Living in the Love of the Trinity
Homily for Holy Trinity Sunday – 26 May 2024
There is a beautiful Russian icon of the Trinity painted by a monk named Andre Rublev around 1425. It is considered the greatest of its kind, and one of the finest works of religious art ever created. It a wordless conversation between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and is based on the story of the “Hospitality of Abraham” in Genesis 18.
The icon depicts the three angels who visited Abraham at the Oak of Mamre sitting around a table. Each of the angelic figures holds a staff of equal divine authority and each of them is clothed in blue, a symbol of divinity. The Father has his hand raised in blessing of the Son, who indicates with two fingers on the altar his mission to be the sacrificial lamb. The Holy Spirit points to a rectangle on the front of the altar representing that the mission of the Son is for the salvation of the world. But the thing that immediately strikes you is the fact that at the front of the altar, there is an empty wedge. That vacant place is meant for each one of us, and for all the human family to enter in. It signifies God’s invitation to us to share in the life of the Trinity. God invites us to come in and sit at his table. He wants to share his life with us.
We are a people made for the heart of God, who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We are made for a love relationship with this God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in him. Our Christian identity is inextricably tied to the Trinity, from the moment of baptism into the name of the Persons of the Trinity, as we hear in the Great Commission of Jesus in the Gospel today.
God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, a Trinity. This is a fundamental mystery of the Christian faith, and yet we can never fully comprehend its depth and meaning. God, in his infinite nature transcends our human language, logic and reason. This should not surprise us or disconcert us. A god who was fully within our grasp, as finite human beings, simply wouldn’t be God. God is necessarily infinitely more than we can ever grasp and understand.
Even so, it would be tragic if this inability to completely grasp the nature of God as a Trinity of Persons were somehow, in our minds and hearts, to make God seem far away or unrelated to us. The complexity of the theological truth and the richness of this mystery must not distance us from an experience of the loving and merciful God. The meaning of the Trinity is utterly opposed to the notion of God being far away. It is precisely in the closeness of God, in God showing himself to us, that we know that God is a Trinity.
It might well be said that we can understand something of the Mystery of the Holy Trinity more readily with our hearts than with our minds. Because God has shown himself to us as Trinity, we can know and experience him as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Actually, Trinity is just a way of saying, God is love. Not only is God loving, not only does God love us and everything that exists, but God is love in himself. The phrase “is love” means that God’s very being is structured according to love. St Augustine, in trying to explain the Trinity, said, Love implies one who loves; then it implies the object of love; and finally there is the love itself. In the Trinity, the Father is the one who loves, he is the Lover; the Son is the one who is loved, he is the Beloved; and the Holy Spirit is the love they have for each other.
Not only is God love in himself, Trinity means that God reaches out to human beings in compassion and love. Think about how close God came to us in taking human nature in Jesus Christ, and in giving us his Spirit to live within us. In coming close to us, God has shown himself to be a Trinity of Persons. So, we can say that “Trinity” means that God is a God-for-us. God shows us who he is, and that he is trinitarian, in the course of his reaching out to us. This reaching out to us is expressed in the theological maxim that we considered last Sunday for Pentecost, that the Father sent his Son that we might be given the Spirit. In this maxim, we see again in a pithy way, that God is a Trinity of Persons.
God is in love with human beings. Our infinite, unfathomable God loves us beyond our wildest dreams and deepest longings. He goes to extraordinary lengths to show himself to us and share love with us. The whole history of salvation is a record of God bending over backwards, turning himself inside out in order to give himself to us in love. In this reaching out to us, he has shown himself to be Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
The readings for today’s Mass show that God is love and that in reaching out to us, the Trinity is revealed. In the first reading from the Book of Deuteronomy, we get a sense of Moses’s awe and wonder that God steps so close to human beings. Moses says, “Was there ever so great a thing that has happened or was heard of?” Moses encourages the Israelites to be astonished that God becomes so close and personal as to intervene in their history, to save them and walk with them.
What is true for the Israelites after their escape from Egypt is true for us today. God speaks to us, chooses us and saves us. Through God’s intervention in our human history, he enables us to be, and calls us, his sons and daughters. We need to recapture a sense of wonder and awe at the beauty and goodness of a God who comes so close. This awe and wonder is the basis of worship.
In the second reading from St Paul’s Letter to the Romans, we see that not only does God reach out to us in the Trinity, but he enables us to reach out to him, by the power of the Spirit within us. Because of the Holy Spirit living in each one of us, we can have an intimate relationship with God. Indeed, we are encouraged by Jesus to call God, Father. This name for God: Abba, is an expression of extraordinary intimacy. Because of the Spirit within us we can approach God with the confidence of sons and daughters going to their father, full of trust, and without fear.
Then also, not only does this mystery explain to us God’s very nature as being love and how he reaches out to us, but it also reveals our vocation and purpose. In the beginning, when God said, “Let us make man in our own image and likeness”, the image he speaks of is the image and likeness of a trinity of love between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. If we are made in the image and likeness of God, and God is love, then we are most human, most fully alive, when we love as God loves.
Jesus, in commissioning his disciples to make further disciples and to baptise all people in the name of the Persons of the Trinity, means that we are incorporated into the very life and love of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit by Baptism. The Holy Spirit, the love of between the Father and the Son is given to us, so that God surrounds us with the love relationship that he is.
Because the Spirit of God has been given to us, we are called to communion with God. We are called to share in this intimate community of God, and God himself has made this possible. As you pray today, know that God is close to you, and that you are loved by him. This is the meaning of Trinity. The infinite and eternal God has entered your history, to come close to you, to give himself to you in love.
This great feast today calls us to consider the beauty and goodness of the ever-present Trinity, a God who is God-for-us. Let us, in the words of Moses, know it today, and take it to heart; and let us respond with awe and wonder, and that will become our worship.