Homily for Trinity Sunday
Collect
June 15, 2025
The Fountains, Tuckahoe,
N.Y.
St. Francis Xavier, Bronx
Our Lady of the Assumption,
Bronx
 |
| The Holy Trinity (St. James Church, Antwerp) |
God has made known to us
his wondrous mystery. In part, we have
to say.
It truly is a mystery that
God is one God yet 3 Persons. We can’t
possibly understand that core of our Christian faith, the faith we profess
every week: “I believe in God, the
Father Almighty. I believe in Jesus
Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God. I
believe in the Holy Spirit.”
The greatest Christian
theologians, such as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, have struggled to
understand the Holy Trinity, but really, we can’t understand or explain the
mystery. We can only believe that God
has revealed it to us.
You may think, well, that
makes no sense. How can I believe
something so incomprehensible? I respond: I believe you are deeply, passionately in
love with your spouse, or if you’re single you have such a hope for your
future, or if you’re widowed you had such an experience. Can you explain that? Do you understand why you have that feeling
for one person and not someone else? In
the depths of your heart, it’s a mystery.
And it’s true.
Our prayer notes that we
know God because he sent into the world the Word of truth and the Spirit of
sanctification.
The Word of truth is God
the Son, the Word personified as eternal Wisdom in our 1st reading (Prov
8:22-31), the Word of God made flesh in Jesus of Nazareth.
We have some understanding
of truth. There’s mathematical truth,
e.g., 2+2 will always, everywhere = 4, [and the angles of a triangle will
always, everywhere = 180ยบ].[1] There’s scientific truth like the law of
gravity. If Isaac Newton had been
sitting under an apple tree at the South Pole (not that he’d have found a tree
there), when that apple separated from the tree it wouldn’t have fallen off the
bottom of the earth and floated into space; it still would have conked him in
the head because gravity truly applies everywhere in our atmosphere. [Einstein’s famous E=mc2 is true
whether I understand it or not (and I don’t).]
Because the laws of physics are true, we were able to land men on the
moon and aspire to get to Mars.
The order in the universe
demonstrates the truth that Someone intelligent created it; we call that
Someone the Creator or the Supreme Being or God. Nothing can’t create something.
That Someone also put into
our hearts a moral instinct. We know
killing an innocent person is wrong. We
know taking someone else’s belongings is wrong.
We know that we owe respect to our parents.
God has gone further,
however, in making truth known. He has
revealed to us thru his Word, thru Jesus Christ, that he loves us and that he
created us for love and happiness.
That’s true for every human being, everyone created in the image of God
(cf. Gen 1:27), regardless of who you are, where you come from, what color your
skin is. God also reveals thru Jesus that
sin—our all-too-common experience—disrupts and destroys our happiness, but that
forgiveness is ours thru the death and resurrection of Christ, regardless of whatever
we may have done, provided only that we let the grace of Jesus touch us.
We know that because
Jesus, God’s living Word, taught it and because the Father sent us the Holy
Spirit, “the Spirit of truth,” to guide us “to all truth” (John 16:13), help us
remember what Jesus has revealed to us, and guide how we live.
In his autobiography,
titled Hope, Pope Francis tells a little story about an old woman he met
at a penance service in Buenos Aires while he was an auxiliary bishop. She assured him, “The Lord forgives everyone.
If the Lord did not forgive everyone, the world would not exist.” He comments to us, his readers: “She could
not have been wiser if she had studied at the Gregorian University. For hers was the wisdom given by the Holy
Spirit: the inner wisdom that is open to God’s mercy.”[2]
God also sent to the human
race the Spirit of sanctification, that is, the Spirit of holiness. The Spirit makes us holy, which is the
literal meaning of “sanctify”—to make holy.
Holiness isn’t something we can do on our own—as you well know. But the Holy Spirit of God can do that. Christ acts to forgive our sins thru the
Spirit, as we heard when Jesus appeared to his disciples on Easter nite and
breathed the Holy Spirit upon them for the forgiveness of sins.
In confession, have you
ever listened to the beautiful words of absolution the priest speaks to you
after you confess and he gives you a penance?
“God the Father of mercies, thru the death and resurrection of Christ,
has poured forth the Holy Spirit for the forgiveness of sins,” and he then
pronounces the words of forgiveness.
What a wonderful gift God the Father gives us thru Jesus and the Holy
Spirit: forgiveness! mercy!
and thus, holiness! Holiness is
nothing but being in God’s grace.
When we die, only one
thing will matter: have we allowed the
grace of God to wash away our sins and make us holy? [Imagine this: Aaron Judge comes to bat, and the pitcher
wants to give him an intentional walk.
Judge says, “No, I refuse the walk,” and goes back to the dugout. What happens?
He’ll be declared out, of course. Thru the Spirit of sanctification, God wants
to walk us into heaven; he won’t send anyone to hell, but he can’t
prevent us from refusing his offer of heaven, of grace, of holiness.]
“We have peace with God
thru our Lord Jesus Christ,” St. Paul writes (Rom 5:1). “The love of God has been poured out into our
hearts thru the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (5:5). May we allow God’s peace and love to rule our
hearts and make us holy.
No comments:
Post a Comment