THE GRACE OF THE LORD JESUS CHRIST, THE LOVE OF GOD AND THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE HOLY SPIRIT

Holy Trinity 2020

Readings for Year A: Exodus 34:4-9; II Corinthians 13:11-13; John 3:16-18

We often begin Mass by saying, “The grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all”.  This echoes St Paul’s greeting to the Corinthians in our second reading today.  Today we give praise and thanks to the God revealed to us through the events we have been celebrating over the last few months.  God is revealed to us as Father, Son and Holy Spirit and it is in the name of the Trinity that we begin every prayer we make. 

 What does our faith reveal about the Trinity and God’s relationship with the world?  This is summed up in the today’s Gospel where Jesus tells Nicodemus that, “God so loved the world so much, that he gave his only Son” and that, “God sent his Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that through him the world might be saved”. 

 St Ignatius of Loyola has a famous meditation in the Spiritual Exercises where he paints a picture of the Trinity looking down at the world.  It is a world of suffering, a world without hope.  The response of the Trinity is not to reject the world and start all over again as in the story of Noah and the flood.  It is not to simply “put it right”, simply make things different.  The Gospel tell us God loved the world.  The response of the Trinity is one of love.  The second person of the Trinity enters into the world, becomes part of it, shares our life.  Not only that but he shares it to the full, experiencing the reality of suffering and death on the cross.  Through the death and resurrection of the Christ our world and our understanding of it is transformed.  The Holy Spirit enables us to share that Good News about our world and God’s love for it with those around us, by what we say and what we do. 

 It took the Church several centuries to come to the understanding of the nature of the Trinity which we express when we recite the Creed.  That was necessary for us to avoid worshiping something less that God, those various, deceptively simpler, heresies of the early centuries of the Church.  Of course, we also need to remember that no formula can fully express the nature of God.  God is God, not some object in our world that we can grasp with our understanding.  However, important as such theological formulae are, what is most important for us is to grasp the reality of God’s love expressed in the Gospel.   

 One of the challenges of our present time is to grasp that love of God.  We can find ourselves wishing God had somehow made the world different.  A world without harmful viruses, earthquakes, floods, droughts or those other things people we see people experiencing at the moment.  A world without division, hatred or violence.  That would be a magic, fantasy world, not the world of nature created by God, not the world God loves.  It would not be a world for which God could show his love by becoming part of, by sharing in its reality. 

 Let us ask to be able to see our world, with all it contains, with that loving gaze of the Trinity which St Ignatius imagines.  Let us give thanks for that revelation of God, Father, Son and Spirit, in the death and resurrection of Jesus and the coming of the Holy Spirit.  Let us give thanks that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son and ask that we might reflect that same self-sacrificing generosity in showing our love for the people and the world God made. 

 Fr Chris Pedley S.J.