Cycle A - Year II:  

7 June: Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity

(Liturgical Color: White)

Readings:

First Reading:        Exodus 34:4-6, 8-9

Second Reading:   2 Corinthians 13:11-13

Gospel Reading:   Please read John 3:16-18  

"The Holy Trinity is God's love!"

This Sunday is the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity.  It is the most fundamental of the Christian beliefs and 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?

Here is a 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 Holy 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.  So St. Augustine asked the boy what he was doing. "I am putting the sea water inside my little hole," the boy answered him.  St. Augustine said to the boy, "That's impossible to contain the vast ocean into your little hole, my child!"  Then the boy told him in reply, "And so with you. How can you grasp the vastness of God with your little mind?"  At that moment St. Augustine realized a profound truth: it is equally impossible to fill the human mind with the immensity of the mystery of the Holy Trinity.  For indeed, if human mind can explain God we must be greater than God.

That is why the Church's teaching on the Trinity is most difficult to comprehend and even more difficult to fully communicate with human words.  And so 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.  Because the human mind can never fully understand the mystery of the Trinity, but we can sum it up in the following formula: God is three Persons in one Nature.  There is only one God, and the three Persons of God -- the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit -- are all equally God and They cannot be divided.

It is important to state 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.

The Gospel for this Sunday 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 the Gospel that "God is love!"  So then for God to live is really to love.  In the words of a Catholic preacher, "This is 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, relationship 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.  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.

So 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!