Holy Trinity Sunday, Conversations with Consequences Podcast, June 3, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for Holy Trinity Sunday, Vigil
June 3, 2023

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 privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us on Holy Trinity Sunday.
• Every Sunday is, in a very real sense, dedicated to God and therefore every Sunday really is Trinity Sunday. But 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.
• Often when you ask people what is the most important teaching in Christianity, you’ll get various answers. Some will say the Incarnation or the Resurrection. Others will say “Love one another as I have loved you,” or “Whatever you did to the least of my brothers, you did to me.” But the top of the hierarchy of Christian teachings is the revelation of the Blessed Trinity. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, in an incredibly important paragraph, emphasizes, “The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of Christian faith and life.”
• The teaching about the Trinity is what separates Christians from adherents of every other religion. Ancient Greek and Roman pagans were polytheists, believing in many different gods, often at war with each other. Buddhists are non-theistic agnostics, who organize their life around a moral philosophy and discipline. Hindus are pantheistic. Jews and Muslims are monopersonal monotheists. We Christians, on the other hand, are Trinitarian monotheists. That’s why the Catechism stresses that the mystery of the Trinity is the central teaching of Christian faith and life. It 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 mystery of the Trinity enlightens the mystery of Creation, the mystery of Redemption, the Mystery of Sanctification. It illumines every page of Sacred Scripture. It sheds light on the four last things. It reveals what is at the root of all of the sacraments and prayer.
• 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). Underneath the history of the world, underneath our own personal history from the moment of our conception in our mother’s womb, until now and beyond, has developed within this mystery of the Blessed Trinity. Therefore, it’s crucial for us as human beings, not to mention believers, to pour ourselves into the mystery of the Trinity. This means not just pouring our minds, but our heart, soul, strength and entire existence, into this reality. The Catechism underlines that the mystery of the Trinity is not just the central mystery of Christian faith but also Christian life. The Christian life — your life, my life — is meant to be a Trinitarian life.
• And so as we prepare to enter into the consequential conversation the Second Person of the Trinity wants to have with us this Sunday, we need to consider how we live a Trinitarian life.
• We certainly are helped to live this reality liturgically, although sometimes we fail to recognize it. This whole Mass, for example, is lived in communion with the Trinity. We begin Mass in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. We will end it by receiving the blessing of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Everything we do and say during this Mass 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 from the second reading of Trinity Sunday, “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 is supposed to help us to 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 Him [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.”
• But liturgy should never be separated from life. The Catechism says we’re called to live as we pray, to put into practice what the Triune God has come to reveal to us and make possible. And so this Trinitarian Life that is emphasized and effectuated by the Sacraments is meant to overflow into our entire life. Jesus has come to reveal to us who God is so that not only we may come to know him and experience his life and love throughout our daily existence into eternity but so that we can also grow to know ourselves, who have been created by Him in his image and likeness.
• John wrote in his first letter something about our Trinitarian God so simple yet so theologically deep. He said, “God is love” (1 John 4:16). This statement strongly implies that the one God somehow had to be a Trinity of Persons. For God to be love, he could not have been monopersonal, 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” is the technical theological term) a third person, the Holy Spirit. They exist in an eternal communion of persons in love, an eternal mutual self-giving that flows from and reinforces their interpersonal unity, three persons in one God. This love who God is overflows, as we see in creation and in redemption, as we will hear in this Sunday’s Gospel, when St. John tells us, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.”
• Made in God’s image and likeness, we are created in love and for love. We’re called to live in a communion of persons in love. Jesus prayed on Holy Thursday that we might be one just as He and the Father are one so that the world may know that God the Father sent the Son and loves us just as much as he loves the Son. The whole revelation of God as a Trinity is meant to be revealed by the communion of love among Christians as the image and likeness of God. This image is meant to be reflected in marriage, in the way God created man and woman to exist in a communion of persons in love so strong that their love for each other can actually generate a third person, similar to what we see in the Holy Trinity. Saint John Paul II used to say that this is the deepest thing that can be said about the imago Dei: we are in God’s image most not by our reason and our capacity freely to choose, but by our nature and call to live in an existential loving communion of persons. In the image of God, God created not a him or a her but a “them.” This image of God as loving communion is meant to be reflected above all in marriage and the family, but is meant to overflow into the Church and through the Church into society. Each of us, as we approach Trinity Sunday, is summoned to ask whether we really strive to live in as a loving communion of persons in God’s image and likeness, or whether we live individualistically, egocentrically and selfishly. Especially at a time in our culture in which divisions are so much out in the open, something manifested not in our widening political and social polarization, Christians as individuals and together as the Church are called to become signs of communion and instruments of peace.
• If we are going to live in the image of the Trinitarian God who is love, that means we are called to imitate God’s love. We can focus on three different ways. First, God’s love is sacrificial: as the Gospel will remind us, he took on our nature in order to give it so that we might not perish but live forever. We are similarly called to give our lives for others. Second God’s love is other-centered, with each of the persons of the Blessed Trinity speaking of and seeking to do the works of the other. For us, we are called to be focused on God and others more than ourselves. Third, God’s love is merciful, something that extends even to those who oppose him. Similarly our love is supposed to make us merciful like God is merciful. Through all three ways of loving, we become more and more God’s image, chips off the old divine block, capable of giving witness to him in the midst of a world that so often refuses sacrifice and mercy and refuses to prioritize anyone or anything other than oneself. How much our culture, how much even our parishes, need this revelation of the central mystery of Christian faith and life!
• This Trinity Sunday is a chance for us, once again, to hear God calling us to live up to our dignity and enter more deeply into the communion with Him and with others that will bring true joy to our lives in this world and eternal joy in the next. It’s a time for us to receive the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God the Father and the communion of the Holy Spirit, to dwell in it and to let that grace, love and communion overflow. As we prepare for Sunday Mass, it’s a time to thank our Triune God for the gift and calling to that divine communion of love, and ask him for all the help he knows we need so that we might truly be men and women in a communion of love and say, by words and deeds, in this world and forever, “Praise the Holy Trinity! Undivided Unity! Holy God! Mighty God! God Immortal be adored!” Amen!

The Gospel passage on which this brief homily was based was: 

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