Cycle A - Year II

15 June 2014: Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity 

(Liturgical color: White)

John 3:16-18

The Trinity: One God in three Persons!

Today is the Solemnity of the Most Blessed Trinity. It is the most important Truth in our Catholic faith: three Divine Person equal in majesty, yet one Lord, one God. 

What do we understand about the Holy Trinity?

There is the story about the great St. Augustine of Hippo. One day while walking in a beach, he was reflecting and trying to grasp the mystery of the Trinity. Then he saw a little boy digging a small hole in the sand, and the boy was transferring the water from the sea into his little hole. St. Augustine asked him what he was trying to do. "I am putting the sea water inside my little hole," the boy told him. St. Augustine said to him, "That's impossible to contain the vast ocean into your little hole, my child." The boy answered him back, "And so with you. How can you grasp the vastness of God with your little mind?" For indeed, if we can explain God we must be greater than God.

In other words, the teaching on the Trinity is most difficult to comprehend and even more difficult to fully communicate with human words. We end up acknowledging that the Trinitarian character of God will always be a mystery.

But it is important to say that the Church did not invent the teaching on the Trinity. Jesus Himself revealed the mystery of the Trinity to us through the first disciples. In fact our whole life is marked by the sign of the Trinity. And every time we make the sign of the cross, we proclaim the Truth of the Holy Trinity: In the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

The Gospel for this Sunday is taken from John, and the text essentially summarizes the whole of salvation history: "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life."

Elsewhere in his Gospel, St. John also tells us that "God is love!" Thus, for God to live is to love. "This is revealed in the fact that God exists eternally as Trinity -- a communion of three divine persons who are one God, only distinguishable from each other in their relationships to each other, relationships which are defined by the love of a Father, a Son, and the Holy Spirit that proceeds from and personifies that love."

In our human experience, it is in this love that God created man in his image -- a creature created to receive God's love and to love Him in return. But it was man's rejection and refusal of God's love that was essentially the original sin, man's loss of life with God.

And so God came to us in this world, in love and revealed himself as love: as a communion of love, Father and Son, and Holy Spirit. 

God's love does not seek condemnation but salvation: to restore us to receiving and returning God's love, a love that is eternal and limitless as the life of God Himself, the love that is the essence of "eternal life" in the Holy Trinity.

A blessed Sunday to us all. And thank you for a moment with God.

Ad Jesum per Mariam!