Trinity Sunday

Deuteronomy 4:32-34,39-40 Romans 8:14-17 Matthew 28:16-20

Each year we come to the feast of the Holy Trinity, the homilist is challenged to make an abstract mystery tangible. It is not like

• Christmas, where the mystery can be seen in a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.
• Easter, where the Risen Lord is seen by Thomas who puts his finger in the holes made by the nails.
• Pentecost, where you can see tongues of flame and hear the noise of a roaring wind.

How does one make a theological idea or article of faith become a living experience.

2. We know that we begin our prayer services, whether liturgical or para -liturgical, with the invocation of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We also end with the same prayer in the form of a blessing. We know that we have been baptised in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, - as we are told in the Gospel. We know that the Trinity touches every moment of our living because as St. Paul said in his speech to the Athenians, it is this living God in whom “we live, and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28.) This is very consoling because when our world falls apart with a diagnosis of cancer, or a loved one has Alzheimer’s, we know that they are in the hands of God, when we are helpless in the face of these sicknesses.

3. Leonardo Boff is a theologian, philosopher and writer, known for his active support for the rights of the poor and excluded. He suggested that each one of us is an explanation and an unfolding of the Trinity. We know that we have been made in the image and likeness of God. So we witness to the Trinity in our very way of living.

I am the Father, insofar as I am mysterious and yet unknown. We picture the Father as an elderly man with a beard. But we know that is a caricature. God being immaterial is neither old, nor a man nor has a beard. And yet the Father like each one of us is mysterious and unknown. People may know my mannerisms, my likes, my dislikes, my moods and even my sins, but they do not know the “real” me until and unless I choose to reveal myself to others. So it is with the Father.

4. In our First reading, Moses paints a God who is faithful to the covenant. It is a God who shows power, a God who protects the people. One can even see an allusion to the Holy Spirit in the flames of the burning bush. But God will eventually reveal himself, as we reveal inner selves to our spouses, our family and our friends. The letter to the Hebrews tells us, that in the fullness of time, God showed himself through the Word made flesh. And when I choose to be open to those around me, I am the Son, who came into this world to show the Love of the Father.

Men and women continue to reveal, the Second Person of the Trinity, the son when they pour themselves out generously in love. The son is revealed in stages and in the layers to the extent that our love is universal, inclusive, extending to all regardless of faith, ethnicity, culture or class. We see that in the extraordinary people we meet in our church communities as they cross our lives at work, in the social and political arena. We see Son, as revealed in the lives of people like Nelson Mandela, Aun San Su Kyi, Mother Theresa to name but a few. They like the Son were “obedient” to the inner voice of love. The Son is seen in the doctors without borders (medecins sans frontiers). They repeat in our day and age, the healing powers of Jesus, as they do cataract operations and make the blind see, as they fit people with prosthesis and make the lame to walk. In a word, it takes the whole community of believers united in love and service to reveal the Son in 2009. The mysteriousness of the Father becomes tangible in the son, born 2000 years ago and is still alive in you and me today.

5. Every now and then, our selfishness comes in the way, there are hurts, grievances and vendettas. There is an inability to forgive. Here is where the Holy Spirit, the communion between Father and Son is made visible. The Holy Spirit comes alive in each one of us, as the Spirit recreates the face of the earth, recreates you and me. As in the case of the burning Bush, the fire makes the ground holy, it creates a Sacred Space.

The Holy Spirit warms the tepid hearts.

The Holy Spirit makes warm hearts aglow with fervour and love.

6. And so as Leonardo Boff would say, it is in the Trinity we find the best image of our church. It is not in a hierarchy of power, but in a community filled with diverse gifts and functions. It is this community that we, together can call God Abba, Father, as Paul explains in the second reading.

And so in the Trinity, we find a God who comes out to meet us

in all our yearnings,

in all our questions,

in all our confusion – as Mary was in the Annunciation, and asked, “How can this happen?” And as God comes to meet us, God empowers us in our efforts for a better world. God empowers us to be a more faithful church, which as Christ said on “Holy Thursday” – a church, that has been invited to serve and not to be served. It is a Church governed by reason (the head), but moved by love, (the heart.)

Is it not fitting therefore that the Mystery of the Trinity should unfold next week in the Feast of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus?

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Appendix: This appendix is given for our own personal meditation. To include it in the homily would make the homily a theology class rather than a homily.

1. If there were only one Unique One, only one God, solitude would ultimately be all there was. Underlying the whole universe, so diverse and so harmonious would not be communion, but only solitude. Every thing would end like a point on a pyramid, as at a single, solitary point.

If there were two Unique Ones, the Father and the Son, separation would be uppermost. One would be different from the other; and so there would exclusion; one would not be the other. There would be no communion between them, and hence no union between Father and Son.

So, with the union and inclusion of the Trinity we reach perfection. Through the Trinity, the solitude of the One is avoided, the separation of the Two (Father and Son) is also overcome, and the exclusion of one from the other (Father from Son, and son from Father) is overcome. The Trinity allows for communion and inclusion. The third Figure reveals the opening and union of opposites. Hence the Holy Spirit, the third divine Persons has always been understood as the union and communion between Father and son, inasmuch as the Person is the expression of the flow of live and interpenetration that thrives between the divine Unique Ones for all eternity.

Hence it is not arbitrary that God is communion of three Unique Ones. The Trinity shows that underlying everything existing and moving there dwells an impulse of unification, communion and eternal synthesis of those who are distinct in an infinite living, personal loving, and absolute fulfilling whole.

Appendix two:

God is a communion rather than solitude. Instead of an image of God as a solitary ruler standing aloof above a static universe, belief in the Trinity means that at the root of everything there is a movement, there is a eternal process of live, of outward movement and love.

Obviously, Boff is interested in the social implication of the Trinity especially because of his indignation against misery and marginalization of the poor and underprivileged.