Trinity Sunday, B May 26, 2024
Fr. Alexander Albert St. John the Evangelist, Jeanerette
Three weeks ago, I focused on the teaching that God is love. But what is love? “Love is to will the good of the other.” If God is love, then this means that God’s very existence is to will the good of the other. We tend to think of existence or being as this kind of passive reality. If you ask me “what are you doing?” and I answer “existing,” you’d probably think “ah, so he’s doing nothing” and you’d be mostly right. But it’s not true of God. His existence is the purest form of activity, the very source of all activity. So, when I say God’s existence is love, I mean it is love in the fullest sense of actively willing the good of the other.
We have to be careful. I think a lot of people tend to imagine God all by himself doing nothing until he created us and the universe, which then gave him a reason to be active. That’s a very worldly, fleshly way of seeing things. God is not more active now than he was before. Our existence did not make God more perfect. He was, has always been, perfectly and completely active in love even before and without our existence. We are lagniappe. Which is why it’s so amazing that, first of all, we get to know anything about the Trinity, and secondly, that he is so eager to save us and lift us up into his eternal love.
As we celebrate Trinity Sunday, this teaching on love and existence is important. The Trinity is the most central mystery of the faith and it is always a mystery beyond our grasp. One God, yet Three Divine Persons each fully the one God. Not three masks or three modes or three separate entities. One God, Three Divine Persons. We can grasp at this in imperfect ways, but ultimately it is an act of faith, a choice to trust the words and teaching of a God who is beyond our understanding.
The revelation that God is love points us in the direction of one way to kinda, sort of grasp this mystery. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit perpetually will the good of each other. The Father, who is fully God, wills the good of the Son so much that the Son is fully God and they both will the good of the Holy Spirit so much that He is fully God. No division, but a real distinction and a real, active exchange of love so perfect they are one God.
What does this mean for us? Well, sometimes, the point of the homily is just to give you something to wonder at, to experience awe at. A very important part of our faith is simply to marvel at God’s goodness and beauty, to ponder the mystery, to be humbly grateful for it, and to be inspired in the deepest sense of having the SpIrit come In to us and fill us with the experience of God’s love. So yeah, take some of these ideas about One God, Three Divine Persons and the activity of God being love and let it broaden your mind and inflame your faith.
Still, the unity of the Trinity in love does also serve to guide our actions. I focused last week on one key form of those actions: obedience. In particular, I reminded you that a relationship to the Holy Spirit requires us to listen to the Holy Spirit and that listening to him starts with listening to the Church which is guided by the Holy Spirit.
And this obedience to the Holy Spirit in and through the Church is important because it is an essential part of what unites us to the Church. Unity between us in and through the Church is rooted directly in the unity of God Himself
You and I will never be one human and ten billion persons the way God is One God and three divine persons, but there is nonetheless a real connection here. That is why Jesus explicitly tells the apostles to baptize in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Our Unity in the Church through baptism is a participation in the unity of the Trinity. By Baptism, we have a real relationship with all three persons in the Trinity, who is one God. Coheirs with the Son, children of the Father, temples and agents of the Holy Spirit.
If every Christian has this same kind of relationship with the Trinity, then it ought to be obvious that we are also in union with each other. Not a vague and irrelevant kind of unity, but a real, visible one. Are we so united? Can people see it? Sometimes. When the magisterium of the Catholic Church teaches that Jesus is God and all 1.4 billion Catholics say “yes, he is.” We see it. When that magisterium tells all 1.4 billion Catholics to pray the Our Father and they do it, we see the unity. But then, the Church also tells all Catholics to go to confession every year. Do we see unity there? What about the expectation of Mass every week? Of getting married in the Church? Of avoiding contraception, euthanasia, and adultery?
Our unity is imperfect precisely to the extent that we disobey God in his Church. When we take to ourselves the authority to reject the Church’s teaching on sin, when we assume that we get to decide for ourselves what Mass is supposed to look like, when we arrogate to ourselves the power to judge souls, we are directly contradicting the very source of our own existence.
To be human is to be in God’s image… the image of a God who is a perfect union of Three persons. To be a baptized Christian – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – is to proclaim that we reflect God’s union to the world. To be a disciple of the Son is to observe what he has commanded us. What is that command? To love! To will the good of the other. And what is “good” for another person? The same thing that’s “good” for the persons of the Trinity: divine unity. The Divine Persons literally are one God in the union. We participate in that reality through union with the Church. So, how on earth can I give someone else union with God if I myself am not united to him? If I am actively and continuously choosing to break the unity of the Church by my sins, by my arrogant falsehoods, by my disobedience, how can I help anyone else to share in that unity which I have spurned? God is patient and merciful. Do not fret at your disunity, but do not settle for it either!
God has given us a glimpse of the very source of all existence: an eternal exchange of infinite love. Look upon that mystery and be awed. Look upon that mystery and know you don’t just get to see it, you get to be part of it. You don’t just get to be part of it, you get to help others be part of it. All you have to do is believe it, live it, and then share it.