocated the superiority of the Aryan race. More properly, the problem lies in all of us… in each and every way of thinking that claims one’s innate superiority over the other, regardless if it is about race, class, honor, wealth, locale, etc. As long as there is the ongoing propagation of the belief that some group of people are by birth privileged to enjoy life on earth more than the unfortunate others, (neo)racism is ubiquitous.

Our celebration of the mystery of the Trinity debunks such a notion. Instead, it encourages us to value more human relationships and universal equality. Our Nicene Creed puts this truth into the formula: “I believe in the Holy Spirit… who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified.” May we be all one in unity and love.

- Rex Fortes, CM