Trinity Sunday

See Commentary on John 3: 16-18 in John 3:16-21

Homily 1 - 2005  

Along with Jews and Muslims, we Christians believe firmly that there is, and can be, only one God; but unlike them we believe that this one God is Trinity.  Believing this, we can claim that the man Jesus is also the one God, as is the Spirit of God that is at work in our world.

In his epistle today, Paul greeted the Corinthians: The grace of the Lord, Jesus, Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the holy Spirit be with you all.  Paul expected this to be the experience of every Christian.

Jesus we know – to some extent: human like us, deeply concerned about issues that we sometimes share; a deep interest in people, especially those getting a rough deal, but not only them – everyone; wanting that situation to change to one where everyone deeply respects everyone else.  These were his constant concerns because his sense of God –  learnt from the Torah, the prophets, his parents, and from his own personal prayer experience – was that God saw things that way.  His concern for people was not from a distance, as it were.  He was open to their friendship.  Remember the conversation in John’s gospel when the two disciples first met Jesus that time he came down to John the Baptist to be baptised.  It went something like this: Who are you seeking? Where do you live? Come and see! And (as the Gospel notes) they spent the rest of the day with him.

Paul expresses his wish that the grace of this Jesus be with us.  What does he mean? The word means “gift”, so Paul means the gift of Jesus to us, his self-gift.  Jesus, however, is the one who offers but does not impose.  That may be why Paul hopes it is our experience, but does not assume so.  Are we open enough to let that Jesus get close and possibly to change us?  Paul hopes we are.  He was open enough, and so he changed  - and he was so thrilled with the change that he wants the experience to be ours, too.

Then, because Jesus’ attitude towards us finds its source in God, indeed, is the human expression of God’s love, Paul continues: and may the love of God be with you all, i.e.,  may the God – God who is love – be with you: the God who so loved the world that he gave his only Son (as the Gospel reminded us today).  I think it important that we don’t assume that we really know what love means – what God’s love means… but we know enough.  Do we hang on to the feeling that God must be the judge –  the detached, uninvolved, dispassionate rewarder of good people and punisher of bad – rather than the God whom we know loves us, unconditionally, of course (or it is hardly love)? Are we willing to let ourselves change?

We want access to this God, so Paul adds: May the fellowship of the holy Spirit be with you all.  There is only one God, but the Spirit, of course, is God – specifically God as “at work in the world”, as “in touch with us”, as “communicating”.  What is Paul trying to convey by the word fellowship?  I think he means connecting intimately – the sense of persons relating deeply – free to be themselves, to offer themselves, open to know and to accept the other.  “All that I am, just as I am, offered to all that you are, just as you are.”  Paul’s hope is that we enter into intimate contact with the God who is love, and who offers himself in love to us creatures, who as Jesus has shared our life, and is, as Spirit, ready now to enter into the complex weave of our day-to-day lives.

It is wonderful possibility.  It is Paul’s hope for every disciple.  It is the reality each of us can open to.  It is what we hope for for each other: May the grace of the Lord, Jesus, Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the holy Spirit, be with you all.

Homily 2 - 2008

When I first heard of Sr Veronica’s sudden death two weeks ago, I noticed that one of my early reactions was a brief twinge of envy – She had beaten me to the adventure of eternal life.  Of the three of us, Peter, Veronica and myself, I had imagined that I would be the first to get under way.  Veronica had beaten the gun!  Her death perhaps situates our reflection on today’s gospel.

The Gospel states that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that everyone one who believes in him … may have eternal life.  It then repeated much the same thought: God sent his Son into the world … so that, through him, the world might be saved.  When we hear of being saved, most of us tend to think of being saved from original sin and the prospect of eternity in hell – but that was not what the Gospel had in mind.  (The doctrine of Original Sin was not developed until centuries after the Gospel was written.)  So, if the Gospel did not have original sin and hell in mind, what did Jesus come to save us from?

From your own experience, do you think that the world, society, yourself are basically OK as is – except for some cosmetic tweaking here and there?  If salvation, finally, is much the same as eternal life, (as the Gospel seems to suggest), and if life as is seems OK enough, is that how you would like life to be for eternity?  I, for one, wouldn’t.  I couldn’t for a moment come to terms with the thought that life as is would continue, basically unchanged, for eternity.  

