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Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity
May 31, 2015
Reading I: Deuteronomy 4:32-34, 39-40
Responsorial Psalm 33:4-5, 6, 9, 18-19, 20, 22
Reading II: Romans 8:14-17
Gospel: Matthew 28:16-20
Reading 1 Dt 4:32-34, 39-40
Moses said to the people:
"Ask now of the days of old, before your time,
ever since God created man upon the earth;
ask from one end of the sky to the other:
Did anything so great ever happen before?
Was it ever heard of?
Did a people ever hear the voice of God
speaking from the midst of fire, as you did, and live?
Or did any god venture to go and take a nation for himself
from the midst of another nation,
by testings, by signs and wonders, by war,
with strong hand and outstretched arm, and by great terrors,
all of which the LORD, your God,
did for you in Egypt before your very eyes?
This is why you must now know,
and fix in your heart, that the LORD is God
in the heavens above and on earth below,
and that there is no other.
You must keep his statutes and commandments that I enjoin on you today,
that you and your children after you may prosper,
and that you may have long life on the land
which the LORD, your God, is giving you forever."
Responsorial Psalm Ps 33:4-5, 6, 9, 18-19, 20, 22
R. (12b) Blessed the people the Lord has chosen to be his own.
Upright is the word of the LORD,
and all his works are trustworthy.
He loves justice and right;
of the kindness of the Lord the earth is full.
R. Blessed the people the Lord has chosen to be his own.
By the word of the LORD the heavens were made;
by the breath of his mouth all their host.
For he spoke, and it was made;
he commanded, and it stood forth.
R. Blessed the people the Lord has chosen to be his own.
See, the eyes of the LORD are upon those who fear him,
upon those who hope for his kindness,
To deliver them from death
and preserve them in spite of famine.
R. Blessed the people the Lord has chosen to be his own.
Our soul waits for the LORD,
who is our help and our shield.
May your kindness, O LORD, be upon us
who have put our hope in you.
R. Blessed the people the Lord has chosen to be his own.
Reading 2 Rom 8:14-17
Brothers and sisters:
For those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.
For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear,
but you received a Spirit of adoption,
through whom we cry, Abba, Father!
The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit
that we are children of God,
and if children, then heirs,
heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ,
if only we suffer with him
so that we may also be glorified with him.
Gospel Mt 28:16-20
The eleven disciples went to Galilee,
to the mountain to which Jesus had ordered them.
When they all saw him, they worshiped, but they doubted.
Then Jesus approached and said to them,
"All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me.
Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations,
baptizing them in the name of the Father,
and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,
teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.
And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age."
It is always difficult to lead a simple reflection on the Blessed Trinity. I even wonder should there be a liturgical celebration at all, since the title itself objectifies what is really about most intimate personal relationships. We know how people bridle at being objectified, spoken of as 'consumers', 'the workers', or 'our clients' - even by those trying to provide personal support. Feminist movements campaign against the objectifying of women. It is wrong to treat a person as one treats an object.
Yet this is what tends to happen when we speak of 'The Holy Trinity', particularly if on the printed page there is some diagram representing threeness in one, a triangle or clover leaf. There is no such thing as 'The Trinity'. We ought to tread very lightly as we approach the mystery of what we metaphorically might say is, as it were, the 'inner life' of God.
I say metaphorically, because God has no inner life, somehow distinct as ours is from the outer everyday physical life that engages with the world. God simply is.
What then are we celebrating in this liturgy?
The gospel formula, 'to immerse them in [or into] the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit' is very ancient. Not, perhaps, coming from the lips of Jeshua, but certainly dating back to the first century. Within a life-span of Jeshua saying enigmatic things like 'No one knows the father except the son'; 'I am going back to the father and I will send the spirit', people became aware that these three names could be used of YHWH - 'father', 'son', 'spirit'. Scattered references had been crystallised into this formula of initiation. I wonder what exactly they were thinking.
Scholars say it was nothing like what the bishops came up with during the tumultuous debates of the 4th century. The Nicene Creed itself must carry some responsibility for objectifying the threefold relationship it dares to define as of the Son begotten of the Father, of the same essence...
We ought always take off our shoes and walk tiptoe on this holy ground when we presume to investigate the 'inner' life of god. We are in a domain that is not ordinary; it is mystical.
*****
"Christians will be mystics, or they'll be nothing." The trouble with these words of Karl Rahner is that the meaning of 'mystic' is not explained. The word seems to point to some specialised form of religious experience, esoteric, and presumably reserved for an exclusive club. Yet the common teaching is that everyone is called to be mystic. Do we know what it means?
It's not easy to say what 'mystic' means, but let's try some approaches that may lead us to get a taste of it, even if we can't exactly define it.
Since we are speaking of mystical knowledge we might start with knowing. There are various levels of knowing, from knowing how to count and spell through to knowing complex formulas that can be used to describe climate variations, for example, or the chemical changes that produce plastics, or the orbits of the stars. Knowing of another kind is about people, understanding how we humans behave in various situations. Then there's knowing right from wrong. Some knowing is sharp and clear: you can read a story and know the characters well, or you can read poetry and know ideas that remain misty and ill-defined. The deeper your knowledge goes the less definite it will likely be. Yet all the richer, nonetheless.
Then there's how I know my best friend, my partner, my wife. What can I say? Are there words to carry this special knowledge? I don't think so. Yet I do know her so very well. I know how she thinks and feels, her highs and lows, her hopes and dreams. Don't ask me to explain it.
