Homily for the Solemnity
of the Holy Trinity
May
26, 2024
Matt
28: 16-20
Rom
8: 14-17
The
Fountains, Tuckahoe
Assumption,
Bronx
St.
Francis Xavier, Bronx
 |
| The Holy Trinity (Hendrik van Balen) |
I’ve heard of a priest who takes his vacation every year at this time—so that he doesn’t have to preach on the Holy Trinity. I did go out camping one nite last week, but as you can see, I came back and am celebrating the Trinity with you.
Many saints and
learned people have tried to explain the Trinity. Even if that were possible, a homily isn’t
the occasion. But we can think about
what that unexplainable doctrine means for us.
The Trinity is a
core Christian belief, brought out not only in the Scriptures like our gospel
today but also in our most basic professions of faith like the Apostles’ Creed. It distinguishes us from Jews, Muslims, and
Unitarians, all of whom honor the one God, creator of the universe, father of
all human beings.
But those faiths
find it shocking and incomprehensible that God should be so personal and so
loving as to enter human history, to assume our flesh, to become our companion,
and to invite us into an intimate relationship with himself.
That’s just what
God did in the Person of Jesus Christ.
Jesus revealed himself as God’s own Son and the Father’s equal: “the Father and I are one” (John 10:30); and
he revealed that the creator God is 3-personed:
Father and Son share a personal Spirit.
In today’s gospel the Son instructed us at the end of his earthly
presence to make disciples and baptize them “in the name of the Father and of
the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matt 28:19), thus bringing us into fellowship
with himself, his Father, and their Spirit.
The Trinity
involves relationship or fellowship. We
can say that God is family, and thru the Holy Spirit Jesus brings us into that
family relationship: “Those who are led
by the Spirit of God are sons of God” (Rom 8:14). Thru the Holy Spirit God has adopted us as his
own children, made us heirs of the kingdom of heaven with Christ, and enabled
us to invoke God as our Abba, our beloved Father (Rom 8:15-17). When we invoke God as our Abba, our Papa, we’re
uttering the same prayer that Jesus taught his disciples (Matt 6:9), which we
pray often including at every Mass; the same prayer he spoke in the Garden of
Gethsemane when he begged his Abba to take away the cup of suffering ahead of
him (Matt 26:39). We’re joined spiritually,
at the core of our existence, with God’s Son and thus with his Father, by the
power of the Holy Spirit whom the Father and the Son bestowed on the Church at
Pentecost, as we heard graphically last Sunday, and bestowed on us when we were baptized.
You may have
noticed that we end every main prayer of the Mass and other sacraments—the
prayer we call the “collect”—by praying “in the unity of the Holy Spirit.” Father and Son are united by their Spirit,
and they live and reign in us the Church, brothers and sisters; we are made a
unity with the Father and the Son by their Spirit and are made one with each
other by the Spirit. As one theologian
expresses this mystery, we “share, with the uncreated Persons of the Trinity
and with one another, a communion of divine life.”[1]
That’s the
communion into which we were baptized and confirmed, the communion we share because
the Spirit of God transforms our bread and wine into the Body and Blood of God
the Son, the communion that’s God’s ultimate plan for us in eternal life.
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