The Depth of the Riches, Wisdom and Knowledge of the Trinitarian God, Holy Trinity Sunday (EF), May 30, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Saint Agnes Church, Manhattan
Sunday of the Most Holy Trinity, Extraordinary Form
May 30, 2021
Rom 11:33-36, Matt 28:18-20

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• Today we celebrate the feast of who God is. 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 on who we’re called to be made in His image and likeness.
• “The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity,” we read in a very important paragraph in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “is the central mystery of Christian faith and life” (CCC 234).  It’s the central mystery, note, not just with regard to what we believebut 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 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 helps us to understand the commandments. 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.” 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. The teaching on the Trinity is not meant be some footnote on a Christian life, but a central part. With wonder, we’re called to say as St. Paul did in today’s epistle, “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!” and we want to plumb that depth! The Christian life is meant to be a Trinitarian life. Your life, my life, is meant to be a Trinitarian life.
• And so the question we must ponder today is: How do we live a Trinitarian life?
• We certainly are helped to live this reality liturgically, although sometimes we can fail to recognize it. This whole Mass, for example, is lived in communion with the Trinity. We began this Mass in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. At the end of it we will receive the blessing of Father, Son and Holy Spirit and the commission, “Ite, missa est,”  an abbreviation of Christ’s valedictory command in today’s Gospel, “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to observe everything” that Jesus has commanded us. Everything we do and say during the 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. In the middle of Mass, we loudly proclaim that we have grounded our lives in the mystery of the Trinity, as we proclaim together with the 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.”
• Just like the Mass, our whole life is meant to begin and end in the name of the Blessed Trinity and be a profession of the faith we proclaim together. Our spiritual life begins when a minister of God makes us God’s child and a temple of His presence by baptizing us, “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” To be baptized is to be submerged, to enter into, to be inundated in the “name” not “names” of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It is to enter into his life. The Trinitarian indwelling begins right then. At the end of our life, a priest, in the prayers after the anointing, will say, “Depart from this life, 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 descended over you.” Between these two extremes — birth and death — our whole earthly existence is meant to be lived explicitly within the life of the Blessed Trinity: in the name of the Trinity spouses are united in holy matrimony; in the name of the Trinity, priests and deacons are ordained and consecrated for God’s service; in the name of the Trinity, our sins are forgiven. Our whole Christian existence develops in the company of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit: the three Persons are with us, they walk each step of life with us — and when we’re in the state of grace, they do so on the inside! God makes us his dwelling place on earth. He wants to abide in us and have us abide in him. Few of us, however, recognize this accompaniment. We are like the disciples on the road to Emmaus who, even though they have walked several miles with Jesus, never recognized him until the end.
• In order to recognize God dwelling within us, two things must grow. First, our prayer must grow. St. John Paul II wrote in his 2001 pastoral plan for the third Christian millennium (Novo Millennio Ineunte), “Learning [the] Trinitarian shape of Christian prayer and living it fully, above all in the liturgy … but also in personal experience, is the secret of a truly vital Christianity.” For our life as Christians to come fully alive, we must learn how to pray in the Trinity, how to pray to the Father through with and in Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit. Prayer is possible because, as the future Pope Benedict once wrote, God is the eternal logos or conversation. Prayer is ultimately not an exchange of ideas or words but of persons and the Blessed Trinity is a tripersonal dialogue. When the Son of God took on our human nature, humanity was mysteriously taken up into that conversation. The work of the Holy Spirit in baptism, in the Sacraments and beyond brings you and me personally into that conversation, and the Holy Spirit does that work in Christ’s Mystical Body, the Church. The upshot of that Trinitarian work is that by the Holy Spirit we can cry out, as St. Paul says in his letter to the Romans, “Abba, Father,” with the confidence of much beloved sons and daughters.
• But prayer must never be separated from life. As the Catechism says, we’re called to live as we pray, to put into practice what Triune God has come to reveal to us and make possible. We must livethe “Trinitarian shape of Christian prayer … in personal experience.” And so this Trinitarian Life that is nourished by the Sacraments and experienced in personal prayer is meant to overflow into our entire existence, which is meant to be an existence made prayer, or a life made Trinitarian. 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 and become fully ourselves, who have been created by Him in his image and likeness.
• What is the Trinitarian shape of Christian life? It’s first a life of communion. That’s why Jesus prayed so hard on Holy Thursday that his disciples might be one, as he and the Father are one in the Holy Spirit. To live according to our having been made in the image of the Trinity is to live for communion, with God and with others. We know that there are many who are sowers of division, who always contrast themselves to others they criticize, who label and put people into different camps, right/left, rich/poor, young/old, black/white, male/female, blue/red, trad/progressive, Israeli/Palestinian, you name it. We Christians, if we live according to our Trinitarian image, must live differently. Especially at a time in our culture in which divisions are so much out in the open, Christians as individuals and together as the Church must become signs of communion and instruments of unity. If people want to see the loving union that exists in God all they should need to do is to look at the way any two Christians love each other, any two parishioners of a Catholic parish, any two students at a Catholic School or religious education program, any two members of a Catholic family. This is obviously a tall order and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. But we also shouldn’t pretend this is some type of unreachable standard that we’re excused even to try to obtain. To seek this type of communion with others doesn’t mean to sacrifice the truth for the sake of a lowest common-denominator “Can’t we all just get along?,” live and let live, kind of lifestyle. But it does mean making the choice to choose to find the good more than the bad, to praise more than criticize, to turn toward rather than turn away, to pray for others rather than to spurn, to forgive more than to hold grudges. This is so important to Jesus that he once said that he if we come to the altar but recognize our brother has something against us, to go first to be reconciled with our brother before offering our gift. Jesus came to reconcile all things in himself and if we are truly his followers, we will do everything we can to try to bring about communion. And the Holy Spirit’s principal work is to make this communion with God and others possible, if we cooperate.
• The second way our Christian life takes on a Trinitarian shape is by loving as God loves. As St. John wrote in his first letter, “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 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 (or “spirated”) a third person, the Holy Spirit (“Sacred Breath”). The Persons of the Trinity exist in an eternal communion of persons in love, in which the three persons exist in one mutual, united, interpersonal 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. We see this image reflected in the way he 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 human person made in God’s image: 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 a loving communion of persons. This image of God as communion is meant to be reflected in the family, in the Church, and in society. And each of us, on this 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 selfishly, egocentrically and individualistically.
• The way we best prepare for heaven is by entering into that type of communion of love here on earth and we do that, first, by God’s help in the liturgy, as we pondered earlier. This Trinity Sunday is a chance for us, once again, to hear God calling us and helping us to live up to our dignity as Christians, to become one just as Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one, and enter more deeply into the joy-filled communion with Him and with others. Today we thank God Father-Son-and-Holy-Spirit for the gift and calling to that communion of love, and ask him to strengthen us to respond to the help he gives 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, “Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end!” Amen.

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