Trinity Sunday, A June 4, 2023
Fr. Alexander Albert St. John the Evangelist, Jeanerette
You may have noticed that instead of the usual greeting of “the Lord be with you” at the beginning of Mass, I said: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the [communion] of the Holy Spirit be with [you all].” Then we heard something very similar from the conclusion of our second reading, which is also the end of St. Paul’s Second letter to the Corinthians. Indeed, the greeting I used came from that part of scripture with a slight difference in translation, using the word “communion” instead of “fellowship.” In fact, this little passage is probably the oldest direct reference to the Trinity we have, since St. Paul wrote it even before the Gospels were written down.
Anyway, the reason we read that part of the letter and that I used this greeting is the solemnity we celebrate today: The Most Holy Trinity. Every other feast that we celebrate in the liturgical calendar is focused on what God has done in history, but today is focused on who God is. We’ll use St. Paul’s farewell blessing to guide us in reflecting on just what this mystery means for us. In his blessing, he is praying for three things to be “with” us, so we’ll look at each.
“The grace of the Lord Jesus.” Now, Paul links this specifically to Jesus, but we must remember that in everything that God does, all three persons of the Trinity are doing it together. Indeed we spent the last two weeks considering this grace and seeing that, through Jesus Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, we can access the power of the Father to increase the freedom of human hearts, better enabling them to freely choose to follow God and receive eternal life.
“The love of God.” “God” is a reference to the Father, but again, all three persons work as one to increase the love Paul wishes for us. What does he mean in praying for God’s “love” to be with us? If we look at the first reading, we find Moses praying for the Lord to “come along in our company” if we “find favor with” the Lord. In the Gospel, we hear that God did indeed find favor with us and “gave his only Son” because he “so loved the world” and so “that the world might be saved through him.” Moses also realizes that we are a “stiff-necked people” and prays for God to “pardon our wickedness and sins.”
This tells us that the specific focus of this “love of God” St. Paul prays for is that of mercy. Paul and Moses both pray – we should pray to receive the loving mercy of God because we are sinners. It is Jesus’ incarnation and then death on the cross that answers Moses’ prayer and forgives our sins. We saw last week that it is the power of the Holy Spirit that actualizes and makes present that forgiveness in us here and now, again revealing this unity of the Three Persons of the Trinity.
Finally, there is “the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.” We can again emphasize the aspect of unity in this. This very blessing is the conclusion of a whole letter about unity… two letters, actually. After Paul first evangelized Corinth, other people came claiming to be better apostles with a better version of the gospel. They caused division inside the Corinthian community, divided them from the wider church by disrupting their financial support of other churches, and divided them from real mercy by distracting them from resolving some very public acts of unrepentant sinfulness by certain members of the community.
To draw them back into the communion of the Holy Spirit, St. Paul focuses on drawing them into Jesus’ own example of humility, generosity, and purity by pointing to his own radical submission to the truth and example of Jesus. If you read the whole letter, you’ll see that he doesn’t ask the Corinthians to “be nice.” Instead, he calls them out on their hypocrisy and challenges them to embrace the truth. He even hints that he will be “severe” with his authority if he comes to see them and they haven’t shaped up yet… a kind of biblical “wait till your father gets home,” with St. Paul as the father of the whole community.
Now, when Paul tells us to “agree with one another,” does this mean not thinking for ourselves? That we vote and all agree to the most popular idea? No! It means every person should set aside their ego, their biases, their pride, their tribal loyalty and humbly embrace the truth revealed by God. We can and should wrestle and seek the truth, but in the end it is ultimately found only in submitting to truths beyond us. To be authentically united to the Church, to the Holy Spirit, to the Trinity, we cannot pick and choose the teachings to follow. We either trust the whole revelation of God or we don’t. A single “Amen” to all God has given us. Only from that foundation of submission are we then prepared to reconcile our confusions and overcome our questions.
That’s what this Sunday – Trinity Sunday – is all about: the unity and integrity of God as the central foundation of everything else. Just as we cannot truly divide the Three Persons of the Trinity we cannot truly divide the teachings of the faith or its demands on our daily life. Everything in our faith, all of it is centered around the revelation of who God is: a Trinity of Three Persons who are all One God.
What’s the reason for a blessing to increase the grace of Christ? So people have the freedom to know and love Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The reason for loving mercy? So we can actually survive being with the Trinity where no evil or sin can endure. And what of the fellowship of the Holy Spirit? Ultimately, that’s what this fellowship means. It means we are so full of grace, so clean from sin, so accepting of the truth, so generous and loving toward God’s children that we don’t just know about God, we are actually united to God, sharing in that eternal exchange of love. Remember this as you struggle to find the motivation to keep participating in Mass and the sacraments, as you battle your sins, as you wrestle with truths you don’t understand.
God didn’t just sit back to issue rules and judgments. He didn’t create you just to watch you fail. And He doesn’t arbitrarily change the truth to match our preferences or the world around us. He sent his only Son to die for your sins. For thousands of generations, God has inspired people to ask him who is he and what he wants. He did this so that you could come to know the answer: He is Love so real, so complete that He, the one God, is three persons in an eternal exchange of love… and all he wants is for you to have that love too.