One problem most of us have, as we think of eternity, lies in whether we imagine life in eternity to be simply an individual experience or a collective experience.  My instinctive reaction is that, if the experience of eternity involves everyone else, too, then I would like people to be radically different from what they are now.  I don’t want the selfishness, the competitiveness, the drivenness, the emptiness and the violence of society to continue as is for eternity.  Eternity could be bearable only if we would all live not only in harmony but in deeply loving relationships.

If I think beyond my instinctive first reaction, I realise that eternity will be liveable only if I can love everyone else – and that is what I do not succeed at doing now.  I need to be saved from what stops me loving unconditionally – my fears, my insecurities and my fascination with myself.  And I would like to think that others undergo a similar growth, a similar liberation, a similar salvation.

God wants that to be, too, because God is wholly love.  So God sent Jesus.  But for salvation to happen, to really live eternally, we have to believe Jesus; we have to take him seriously; we have to take notice of what he has shown us; and we need to trust him.  His message was quite simple.  His recipe for the world’s salvation was quite simple: love one another.

I would love to have the freedom, and the power, of the risen Jesus.  Remember last week’s Gospel: After his resurrection, Jesus could come to the world and say simply: Peace be with you to those disciples who had abandoned him and denied ever having known him, and, by extension, to those thousands of others who had ignored him, found him boring, or who had seen him as irrelevant, an embarrassment, even as an enemy 

The wonderful thing is that the Father, in his love for the world, sent Jesus to save us from each other – and, perhaps, even more pertinently, to save us from ourselves.  Jesus accepted his mission: he showed us what love is; he showed us that love is possible, and he told us that our only hope really to live life, in any real sense, is to choose to love.  But more than that, the Father and Jesus have sent the Spirit of Jesus to empower us in our choice to love.  That is how, together, Father, Son and Spirit, have saved us and enabled us to live into eternity – And the process has already started.

Homily 3 - 2014

Today, on this Feast of the Trinity, we are going to baptise young Angus into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. We are going to launch him on the adventure of his life.

Did you notice how I greeted you at the start of Mass today? I was in fact quoting what Paul wrote to wind up his letter to the Corinthians, as we heard again in today’s Second Reading, May the grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all. What is that all about? Does it matter? It does indeed matter – because we are made in the image of God; and the more we know God, the better we can understand ourselves. So, hold on to your seats!

Do not worry that you have been told that God is a mystery. We are used to mysteries. Mysteries are not problems to be solved but realities that we never come to the end of exploring, realities that we can learn to experience and to enjoy more and more. We are all mysteries. Every human person is a mystery. Not surprising, then, if we are made in God’s image, that God is mystery, too; but infinitely more wonderful, more beautiful, more exciting.

I want to start with Person number Three, whom we call Spirit, Holy Spirit. Paul talked about the communion of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the love that the First and Second Persons have for each other. It is the energy that draws them together, the love that leads them to rejoice in each other … and to enjoy being God. The same energy flows out into the world of created persons – to you and me. It is what draws people together. It is that source of almost tangible delight when two persons find themselves really loving each other. 

More than that, the Spirit draws us into the risen humanity of Jesus; and so, in and through Jesus, into the very heart of God. When we baptise young Angus today, we are going to christen him, that is, set him up to be drawn into the experience and reality of the risen Jesus. Sacraments are not magic, however. He will have to cooperate as he grows across life – but the wherewithal will be there.

Persons One and Two – How are we like them? They are the two who love each other. But before that, there is more to say. We call Person One Father – which is helpful and not helpful. Helpful in that Father suggests origin and life-source – where everything starts; and it is also personal. Unhelpful, in that the name suggests gender, authoritarianism, judgmentalism and perhaps violence.

The dance of the Trinity gets moving as Person One expresses the divine reality, reveals it completely, by giving birth, as it were, to Person Two – whom the Gospels call Son or Word. In revealing that divine reality, Person One had to surrender, give, totally; and Person Two had to receive that gift, and give it back. We get some sense of that experience to the extent that we know true intimacy. One mediaeval author described intimacy as “All that I am, just as I am, offered to all that you are, just as you are.” When intimacy is truly real, and adult, both partners share in the delight of God. And somehow, Person Three, the Holy Spirit, the love energy of Persons One and Two, is there in the middle of it, making it all possible.

So, Angus, baptised into the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit! A wonderful adventure opens up before him. In it, he will need to be supported by you, family and parishioners, as, with him, you keep on opening yourselves to the unifying love energy, the communion, the unity, of the Holy Spirit of God.

