Trinity Sunday

See Commentary on John 16:12-15 in John 16:5-15

Homily 1 - 2007

The love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given us. St Paul’s comment in today’s Second Reading bears reflection.

There are different kinds of love: some people say they love chocolates; some love their pets; most love their children; and most love their spouse. Let’s look more closely at the last two loves: the love of parent for child and the love of spouse for spouse. Both are beautiful; both are strong – but they are different.

When parents love their children, there is an inequality. The parent is in control, as it were, and operating from a position of superiority. When spouses love spouses, or adult friend loves adult friend, there is equality -  neither is in control; both are vulnerable. Beautiful as it is, the love between parent and child is not as total, or as perfect, as love of adult for adult can be. I think that the deepest love is the love between equals.

The Creator God loves creatures: the First Reading put it beautifully. But is that love more like parent for child than adult for adult, or equal for equal? When Paul said in the Second Reading that the love of God has been poured into our hearts  by God’s Spirit was he referring to the love of creator for creature, or to something else?

Ask a Muslim the same question: I think (I’m not totally sure) a Muslim would say that God loves us as Creator loves creature – from a position of absolute superiority and total control.

I am not sure what a Jew would say. The Hebrew Scriptures use the imagery of the love of bridegroom for his bride to convey a sense of God’s love; but the context of the imagery was of a patriarchal society where man and woman were by no means equal.

So what does the Christian disciple answer? Is God’s love for us something immeasurably more even than that of Creator for creature? The answer is “Yes!”.

I think, though, that, unless we believe in Trinity, our answer would have to be that God can love us only from a position of infinite superiority, that is, as Creator loves creature. In fact, I think that, unless God is Trinity, God can never even offer or experience within God’s own inner life a love like that of adult for adult, the love of  equals, the love where control is surrendered.

We don’t understand Trinity – it will always be mystery – but, as far as we can see, the fact that God is Trinity allows for some sort of personal relating within God’s own self. We refer to Persons in God: two persons in love, first and second Person - whose mutual love for each other is so perfect and complete, and lacking nothing, that it, too, their mutual love, is personal – a third Person.

So, the first and the second Persons relate to each other as equals. The experience of loving each other and being loved by each other - totally, infinitely - are very much God’s experience. And they love as equals. And the breath of that mutual love – the deep energy of love – is the Holy Spirit.

Paul says that this love of God for God has been poured into our hearts. When we became, through baptism, mysteriously christened – Christed - we were made one with Christ, sort of identified with him – but without losing our own identity – and thereby graciously drawn into the inner life of God. Because we are in Christ, then, to the extent that we are in Christ, God can love us not simply as creator but as lover.

Indeed, God’s love is better understood not so much as a noun but as a verb – not as some thing that can be given and received but as an event that is happening. God is not so much love as loving.

So rather than receiving the gift of their love, we are, more accurately, drawn up into their mutual loving of each other. As the Spirit of God pours into our lives, we are ennobled to share in the inner living of God, the God that is Trinity.

 Such is the dignity of the human person. We hold on to it now on faith. Our ultimate destiny will be to experience the mystery face to face.

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.

 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.

 Homily 4 - 2019

The Feast of the Trinity has come at a good time. Just last Sunday the Plenary Council steering Committee released what they call Six Major Themes, distilled from the thousands of replies sent to them from people all round Australia in answer to their question, “What might God be asking of the Church in Australia now?” Apparently over two hundred thousand people gave their views – most by taking part in group discussions [some of you here no doubt], and over seventeen thousand by sending individual replies.

Some quiet reflection on the Mystery of the Trinity may be just what we need as together we move into the next phase of the Council preparation – narrowing down the field and discerning where the Spirit of God is leading us. Discernment is something much richer than a majority vote. It is more a search for consensus on the part of all concerned, based on prayerful cooperation with the Spirit’s leading.

Why reflection on the Trinity is appropriate is precisely because we have been created in the image of our Trinitarian God. We believe firmly that there is only one God. Yet our God is not like some great solitary monolith but exists mysteriously as three persons. There is diversity in God. And this diversity is held together by the fact that each of the persons loves the others with infinite love. Difference, yet unity, through love! Did you notice in today’s brief Gospel reading how Jesus insisted, “All the Father has is mine”, and then, “All the Spirit tells you is taken from what is mine” – each person lovingly giving to the other all that it is and has, and then receiving that same gift in return.

