Trinity Sunday - Homily 6

Homily 6 -2023

I shall base my thoughts for Trinity Sunday today on the opening greeting I often choose at the start of Mass: “The grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” It was originally the concluding line of St Paul’s Second Epistle to the Corinthians — as we heard today.

Paul focussed first on what he called “the grace” of Jesus. That led me into thinking about what strikes me most about Jesus. “Grace” seems too vague a word to satisfy me first up. There are so many things about Jesus that fascinate me that I find it hard to settle on one. His personal integrity and courage I find attractive, his warmth, his ready forgiveness, his persistent hopefulness. Regarding his teaching, I like his consistent emphasis on non-violence.

If someone were to ask you what attracts you about Jesus, what do you think you might answer? Perhaps today’s Feast of Trinity is as good as any to quietly chew it over.

Given that Jesus is the one whom God sent into the world in the first place, it is interesting to note what Paul had to say of God. He mentioned simply the “love” of God. John the Evangelist, the author of today’s Gospel passage, would agree with him. As we heard today, “God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son … so that through him the world might be saved.”

I sometimes worry that some of us are not quite convinced of that: that God loves this messy world. Yet even the early Hebrew People, whom we may be inclined at times to criticise for fixing on a more violent and frightening God, were by no means unanimous on that score. Just listen again to what one of the very early Books of the Hebrew Bible had to say of God, as we heard in today’s First Reading. Up on Mt Sinai God appeared to Moses, and identified himself as “a God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in kindness and faithfulness”. How long did it take for people to be convinced of that? … for us still to be convinced of it?

All that is needed is for us, as we mature, to deepen our experience of the mystery of love, of human love, and allow it to give us some feel for the infinitely richer love of God, “a God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in kindness and faithfulness”.

This leaves us with the Holy Spirit, the third Person of the Trinity, who, as the Creed will observe in a few minutes, “proceeds from the Father and the Son”. That is a rich theological description. But it is an observation that makes sense. Within the vital relationships that constitute the inner life of the Trinity, the Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father. As we know from human experience, when two persons love each other deeply and consistently, there proceeds from their mutual love a deep joy and a real vitality. Their love seeks to expand, to be shared. They sometimes sense a real creative urge to foster life. So true is this of the mutual love of the First and Second Persons of the Trinity that the joy, the vitality, the creativeness that proceed from their love is itself a Person, the Holy Spirit.

That is why St Paul was able to pray that the early Christian community in Corinth, along with and through the “grace” of Jesus and the “love” of God, would come to experience and to embrace what he called the “fellowship” of the Holy Spirit — the joy, the vitality and the creative energy, translated into practical cooperation and relationship, that are proper to the influence of the Holy Spirit.