Homily 4 - 2017

A number of shops in Hamilton have decorated their shop windows in rainbow colours to show support for the “Pride & Inclusion” football match in the town next weekend.  As might be expected, citizens have reacted differently – some quietly pleased, some highly opposed, most, I presume, fairly indifferent. I would not be surprised if the members of our Catholic congregation experience a similar range of reactions.  It was against this background that I have been pondering this past week on the readings for today’s Mass.

 God loved the world so much. What a great starting point! The world God loves is this world with its amazingly complex assortment of people and cultures. God loved this world so much that God wanted everyone in it to find eternal life. That this might be, God even sent his Son into this world.

 Why was that necessary? Listen again to the Gospel, “God sent his Son into the world, not to condemn the world [that was the farthest thing from God’s mind], but so that through him the world might be saved”... because this world of people loved by God needed to be saved – saved, obviously not from God, but from the mess we make of ourselves and of each other. Look at our TV news programs and it seems that this world that God loves has an incurable death wish, rather than an irrepressible urge for life, for eternal life.

 Eternal life is precisely what it says. It is life. It has to be lived. And for us humans, it has to be lived freely. Eternal life is something more than, over and above, immensely more wonderful than, human life. Eternal life is the same kind of life that God lives. And as the Gospel text made clear, God loves. God is love. Eternal life is living like God – so loving the world, each other, not tearing it or ourselves or each other apart, as we seem bent on doing.

 We cannot at times help judging the attitudes or action of others. Certainly God judges the world, and God’s judgment is clear. All of us are sinners; we are guilty. But that is totally irrelevant to God’s loving us.  We can find it hard to get hold of that; perhaps it calls for a certain maturity, or suffering, or confronting our unavoidable failures. Jesus was not sent into the world to condemn anyone; there is no violence in God. Judging does not rule out loving. God, seeing us destroying ourselves and each other, seeks, rather, to heal us, to heal those hidden wounds that drive us to mutual nastiness, hostility and destructiveness. God’s clear intention is to save us.

 But we have to cooperate, because eternal life calls for free decision on our part. Jesus came to show us through his whole lifestyle and teaching the need for us to become alert to our innate hostility, to try to move beyond it and choose to see this world as God does, to love this broken world and everyone else living in it, even if they don’t love us. We can freely hold back from loving, from forgiving, allowing our hostility to take over. But by so doing we condemn ourselves to life without love – hardly compatible with eternal life.

 Because God loves the world and creates everyone in it, God loves gay people as much as God loves straight. God has only one way of loving, and that is with all stops out, infinitely intensely, without discrimination, without conditions. While we often, and inevitably, in all sorts of contexts, have strong views on the rightness or wrongness of others’ actions and lifestyles, whether they are straight or gay, we certainly are never in a position to judge whether others are in a state of sin. Only God has access to the depths of human hearts. And if somewhere God sees sin, God’s response of healing mercy goes into overdrive.

 As people endeavoring to live with the life, and the mind and heart, of God, we endeavor to respect everyone, to be sensitive. That is basic. We may disagree with others, but as Pope Francis said once in answer to a question about gays, “Who am I to judge?”

Homily 5 - 2020 

I seek dearly to relate to this “three-person” God present in my life. I spend time each day, trying to be alert to God’s presence. I sit down, try to empty my mind of my own thoughts, and simply be alert to God.

Usually within a few seconds of sitting down, either my mind, like a tree full of chattering monkeys, fills itself with a succession of distractions, or I fall asleep. I don’t want to — but it happens.

Eventually I notice what is happening. My spontaneous reaction is to feel disappointed, annoyed with myself, and angry. I feel a failure. I have come to realise that this is most important.

God reminds me that God has been quite alert to me, is always alert to me — all day, every day — and, what is more, is loving me no more and no less if I am alert or distracted or asleep. In fact, it is precisely by my failing miserably that God gets through to me that God’s love is totally unconditioned by me — is pure gift.

And then God seems to offer to help me love this failed me, this distracted, sleeping me, and even more, the hostile me that is disappointed and angry. God draws me into the river of love that flows between the three of them. In time, God even draws me into the flow of their love for other people, too, who are all failures in their own ways, even the ones whom I see as my enemies.

None of this helps my prayer to become more focussed. But I do notice over time that my thirst for God has grown stronger, and that I even seem to be more peaceful, even joyful.

What is your experience?

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.