"The Spirit of Truth...Will Guide You to
All Truth" John 16
Homily for Trinity Sunday
Mark Payne, OSB
It does not surprise us that the mystery of the
Holy Trinity is utterly above and beyond us. It is not something
that we could grasp completely, put into writing, and then check
off our list of acccomplishments. I suppose there are two reasons
why the dogma of the Most Holy Trinity is so challenging for us.
First of all, the Trinity is a person and we know how long it
takes to understand another person's characteristics, moods,
opinions, capabilities, inner feelings and desires. How much more
then for the creator God of the universe. In fact, even after
some decades of trying to understand our own selves, we realize
that there is always so much more to learn, to understand, and to
appreciate.
The Holy Trinity is not a problem to be solved,
nor an idea to be understood, nor a proposition to be proven. The
Trinity is a person to be loved. The catechism calls the Trinity,
the central, fundamental, and essential mystery of the faith. The
word "mystery," by the way, does not mean that we
cannot know anything about it. We can, in fact, know a lot about
God and about one another. It is just that the more we know about
a mystery, the more and more there remains for us to know.
Furthermore, we do come to realize that not simply our mind but
even more our heart that is involved in grasping a mystery. The
Trinity, remember, is a person to be loved.
The whole history of creation is the process of
the revelation of God. We come to understand and love God as we
experience the unfolding history and the developing life of the
human race. God as creator initiates and sustains everything that
is. We humans are created to observe, appreciate, understand, and
accept this unfolding of reality. But it does not depend on us
alone. The eternal Word of God is ahead of us in this. It was by
God's holy Word that everything was created first of all and it
was God's holy Word who became a person like us at to acknowledge
and to receive and to perfect all of creation. By the Spirit, all
of this has been announced and accepted and loved.
The Book of Proverbs read to us today contains
an ancient and beautiful description of the Word of God, the
forerunner of creation, delightedly at play before God's face.
What a wonderful image of Jesus' life and our own human Christian
exisitance. In Christ, we are the beloved children of a generous
and trustworthy God who made the universe for God's glory and for
our delight. Jesus is the Ancient and the New, the giver and the
receiver of God's goodness. We exist to share in that beautiful
vocation. \par \par Psalm 8 praises God's creation, especially
you and I, human beings, the summit of God's earthly creation.
How is it that God, utterly complete and lacking for nothing
chose to create us, to put up with us, to forgive and to love us,
utterly unworthy and (on our own) unreliable and ungrateful
creatures? Yet here we are, beloved sons and daughters of the
Father.
We have been granted the gift of the Holy
Spirit, so says St. Paul today, to confirm and to guide us in the
struggle to become who we are. God always is Father, Son and
Spirit, One prefect God. We, on the other hand, need an eternity
to grow into what we are to become in God. For us it is a long
and painful process to become what we are to be. St. Paul was
quite familiar with wordly misunderstanding, with human
mistreatment, with arrogance and weakness. Yet St. Paul assures
us today that at every moment the Holy Sprit is healing us,
forgiving us and pouring the love of God into our hearts.
Let us happily resolve to live all of our life
in grateful reception of the Holy God, to be imitators of the
goodness and gratitude of Jesus, and to be channels of the Holy
Spirit to all whom we meet. Then God's work will be complete and
even we can be like God.