Cycle A - Year I:  

4 June 2023: 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:  Please Read  John 3:16-18 

The Blessed Trinity inhibits our soul!

Let us start our reflection in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. In reading and reflecting on Holy Scriptures we need to invoke the help of the Blessed Trinity to understand better the will of the Father, through the works and teachings of the Son, and by the wisdom of the Holy Spirit.

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?  We realize a profound truth that it is impossible to fill the human mind with the immensity of the mystery of the Holy Trinity. For indeed, if the human mind can explain God then we must be greater than God.

The truth about the Trinity is the most difficult to comprehend and even more difficult to fully communicate with human words. 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 mind. 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 cannot be divided.

Holy Mother Church did not invent the teaching on the Holy 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, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

St. John is our evangelist for this Sunday. The Gospel proclamation 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." (Jn 3:16) St. John tries to help us to reflect on the Trinitarian character of God through a more familiar word in our human experience, and that is LOVE. For "God is 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, relationships which are defined by the love of a Father, a Son, and Holy Spirit that proceeds from and personifies that love."

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. So that 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.

We conclude our reflection on the Most Holy Trinity in the words of St. John of the Cross: "The Blessed Trinity inhibits the soul by divinely illuminating its intellect with the wisdom of the Son, delighting its will in the Holy Spirit, and absorbing it powerfully and mightily in the unfathomed embrace of the Father's sweetness."

Today is also Basic Ecclesial Community (BEC) Sunday. BECs are local Christian communities in neighborhood within parishes, usually of families, who gather around the Word of God and the Eucharist. Let us pray for their growth and perseverance to spread the Good News to local communities and to the world. Amen.

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

Ad Jesum per Mariam!