Trinity Sunday - Homily 2

Homily 2 - 2010

Perhaps what I share tonight may not be familiar, but I think that it will resonate with your own wisdom. Don’t take it just as my view of things, but check it out yourselves in the light of your own experience.

I am not a parent, but I have observed parents, and, as well, I know within myself the longings of parenthood. I imagine that the love of a mature parent for a young child is something quite wonderful and unique. But it isn’t always so. Some parents have never grown up; and a whole lot of other agendas can intrude into their parenting - agendas that aren’t always helpful.

Perhaps, for parents to love well their child, they may need to have learnt to love someone like themselves, a peer, another adult – usually their spouse, at least. To love a peer, an adult, can be difficult, and can call for a lot of dying to self.

Yet, beautiful as love of parent for child can be, I suspect that everyone’s deepest longing is to love and to be understood and loved by another adult. And, unless that love happens, there remains an unfulfilled emptiness in our hearts. Only between equals can we say: "All that I am, just as I am, I offer to all that you are, just as you are". Only between equals can there be the total sharing of dreams, of values, of commitments, that marks the deepest loves.

That is why it makes so much sense to me that the God who is love, whose whole essence is love, who can be nothing but love, is somehow or other Trinity. Our God is not a Unitarian God – not a kind of monolithic God.

Perhaps a Unitarian God can be a creating God, may even be a merciful God, but would never know the reciprocity of the love of equal for equal, and so would remain always lacking something, and unfulfilled. As I see it, the capacity for merciful love of superior for inferior, of creator for creature, of parent for child, would always fall short of what could be, and may, therefore, seem suspect.

The Gospel of John showed a Jesus who related to God as peer, as equal: To see me is to see the Father… The Father and I are one.

The language of Father/Son can seem deceptive (and its purpose, its value, is,  ultimately, to nail their difference); but in relating to the Father, Jesus relates not as child but as adult son – adult to adult, as it were (and perhaps the only Father/Son relationship that has ever been totally and mutually satisfying).

Having said all this, it is important to realise that we can do no more than to apply our human minds to a Mystery that quite escapes us. But, being human, we can’t help pondering!

Where does the third one – the Spirit of love – fit in? That is a whole other story.

But, at least, notice in tonight’s Gospel that speaks of  Father, Jesus and the Spirit, that they all have the one agenda, the one purpose, the one message. Or, as the Evangelist put it, All the Spirit tells you will be taken from what is mine, and Everything the Father has is mine.

All/everything – the prerogative of the Father, of Jesus, of the Spirit – the same message, the same gift. And, as far as we are concerned, that message, that gift, is love. And that love, as I see it, can be what it is because God is Trinity.