Sunday Meditation: The Heart of God

On the first Sunday after Pentecost the Church celebrates the Solemnity of the Holy Trinity.  Each liturgical year has different readings, and for Year A the Gospel is the often quoted, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.”  Why is this passage read for the Feast of the Holy Trinity?  On the surface it only mentions two of the three persons of the Trinity.  God the Father and the Son are clearly stated.  But look carefully.  The Holy Spirit is a spiraling forth of the love between the Father and the Son.  That love is clearly there, and so then is the Holy Spirit.

 

Today’s Gospel:

 

 

God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,

so that everyone who believes in him might not perish

but might have eternal life.

For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.

Whoever believes in him will not be condemned,

but whoever does not believe has already been condemned,

because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.

~Jn:3:16-18

 

It is so hard to describe the Trinity.  I don’t think you can capture it with one image.  It takes a complex set of words to formulate the Christian notion of the Trinity.  This program, Catholic Saints & Feasts, does a noteworthy job of it in short of a seven minute video. 

 

Catholic Saints & Feasts:

God is the ultimate superlative adjective whose nature admits of no competing God. Christian monotheism stops us from approaching different gods for different things. We believe in one God with one will, one mind, and one plan for mankind.  The Holy Trinity, the God of Christianity, is complex. Clear language must be used and clear thinking deployed to grasp the Christian God.

 

The church believes that God is one in his nature and three in his persons.  This means that if you were in a pitch black room and sensed a presence nearby, your first question would be, "What is that? Is it the dog or the cat, my spouse or the wind?" If it were God in the darkness, he would answer the question of what by saying, "I am God." Satisfied that the presence was a person and not an animal or the wind, the next question would be, "Who are you?" And to that question, God would reply in three successive voices. I am the father. I am the son. I am the holy spirit. A nature is the source of operations, but a person does [music] them. A statue has eyes, but it is not its nature to see.  It is not man's nature to lay eggs or to breathe underwater, but it is the nature of a bird or a fish to do so. Our nature sets the parameters for what actions are possible for us. The daughter of a lion is a lioness and does what lions do. The son of a man is a man and does what men do. And the son of God is God and knows, loves, and acts as God does perfectly.  Our trinitarian supernova is both a unity and a plurality, both one and many at the same time. This means that God does not exist alone but in a community of love. God is not narcissistic admiring his own beauty and perfection.  Instead, the love of the father is directed toward the son for all eternity. And the love of the holy spirit animates and passes between the father and the son. The trinity's three persons do not share portions of the divine nature. They each possess it totally.

 

Our God, distinct in his persons, one in his essence and equal in his majesty, is solemnly invoked as the water spills on our heads at baptism and as the oil is traced on our palms at our anointing. God in all of his complexity and in all of his simplicity is with us always in this world and hopefully in the world to come. Most Holy Trinity, we look to your three persons as a model of true love, knowledge, and community life. Help all marriages and families strive for the high ideal of perfection you set before the world, no matter the discouragement resulting from our sins and imperfections. Amen.

 

Not only did the words make the Trinity understandable, but there were so many beautiful images to present how artists through the ages have tried to capture the Trinity.

For the pastoral homily I turn to Fr. Kris Janczak in his YouTube Channel, Good Soil.  I’m not sure if I’ve ever posted one of Fr. Janczak’s homilies before but I have listened to a few.  I think today he really highlights what is a pastoral understanding of this Solemnity.

 

Fr. Kris:

Even though we celebrate this feast day once a year, every single day we pray to the holy trinity. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. May almighty God bless you, Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. Through him and with him and in him, O God, almighty Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and honor is yours forever and ever.  Sound familiar? See, sometimes we automatically repeat these prayers, forgetting that when we say them, we honor one God who is in three persons.

 

There were much smarter and more educated people in the past who tried but failed. However, I am here to tell you that this is not about understanding but believing. That is not to grasp all this with our brains but with our hearts. And that makes all the difference. There were endless times during Jesus ministry when he repeated, "Believe, have faith, trust me." He didn't ask people to understand.  He asked them to believe. Today he is asking us to believe to believe that the father and the son and the holy spirit are one. One God. Yet what does this mean to us? What does it mean to believe in the Holy Trinity? Well, the holy trinity is united in the greatest love.  The one thing that connects these three, father, son, and the spirit is love. It is love that makes them one God.

 

If I could compare this truth to something, it would be to a marriage between a man and a woman.  During our Catholic wedding ceremony during the mass, before the end of mass, the priest blesses the couple using a unique and beautiful blessing.  It is called the Nuptial Blessing. It is a rather long blessing or prayer if you wish. But there is one sentence in there that says, "God, we pray that they husband and wife become one flesh, become one body." How can they become one flesh? How can they become connected? Only by a true love that they have for each other. They are still two separate people, but they are equal. And by their sacrificial love, they become one, one flesh, husband and wife. And nothing should separate that union.

 

If I could summarize it, through love, persons become one.

 

 

Sunday Meditation: God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.

 

We sang this at our parish today, “All Hail Adored Trinity.”

 

 

All hail, adored Trinity!

All hail, eternal Unity!

O God the Father, God the Son,

And God the Spirit, ever One.

 

Three persons praise we evermore,

One only God our hearts adore:

In thy sure mercy, ever kind,

May we your strong protection find.

 

The Trinity is at the heart of God.