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.
