Every year, on the Sunday after Pentecost, after the end of the Easter season, we celebrate the Holy Trinity in a special way. In fact, we have been celebrating the Holy Trinity on the Sunday after Pentecost since the early 14th century, as declared in an edict by Pope John XXII. We try to use human concepts and human words in order to understand God and in order to describe God as a Trinity, but ultimately, although these concepts and words do the best job they can, they are far from perfect.
We recognize the presence of God in our lives in different ways. Which is why we celebrate today as the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity. If you do a word search in the Bible, the word “Trinity” will not be found. However, the reality of the Trinity that we celebrate today is certainly described in the Bible in different ways. Paul closes his second letter to the Corinthians in the name of the Trinity – “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the holy Spirit be with all of you.” The priest uses a greeting in almost that same language each time we begin mass. So, we Christians often greet each other in the midst of the reality of the Trinity, in God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The fathers and mothers of the Early Church engaged in a lot of heated discussions and even bloodshed in their attempts to try to understand the Trinity, to try to understand God in the way that he truly is. All of us as disciples of Christ who try to use our faith to gain understanding realize that there is a paradox: as we learn more about God, we realize that there is always more and more to know and learn. The English poet John Milton once said: “When we speak of knowing God, it must be understood with reference to man’s limit power of comprehension. God, as he really is, is beyond man’s imagination, let alone understanding…. God has revealed only so much of himself as our minds can conceive and the weakness of our nature can bear.”
Without any reservation, we can say that the Triune God is a God of community. The triune nature of God tells us that the three Persons of God (the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) are in fellowship in God’s very self. From the very beginning, God as Creator, God as Word and God as Spirit co-mingled together to bring forth creation. God is three persons, but God exists communally, God creates communally. In the Trinitarian nature of God, we human beings are related in a beautiful life giving dance of creation.
The reading we have today from the Acts of the Apostles was also heard recently in a daily mass during the Easter season. Paul comes across a Temple dedicated to an “unknown God” while he was in Athens. For Christians, God is not unknown. The God of the Trinity that we know is God who reveals himself in different ways. The God whom we renew ourselves in each year during the celebration of the Easter season and Pentecost is not some abstract, vague concept. According to today’s Gospel, God is a God of love, a God that loved us so much that he sent his only Begotten Son to live among us and to bring salvation. The love of God is the love of the Father at the source of our life, the love of the Son who died for us on the cross and who rose, and the love of the Holy Spirit who renews the face of the earth. The Trinity did not come out of human reasoning or imagination. The Trinity is not a human construct. Rather, it is the face of God who reveals himself to us. The Triune God reveals himself to us in the waters of our baptism, in the Body and Blood of the Son that we receive in the Eucharist, in the love and compassion we show to our brothers and sisters in the faith that we live out. In all of those ways, the Triune God is a reality to us. We celebrate the presence of the Trinity with us in this wonderful solemnity we celebrate today. May we all live out the reality of the Trinity in our lives.
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