Holy Trinity Sunday (C), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, June 11, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for Holy Trinity Sunday, Year C, Vigil
June 11, 2022

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us as we celebrate Trinity Sunday.
• In the Gospel we’ll hear, Jesus will say to us, “I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now. But when he comes, the Spirit of Truth, he will guide you to all truth.” Jesus goes on to say that just as he has given us what he has received from the Father, so the Holy Spirit will give us what he has received from Jesus. The Holy Spirit, whose outpouring on Pentecost we celebrated last Sunday, will guide us not only to truths but into the most important truth of all, the very truth of who God is.
• “The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity,” we read in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “is the central mystery of Christian faith and life.” It’s the core mystery not just with regard to what we believe but how we live. The Catechism goes on to say why: “It is the mystery of God in himself. It is therefore the source of all the other mysteries of faith, the light that enlightens them. It is the most fundamental and essential teaching in the ‘hierarchy of the truths of faith.’” The Holy Spirit seeks to guide us into this truth at the top of the hierarchy and to help us to understand everything else in the faith in light of it. The Catechism paragraph concludes, “The whole history of salvation is identical with the history of the way and the means by which the one true God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, reveals himself to men ‘and reconciles and unites with himself those who turn away from sin” (CCC 234). Therefore, it’s crucial for us as human beings, not to mention believers, to pour ourselves — mind, heart, soul and strength — into the mystery of the Trinity.
• Since the 1300s, the Church has celebrated on the Sunday immediately following Pentecost a feast dedicated to the Holy Trinity, to help all of us focus more explicitly on who God is in his profound mysterious depths, and therefore who we’re called to be made in His image and likeness. Even though every Sunday is in some sense dedicated to God and therefore is in some way Trinity Sunday, the Church has wanted us to have at least one Sunday in which we focus on this central mystery of Christian faith and life, the most fundamental and essential teaching in all the truths of the faith. In an age in which many forget about God, when aggressive secularists are trying to drive even conversation about God from public spaces, it is important for believers to be bold not only in reminding society that God exists, as the Creator of all, but to help reveal him and his nature.
• God has revealed himself as a Trinity, a loving communion, one God in three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. He’s not a distant life force. He’s not an arbitrary omnipotent despot. As St. John wrote in his first letter, “God is love” (1 John 4:16), a declaration that strongly implies that the one God somehow had to be a Trinity of Persons. For God to be love, he could not have been solitary, because no one can love in a vacuum. In love, there is always one who loves, one who is loved, and the content of their love for each other. God the Father and God the Son, in all eternity, loved each other so much that their love generated (“spirated”) a third person, the Holy Spirit. They exist in an eternal communion of persons in love, in which the three persons exist in mutual self-giving. We, having been made in God’s image and likeness, are created in love and for love. We’re called to live in a communion of persons in love, which is what is meant to be reflection in the family, in the Church, and in society. But created as we are in and for love, we’re called by grace to live mysteriously within the love of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
• This is a reality that we have been livingfor as long as we have been Christian. It began on the day we were baptized “in the name” — meaning in the Trinitarian reality — “of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.” It is something that is meant to continue until the end of our days when another priest will tell us on our deathbed, “Go forth, Christian soul, in the name of God the almighty Father who created you, in the name of Jesus Christ, Son of the living God who suffered for you, in the name of the Holy Spirit, who was poured out upon you. Go forth, faithful Christian.” In between everything we do is supposed to be done in the name of the Trinity: we are supposed to pray in the name of the Trinity, to work in the name of the Trinity, whatever we do in word or in deed to do in the name of the Lord.
• For us to do this, however, we have to cultivate a relationship with each of the persons of the Blessed Trinity and allow that Person to bring us more deeply into relationship with the other Two. What type of relationship do we have with God the Father? Do we really focus on him when we pray the Our Father as Jesus taught us, or do we focus generically on “God”? Are we conscious of what Jesus has revealed about God the Father, and that he cares for us more than for the lilies and the sparrows and will never give us a stone when we ask for bread? What type of relationship do we have with Jesus? Do we listen to him as the Gospel is proclaimed at Mass? Do we approach him with reverence as we prepare to receive Him in Holy Communion? Do we show our love for him, as he said, by keeping his commandments and loving others as he has loved us? Do we try to introduce others to him? What about the Holy Spirit? Do we have a personal relationship with him? Do we pray to him by name? Do we receive his help to pray as we ought, to cry out “Abba!, Father,” to remember what Jesus taught, to set our mind on the things of the Spirit, to live by his gifts producing his fruit, and give witness to the Gospel with tongues of fire? The feast of the Holy Trinity is first and foremost a celebration of the unity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but it is similarly an opportunity for us to ask ourselves whether our relationship with the Trinity takes all three Persons seriously and responds to divine grace to nourish our relationship with each and all.
• In the Mass we are helped to enter more fully into communion with our Trinitarian God. We begin Mass in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. We end it by receiving the blessing of Father, Son and Holy Spirit and are sent forth to glorify God by our life. Everything we do and say during Mass, like it’s meant to be in life, is nothing other than a dialogue between us and the Father, through the person of Jesus Christ, in the light and with the help of the Holy Spirit. The priest greets us all with St. Paul’s words, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.” The Mass helps us enter into God’s grace, love and communion. In the middle of Mass, we loudly proclaim that we have grounded our lives in the mystery of the Trinity, uniting ourselves to the entire Church on earth, in heaven and in Purgatory as we say: “I believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth… I believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God… I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified.” At the end of the Eucharistic Prayer, as we lift up Christ’s Body and Blood to the Father and offer ourselves together with him, the priest on behalf of Christ’s whole mystical body summarizes the fundamental orientation of a Christian life: “Through [Christ], with Him and in Him, O God, Almighty Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and honor is yours, forever and ever.”
• As we prepare for Mass on Holy Trinity Sunday, as the Holy Spirit guides us into the central mystery of Christian faith and life, the most fundamental and essential teaching in all the truths of the faith, who God is in himself, we ask for his help to believe more profoundly in this mystery, to profess it with greater conviction, to celebrate it with greater joy and to live it in deeper communion. “Praise the Holy Trinity! Undivided Unity! Holy God! Mighty God! God Immortal be adored!” Amen.

The Gospel reading on which the homily was based was: 

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