In this I think we are getting close to the kind of knowing that we'd call 'mystic'. It's real; most real of all knowing, in fact, even if it does slip away when we try to grasp it, pin it down, describe or define it. Many today complain about the hard crusts they were forced to swallow and learn by heart in the form of catechism formulations about God and Jesus and the church. Someone in this place only last week said they don't believe in the Trinity. I wonder do they know what they don't believe in.
As we turn to mystic knowing we need to learn to do without clear-cut definitions. These have their place in theology, in the science of interpretation, but they are like the collection of facts that could be said to describe my wife - age, date of birth, height, weight, colour of skin, of hair, particular identifying marks or features. I know all those facts, figures and formulas, but that's not how I know her as my friend, my partner and my lover. Person to person is 'mystic' knowing.
So let's try to talk about knowing the Mystery whom we dare to call God.
Marvelous it is that God wants to be known intimately, personally, one to one, by us - by you and me, and the family across the street, by the busy executive and the patient doorman, by the Governor and by the prisoners in the city jail. All - we all - are children of God and heirs to his kingdom here and now because God's life is our life, our sacred communion of love.
Can I possibly know God so intimately? Can you live with the idea that, somewhat like the way my partner might reveal herself to me or yours to you over many years, so God reveals God's self to you?
Jeshua of Nazareth talks this way about knowing the Father, his abba, - I know the father and the father knows me. You could spend a lot of time with that short statement, wondering...
Looking for ways to explain this, theologians saw Jesus as the 'Word'. If you'd like to pursue their thinking here you'll have to think of God as "mind", and then analyse what we experience in our mind. I am conscious of being me: that's the base of all the rest. I am a 'subject' thinking. Then I experience myself 'getting an idea' - generating a thought or even 'begetting' an idea - and I express this idea in a word that captures it and holds it, contains it. I can express that word and I know it contains my idea, something of my own self in fact. I can see myself in the word that contains my idea. I know me. And my word contains me, in a way.
There is a long tradition reflected in the scriptures, Old and New, about "The Word" coming from the mouth of God and making things happen. This ancient Hebrew notion found congenial company in the parallel Greek notion of the Logos, the word that contains our thought within our mind. I think it didn't take the early Christians much effort before they were speaking of Jeshua as that Word that was with God in the beginning. He came among us and settled in [pitched his tent] as one of us, like us in all things, living our hard life and dying our hard death.
Something which has existed from the beginning,
that we have heard, and seen with our own eyes,
that we have watched
and touched with our hands:
the Word, who is life - this is our subject.
That life was made visible:
we saw it and we are giving our testimony,
telling you of the eternal life
which was with the Father and has been made visible to us.
What we have seen and heard
we are telling you... (1 Jn 1:1-3)
The Word of God that makes things happen we heard, and saw with our eyes and touched with our hands, John says in his first letter. We can feel the awe still vibrating in this writing.
What was The Word making happen?
Any fair reading of the New Testament will see that what Jesus 'made happen' was not first and foremost 'reconciliation', though that is very significant. What happened, what actually followed from the Word coming among us, in all the gospels, was the sending of the Holy Spirit. How can we think of the Spirit as being of God, one with Father and Son?
When we think of God as being connected like father to son and son to father, like thinker to thought and idea to its origin, we quickly come to the bonding in that relationship, and we call this bonding 'love'.
We experience love as the strong force that holds us together - and leads us to share our deepest self in loving communion with another.
Sometimes we speak of the spirit of Jesus, as if it were his enthusiasm, his joy, hope, anger, energy. But the Holy Spirit, the ruah hakodesh, the Breath of Holiness, is not something parallel to my spirit or yours. The Holy Spirit is God, equally as the Father is God and the Son is God.
*****
There is a corollary, or a practical dimension to all this, and I would suggest that it calls us to continue a radical re-adjustment that has in fact been going on for some time already.
We think of ourselves as followers of Jesus, even 'Jesus People'. We speak of the body of Christ, of Jesus present in our world. But Jesus went away. His life came to its end. With some formality he returned to the Father. The time of Word made flesh dwelling among us is over. This is the time of the Spirit poured out over the whole world.
What's the difference? Well, I think there might be a major difference. There's the matter of unity, for a start. How much time and effort goes into making the visible church the one people of god! Strangely, though, the unity of the Spirit is at another level, and cannot so easily be arranged, nor even seen. Take the deep divisions of the churches into Eastern and Western, Catholic and Protestant. Yet the Holy Spirit is active in all these opposing factions. What does that say about unity?
Also we might wonder about our attitude to world religions. Today who would deny that the Holy Spirit is active in those traditions. Whatever the notion of a chosen people might mean, it cannot mean that the rest, the majority of humankind have been rejected by the God of love. Perhaps in identifying the church as the body of the Christ we have missed the spirit enlivening people of good will.
For our ordinary selves, what would it mean to give pride of place to the Spirit, leaving Jeshua where he belongs, the teacher, the one who lived and died for his loved ones, and rose and returned to the Father. The coming of the Spirit means that everyone of us is filled with that spirit. We are each in a certain way god in the flesh. The field of our mission is our home, our town, our social milieu, our modern world in all its excellence and corruption. We will do that, each in our own way, in a billion different ways, as the Spirit moves us and as we respond in our different worlds.
Do we expect a future in which the church is restored, purified and filled again with vibrant life, glorious in its refurbished grandeur, an effective sign influencing the world? Perhaps the time for institutions is past. They may have been a necessary phase, inevitable - as was the period of clarification when even the Trinity was defined, but that time is over. I see local communities made up of people who recognise in each other the call to faith and hope and love, supporting one another in their efforts to be good for their town. These communities are already present and active everywhere, even in cyberspace. For us to wake up and recognise the Holy Spirit moving over the waters of chaos.