Solemnity of the Holy Trinity – Year B

In everything that exists, the name of the Trinity is imprinted!

“And know that I am with you always; yes, to the end of time.”
Matthew 28:16-20

Today we celebrate the Solemnity of the Holy Trinity. We have experienced the saving action of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. On this Sunday, after Pentecost, the Church invites us to contemplate this loving action of the three individual persons in God in their unity and synergy. “This feast is like an oasis of contemplation, after the fullness of Pentecost” (Fr Angelo Casati).

The Holy Trinity is a relatively recent feast. It was introduced into the liturgical calendar in the 14th century and assigned to the Sunday after Pentecost, considered the most suitable Sunday, considering that the Trinity was fully revealed with the descent of the Holy Spirit. We are not celebrating a truth of the catechism, enclosed in a dogmatic formulation, nor an enigmatic mystery. It is a living, beautiful, surprising reality, which is at the heart of the good news of the gospel and which St John sums up in the statement: ‘God is love’ (1 John 4:8).

The Trinity is not a particular feast to be celebrated once a year, but is the heart and root of Christian life. We celebrate it in the Eucharist, which is all about the Trinity. Moreover, it is the highest expression of the Christian’s vocation, his way and style of life. Teilhard de Chardin speaks of “amouriser le monde”, to ‘amourise’ the world!

The path to faith in the Trinity

All Christians profess faith in the Trinity: “God is one in three Persons”. We do not find this definition of God in the Bible and the first generations of Christians did not use the word Trinity. The first to employ it (‘Trinitas‘) was Tertullian, a Church Father (+240). His is not an invention, of course, but the fruit of his meditation on Holy Scripture. There is no lack of allusions to this truth of faith in the New or Second Testament. The conclusion of Matthew’s gospel that the liturgy offers us today (Matthew 28:16-20) is the most explicit Trinitarian formula we find in Scripture: “Baptise them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”. Another is found in 2 Corinthians 13:14: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the holy Spirit be with all of you”.

The Old or First Testament was a slow and progressive journey of experience and knowledge of God that led the people of Israel to the profession of faith in one God. We find this faith beautifully formulated in today’s first reading: “Understand this today, therefore, and take it to heart: the Lord is God indeed, in heaven above as on earth beneath, he and no other.” (Deuteronomy 4). We can imagine how scandalous it might have been, in this context, for Jesus to proclaim himself the Son of God and speak of the person of the Holy Spirit. The early Christians were indeed bold in initiating the belief in the Trinity, which would only be clearly formulated in the 4th century. Only a deep conviction, received through the teaching of Jesus, could have made them so bold.

From the exterior to the intimacy of God

Human intelligence can arrive at the oneness of God (monotheism) through reflection and philosophy. It is possible for everyone to arrive at God through his epiphany in creation. To the trinity of persons in the one God, houwever, only our faith in Jesus has guided us, for “No one has ever seen God. The only Son, God, who is at the Father’s side, has revealed him.” (John 1:18). It is not, however, a theoretical or dogmatic knowledge, which is of little or no use, but an introduction into the intimacy of God, an immersion in the immense and surprising mystery of God. Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes: “We are not interested in a divine that does not make the human flourish!”

Today we live projected towards the world and the universe, eager – rightly – to know the mysteries of the cosmos and of life. But few are interested in delving into the Mystery par excellence! Mankind has always sought to know the ‘cosmos’ it carries within itself: “know thyself!”. But despite the amazing progress of the sciences, we continue to be an enigma to ourselves. Only the ‘knowledge’ of God and his Mystery can reveal man to himself!

This Mystery is the key to understanding all reality. Benedict XVI said: “The “name” of the Blessed Trinity is, in a certain sense, imprinted upon all things because all that exists, down to the last particle, is in relation; in this way we catch a glimpse of God as relationship and ultimately, Creator Love. All things derive from love, aspire to love and move impelled by love, though naturally with varying degrees of awareness and freedom.” (Angelus 7/6/2009).

The Trinity, a requirement of love

If, on the one hand, the mystery of the Trinity is difficult to understand, because it clashes with our logic, on the other hand we could say that it is easy to understand, because it is a demand of love itself. A one-person God would be solipsistic, how could it be called love? A love of two could become a love of reciprocity, a mirror love, in which the two lovers mirror each other. It is still an imperfect love. There is a need for a third party who embodies diversity and forces love in two to step outside the logic of reciprocity to integrate the different.

God created mankind “in his own image and likeness” (Genesis 1:26-27), but the icon of the Trinity is not the couple, but the family, that is, the fruitful couple that welcomes “the other”, that comes out of the mirror logic. God is Family. In this sense, the current growing tendency to exclude the child, whether by sociological, economic or labour constraint, or by the couple’s own choice, is worrying. Procreation says something about God. Nature bears within it a Trinitarian imprint.

