Cycle A - Year 1

11 June 2017:  Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity 

(Liturgical Color: White)

Gospel:Please Read  John 3:16-18

The Trinity: One God in three Persons!

We celebrate the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity this Sunday. It is the most important Truth in our Catholic faith: three Divine Persons 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 in the sand. St. Augustine asked the boy what he was doing, "I am putting the sea water inside my little hole," the boy told him. St. Augustine said to to the boy, "That's impossible to contain the vast ocean into your little hole, my child!"  Then 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. That is why it is often regarded as a "preacher's nightmare"!. We end up acknowledging that the Trinitarian character of God will always be a mystery to our human minds.

But it is important to say that Holy Mother 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.

This Sunday's Gospel is from St. 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. The Gospel reading tries to help us reflect on the Trinitarian character of God through a more familiar word and human experience, and that is love.

St. John also tells us somewhere in his Gospel that "God is love!" For God, to live is really to love. In the words of a Catholic preacher: "This revealed in the fact that God exists eternally as Trinity -- a communion of three Persons who are one God, only distinguishable from each other in their relationship 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: a communion of love, Father and Son and Holy Spirit.

In sum, 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.

Let us pray, that when we reach our final destiny in heaven, our eyes will finally be able to contemplate the face of God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

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

Ad Jesum per Mariam!