Today, the first weekend after the end of the Easter season, we celebrate the solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity. I must say that as a priest, I always feel inadequate in preaching about the Holy Trinity, one of the eternal mysteries of our faith. Even the great theologian St Thomas Aquinas said that it was much easier to say what God was not than to say what he is. In speaking about the meaning and inner relationship of the three persons of God, I always feel that the words of our human understand of things are inadequate to express that reality. Father Anthony de Mello says that human beings talking about the Holy Trinity is like trying to explain the color green to a person who has has been blind since birth. There is a story told about the great 20th-century German theologian, Jesuit priest Karl Rahner. Supposedly, a priest friend of his asked his advice in trying to explain the Trinity in his preaching. The advice he received from Karl Rahner: Don’t even try. Having said all this, I think that there are still many things we can reflect upon concerning God and the three persons that comprise his being.
All of us baptized Catholics were initiated into the Church with the formula that Jesus gives at the end of Matthew’s Gospel, baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In recognizing what the Catechism teaches us, that God is three persons in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that each of these persons is God, but there is one God, we can recognize that the reality of God is beyond our human intellect, but we can still say this: (1) God, the Father, is our Father. He is omnipresent and reflected in all his creation. So, will live in him and creation exists in him. (2) Jesus, the son is Emmanuel, he is God with us. He is our Savior and Redeemer. As we are his disciples, he is alway with us. (3) The Holy Spirit is there to accompany us, leading us, guiding us, and inspiring us. The Spirit speaks in the inner recesses of our hearts. But there is only one God. He lives in us. And we live in him.
I want to look at some life messages we can learn from the Holy Trinity. First, the Holy Trinity teach us to respect ourselves and respect others. Our conviction is that the Triune God is present within us always; thus, we are called to esteem ourselves as God’s holy dwelling place, to behave well in his holy presence, and to lead pure and holy lives, reflecting God’s justice and charity. This Triune presence with us encourages us to respect and honor others as temples of the Holy Spirit.
Secondly, God as the Source of our strength and courage. The awareness and conviction of the presence of God within us gives us the strength to face the manifold problems of life with Christian courage. It was such a conviction that prompted the early Christian martyrs being taken to their execution to shout the heroic prayer of Faith from the Psalms: "The Lord of might is with us, our God is within us, and the God of Jacob is our helper" (Psalm 46).
Next, we called to see the Triune God as the model for Christian families. We are created by God in love to be a community of loving persons, just as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are united in a community love. From the day of our Baptism, we have belonged to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We grow up in the grace of the family of the Trinity. Thus, we are called to turn to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in prayer every day, belonging to the family of the Triune God. The love, unity and joy that if found in the relationship among the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is the foundational paradigm of our relationships within our Christian families. Our families become truly Christian when we live in a relationship of love with God and with others.
Thirdly, we are called to become more like the Triune God in all our relationships, as we are created in God’s image and likeness. Just as God is God only in a Trinitarian relationship, so we can be fully human only as one member of a triune relationship: ourselves, God, and our brothers and sisters. We can think of this in the way we make the sign of the cross: being in a vertical relationship with God and a horizontal relationship with others - those relationship integral to each other. In that way our life becomes Trinitarian like the Trinitarian life of God. That is very different from our modern society, where we value individualism and the “I” is seen above everything else. This doctrine of the Trinity calls us to see “I” linked with God and neighbor: Like God the Father, we are called to be productive, creative persons by help to build up the fabric of life and to build love in our family, our Church, our community and our nation. Like God the Son, we are called to reconciliation and healing, to be peacemakers, to restore what has been broken and shattered. Like God the Holy Spirit, it is our task to live out the truth of our faith, to teach truth and to dispel ignorance. The spirituality of the Trinity calls us to solidarity with God and with our neighbor. to live the Gospel values of justice, and live in rightly ordered relationships with others.
Jesuit missionary St. Francis Xavier from the 16th century has the wonderful short prayer that he prayed often the the Trinity: “Most Holy Trinity, who live in me, I praise you, I worship you, I adore you and I love you. Let the Son lead us to the Father through the Spirit, to live with the Triune God forever and ever. Amen.”
No comments:
Post a Comment