Created in God’s image, we are each unique persons, necessarily different from each other. We arrive at what God dreams us to become by our deliberate and free choice to relate to each other, with all our diversity, in mutual love. That is what we were made for. Only there shall we find true fulfillment. It is written into us, more deeply than our DNA. It is there in the creative mind of the Son of God, of the Logos, the Word, the Wisdom of God, of whom we joyfully heard in the First Reading, “I was by God’s side, a master craftsman, delighting him day after day, ever at play in his presence, delighting to be with the sons of men”.

But there is another mood abroad in our world, that we inevitably and constantly breathe in, as it were. It is exemplified in our political world; it is reinforced by our media. We align, not on the basis of acceptance, respect and love, but driven by our ideologies. We do not listen to each other. We do not want consensus. We want instead to win. Instinctively we align for or against. It seems that we need opponents, enemies, in order to feel secure and somehow at home in our own identity.

Growth and change are written into the plan of God, and stimulate our capacity and our need to penetrate ever more deeply into the truth of God and the things of God. While “two plus two equals four” might be true forever, what we can know and say about God keeps opening out into eternity. It is the Spirit of God who wishes to lead us there. As we heard in today’s Gospel passage, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will lead you to complete truth”. It is a process that never finishes.

Among the themes, or general orientations, already discerned by the National Centre for Pastoral Research as we continue our preparation for the Plenary Council is one entitled “Open to conversion, renewal and reform”. Another sees us as “Prayerful and Eucharistic”. We need to prioritise prayer as individuals, especially contemplative prayer that opens us to mystery. And we need Eucharist – with its sense of community – brothers and sisters sharing the one Bread and the one Cup, with Christ among us as our enthusiastic host.

Homily 5 - 2022

I find today’s First Reading from the ancient Hebrew book of Proverbs a beautiful though brief reflection on the mystery of God. The Book is quite ancient, composed four or five centuries before the Word of God, the Christ, became human in Jesus. In today’s poem, the Christ is personified as Wisdom, existing “from the beginning, before earth came into being… when God fixed the heavens firm”. More than that, Wisdom declared of itself, “I was by God’s side, a master craftsman, delighting him day after day, ever at play in his presence, at play everywhere in God’s world, delighting to be with [human persons]”.

This was written centuries before St John’s Gospel, in its introduction, said of the Word, or the Christ, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things came into being through him”. More academic than Proverbs — but not as poetic.

The First Vatican Council, dating back to the year 1870, assured us that we can know God and talk about God, but it immediately qualified that claim by stating that our language is essentially
metaphorical. More technically, it said that our language about God is at best analogical. Analogy means that our ideas and words about God mean something essentially different, but can make sense up to a point.

When we say that “God is love”, we do not know what God’s love is like. We can be familiar with human love and know what it means — up to a point, depending on our maturity. But when we apply the word “love” to God, we need to remove all love’s human limitations and multiply what is left by infinity — by which stage we barely know what we are talking about. At least, our language can be better than mere metaphor. With an analogy, the opposite of what we claim is not true. To say “God is not love” is simply wrong. And even though we accept that human language is hopelessly inadequate to define God accurately, it is enough to enable us to be “ever at play in God’s presence”. Our words are like a finger pointing at the amazing universe stretched out beyond the moon that we can see. It still remains mystery.

There are so any things we experience in our world that point to mystery beyond. Our perceptions always fall short; they are invariably imperfect. Our capacity to receive and to give love, for example, never totally quench our thirst or our hopes. It is so important to notice and to cultivate those consistent experiences of longing for more, not to make us dissatisfied or discontent, but to spur our reaching out and our quiet hope for that “more”, the unseen, silent Mystery — that people like ourselves for centuries before us have called “God.”

We are immensely blessed that Jesus briefly came among us. John’s Gospel so beautifully declared, “The Word of God became flesh, and dwelt among us”. St Paul wrote of that same Word [which he referred to as “the Christ”] as “…the image of the unseen God, the firstborn of all creation”. Better than words and ideas, Jesus revealed the essence of God by who he was, by what he did. His love, his mercy, his thirst for justice speak more eloquently than words. And though he “dwelt among us” for that brief time only of about thirty years, so long ago, he departed from us to take his place “at God’s right hand” [as Luke colourfully phrased it]. Once there, his first formal task was to send his Spirit to us, the “Spirit of truth” [that we heard about in today’s Gospel], to “lead us to the complete truth” and to “tell us of the things to come”…

… and, as the Book of Proverbs might have added, “to deepen our delight as we play together with the Spirit of God delighting to be present here among us”.