“The perfect form of communion, that which is the symbol of all communion, is the ‘three’. […] A Christian must have the number ‘three’ as a sacred number “My faith is ‘three’, my life is ‘three'”… Because faith is not one thing and our life is another. Our life is ‘three’. For us the number ‘three’ is the goal, it is what we have to strive for. Our life becomes a poor and unfinished life if we do not experience the love of ‘three’.” (Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça).

Daily prayer exercise for the week
1. Make the sign of the cross at the beginning of the day with a special awareness of living it in the name of the Trinity. And at the end of the day, before abandoning ourselves to sleep, repeat it as an immersion in the infinite Sea of Love.
2. Repeat frequently throughout the day, as a breath of the heart, the doxology:
Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.
3. Let us pray with St Catherine of Siena:
“Eternal Trinity, you are like a deep sea, in which the more I seek, the more I find; and the more I find, the more the thirst to seek you grows. Thou art insatiable; and the soul, satiating itself in thy abyss, is not satiated, for it remains in hunger for thee, ever more yearning for thee, O eternal Trinity, desiring to see thee with the light of thy light.

Fr. Manuel João Pereira Correia mccj
Verona, May 2024

The mountain and the name of God

A commentary on Matthew 28, 16-20

This Sunday dedicated to the Holy Trinity is, somehow, the highest point in our liturgical year. The disciple missionary, who tries to identify himself with Jesus Christ, receives today, in adoration and contemplation, a proposal to approach the mystery of God, a reality that is close to his most intimate identity (S. Agustin), but at the same time overrides every frontier and every human dimension. The Church offers today a reading of the last verses of Matthew’s gospel, where mention is made of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Let us reflect a bit on a few concepts that we can find in these last verses of Matthew:

1) To go up the mountain
Jesus meets his disciples on a mountain, in Galilee. It may seem an irrelevant geographical note, but I do not think so. In a sense, all of us are marked by geography. At least, on my side, I must say that some mountains have left a definitive mark in my personal life. I remember, for example, the Sinai majestic pics: there I could understand quite easily how Moses and Elia could feel the extraordinary presence of God (Cfr Ex 19, 20; 1 Kings 19, 8); I remember also the fantastic Machu Pichu in Peru, where I had de impression of being at the centre of our Planet and to enter into communion with the ancient Peruvians… In fact, for many religions and cultures mountains are a place of God’s revelation (theophany). And that can be easily understood: mountains help us to come out of ourselves, to overcome routine and superficiality, looking for the highest level of our personal conscience. And it’s precisely there, in the highest level of our conscience, that appears as a presence that cannot be expressed in words, but it’s clearly perceived as very real and authentic.
Jesus, on his side, used to go quite often to the mountain, alone or with the disciples, reaching, as the son of Mary, the highest level of conscience and communion with the Infinite Love; such an experience has become an extraordinary gift also for us, his disciples and brethren. Following his steps, we need also to climb continuously the mountain of our conscience, with the help of a place which invites us to overcome routine, noise and superficiality.

2) Adoration and doubt
Confronted with Jesus, identified “on the mountain” as the Son of God, the disciples experience a double movement of adoration and doubt. On one side, they feel the need to prostrate themselves and acknowledge the Divine presence in the Master and Friend, because only in adoration we can approach the mystery of God; word do not help and even sometimes they may sound almost like a “blasphemy”, in the sense that no words can contain that reality that one can just glimpse from our deepest conscience. That’s why, together with a sense of joy and adoration, the disciples experience also uneasiness and doubt: they are quite aware that they cannot reach to God and that all or words and concepts are limited and , in a sense, not completely truthful. All our concepts about God are inadequate and must be continuously corrected, with the help of the doubt, which lead us not to “sit” over what we have understood and to be ever open to new insights. God is awaiting us always in front of us on the way of history.

3) The name of God
Different people, cultures and religions, “grope about” for the mystery of God, giving Him different names according their own cultural experience. Israel, on his side, decided rather not to pronounce God’s name, because really no human being can “name” God. When somebody gives a name to something or somebody, somehow, he takes possession and manipulates the “named” object. But God cannot be possessed or manipulated. Nor even Jesus gives a name to God; what he does is to reveal his relationship with God as his Father and his Spirit. And He commands his disciple to go to the world and baptize “in the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit”. When we are baptized, following this mandate, we do not name God, but we are consecrated to become members of that divine “family”. We –and the whole humanity- are called and consecrated to be in communion with this divine mystery of relationships and love.

4) God-communion
The most important religions have reached the idea of a unique God and this is an important step in the history of mankind. But Jesus, from the “mountain” of his human conscience, teaches us that God is unique, but not “single”; not “lonely”, but communitarian. In the same way, we, human beings, created on God’s image, are made to live in communion. None of us is complete; we need to be completed by others before reaching the image of God: Father-Son-Spirit. When somebody denies a member of the community is denying God. To adore God means to welcome Him/Her in the sanctuary of the conscience and, at the same time, in the concrete reality of every human being, in its marvellous singularity and diversity.

Fr. Antonio Villarino, MCCJ