Trinity Sunday - Homily 3

 Homily 3 - 2016

The Book of Genesis states that God, when making us, made us in God’s image and likeness.  I find that an incredible insight. So long ago, some unnamed Jewish man or woman, or group of them, had the insight that we are made in God’s image and likeness. We are familiar enough with the “other way round”, with making or claiming God to be like us, in our image and likeness. It sets me wondering: What was their sense of God that enabled them to see us human persons like God? In the book of Genesis, in the story of creation, God has been presented as a kind of grand-scale landscape artist, ordering an already existing chaos, and then as a creator. Are we like God in that we can create? Or that, alone of all creation, we can communicate with God and each other as God communicates with us? I would like to think we are.

Today’s First Reading from the Hebrew Book of Proverbs adds a further delightful possibility. At creation, personified Wisdom, playing in God’s presence, delighted God. Are we like God also in our capacity to be delighted? It bears thinking.

The Jewish people became over time staunch defenders of the insight that God is one. We had to wait for Jesus to realize that the mystery of God is richer than that. Who? What was Jesus? By the mid-fifties Paul was writing to the Romans. We notice in today’s Second Reading that Paul simply assumed that Jesus was what he and they called Lord.  Lord had been the title that the Hebrew Scriptures jealously reserved for God. About forty years after Paul, the short passage from the Gospel of John that served as today’s Gospel Reading, had no trouble presenting Jesus as claiming, Everything the Father has is mine. The Gospel of John is filled with instances of Jesus indicating a variety of ways in which he and the Father relate to each other.

Both of today’s short Readings have Paul and John speaking of yet another they refer to as the Spirit, the Spirit of truth [in the case of John], a future presence to disciples, who would not speak as from himself, but would say only what he has learnt, taken from what is of Jesus; and who would glorify Jesus, that is, reveal to us more of the otherwise unknowable mystery that is Jesus. Paul said of this Spirit, the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given us.

So early disciples came to intuit that God was not some sort of solid monolith, but movement and activity – the kind of movement and activity we can detect in ourselves, to do with knowing and loving. They came to associate those activities with intensely vital relationships that they saw as somehow constituting God and that they named Father, Son and Spirit.

God, the mystery we see behind and giving existence to the whole created cosmos, is relationships, reflected in myriad ways in the created world and climaxing in human persons as knowing, being conscious and aware, and loving. It would seem that we express the image of God in which we have been created .. ; we become who we are called to be .. ; we become truly human .. to the extent that we become increasingly self-aware and loving persons –delighting in the creative energy that love releases.