The Trinity is Love

Homily on John 3:16-18--Holy Trinity

Today brings the return to ordinary time in the liturgical calendar; we have finished Lent, Easter and Pentecost. Now the Church starts this so-called “ordinary” time with two celebrations central to our Catholic Faith: the Holy Trinity and Corpus Christi. Today, we celebrate the Holy Trinity, the mystery of one God in three Divine Persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

The liturgy of this great solemnity invites us to contemplate the central mystery of our faith. And the Trinity is a great mystery; in fact it is the Mystery of all mysteries. It is a mystery of God’s own inner, intimate life and the very source of all gifts and graces; the Trinity is the source of everything including our very selves. So you can see how important this mystery is to our lives-it is the mystery of what is most essential to us-He Who created us, Who brought us into Being.

To help us enter into the contemplation of this mystery, that is to try to turn our hearts souls and minds toward it and to even to become one with the Mystery of the Trinity (for that is the goal of contemplation), to do this, we must begin by first understanding that we can never fully understand this great mystery. Here below, our intelligence is just not simple, pure, enough to really enter into full contemplation of the Trinity. Here below, we walk by faith, not by sight, so we will always stand in awe of the three persons who are one in being.

Actually, it is the simplest of persons, that is the humble saints, that have come to the deepest understanding of this central mystery of our faith. In fact, sometimes the more theologians or the great intellectuals have tried to get their minds around the mystery, the more errors they made. Either the Trinity loses their personhood or their essential unity—we end up with just one personhood or more than one God. If even trained theologians can mess up, what are we, who are not theologians, to do?

Well, just because we cannot fully understand this great mystery, doesn’t mean we can’t understand it at all. The fundamental stance we take in front of so great a mystery is one of awe. It is analogous to looking at something beautiful in nature, such as a sunset. The quality of the colors in the sky, the light rays turning color- we stand and say “wow!” It just leaves us speechless. So too with contemplation of God- the first stance is awe. We stand before God in prayer, looking with our minds at the mystery of the Three in One- we are in awe, Wow!

Today the Church helps us to contemplate the mystery of the Holy Trinity by helping us enter into the very center of the mystery of the Trinity-the center which is--Love. This revelation of God, in which He reveals to us that He is Love, is as were, a secret help given and revealed to us from deep within the Trinity, Himself. Never in the Old Testament did God reveal this mystery to anyone. God loved the chosen people-Israel, but he was a God who was distant and remote, a Master not a intimate friend. So the ideal of a God who would actually draw close to us, so close that He actually become Incarnate, became a man like us, was beyond their wildest dreams.

This incarnate God is who today’s Gospel passage speaks of. We read that God so loved the world, that he sent His only Son. God sent Him not to condemn the world, but to save the world. This revelation of the true purpose of Jesus coming into our world reveals what is the motive of God. And by knowing God’s motive, we can better contemplate the mystery of the Most Blessed Trinity.

God loved the world-this is His motive and this motive reveals who God really is--God is love. Yet, this Love did not just stay in heaven, it dwelt on this earth, and then this Love was sent into the hearts of all of those who would believe. So love is not just a quality of God, like we would say of us humans—we have love; so we could say that those two persons, that husband and wife really love each other, just like God really loves us. But the problem with this is that God doesn’t love like us—God doesn’t just love—God is Love Itself, or we should say God is Love Himself. In other words, we are not pure love, God is pure love; love is not our essence; but it is God’s. While the bond of marriage is deep, and we can say that two persons in marriage love each other, that a man loves his wife and vice versa, but love is not who the man is or who the woman is. Only in the Holy Trinity do we find Persons who do not just love each other, but are Love Himself.

Here is the heart of the mystery and here is where we enter in- we enter into the essential love the Father has with the Son and the Holy Spirit. The very life of the Divine Trinity is love and we, through our prayer and through our worthy and proper celebration of the Sacraments, being of humble and pure heart, can enter directly in. We are then caught up, as it were, in the loving gaze of the Father to the Son and Holy Spirit, the loving gaze of Jesus to the Father and the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit’s loving gaze to the Father and the Son. This love changes everything in our lives-it goes beyond mere emotions and feelings. Through faith, using our minds and our hearts, we are able to return to the source of Love in order to be loved, by Love, so we can in turn love one another and become one in Love.

So you see, the mystery of the Trinity is not an extraneous believe of our Catholic faith. WE can’t just ignore it and say it’s a mystery and leave it at that. The mystery of the Trinity is the starting point of all revealed truth, it is the source of our existence, the fountain from which proceeds our supernatural life, and it is the goal toward which we are headed and hope to attain; it is a Mystery to experience to enter into to and become one with in love; We are children of the Father, brother’s and co-heirs with the Son, and we are continually sanctified, made holy, by the Holy Spirit to make us ever more resemble Christ.

The more through study and intense prayer we deepen our understanding of this truth of our relationship with each of the persons of the Trinity, the more we, ourselves become living temples of this same Blessed Trinity. The more we adore the Blessed Trinity the more He comes to make His abode in our souls and the more we become like Love itself-Love reveals Himself to us and makes us His Own.

We hear the Blessed Trinity constantly invoked in the Holy Mass and all the Sacraments, because it is the central mystery of our faith. We were baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit; and in their name also are our sins forgiven, in Their Name we became God’s Children. We begin and end many prayers by invoking the Father, through Jesus Christ, in the unity of the Holy Spirit. Often during the day we should say the prayer of adoration to the Trinity, “All Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit as it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be, world without end Amen.

God is my Father! If you meditate on it, you will never let go of this consoling thought!

Jesus is my Lord and Savior who has come not to condemn me but to save me.

The Holy Spirit is my Consoler, who guides my every step along the road.

Consider this often: you are God’s and God is
yours.

Dear Soul, remember you have been created by the Father, redeemed by the Son and sanctified by the Holy Spirit. You are a child of God, you belong to God and you are called to return to this God from whence you came. What Love you have given—Love Himself.

Holy Mary, Daughter of the Father, Mother of the Son, and Spouse of the Holy Spirit, pray for us that we may be worthy of the promises of Christ and return to that Love from whence we came—the Most Blessed Trinity. Amen.