Trinity Sunday (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, May 25, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for Most Holy Trinity Sunday, Vigil
May 25, 2024

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 Trinity Sunday. I am recording this on day six of the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage Seton Route that I am helping to lead from New Haven, Connecticut, to Indianapolis, in anticipation of the first National Eucharistic Congress in 83 years. So I would like to focus in a particular way on the Trinitarian dimension of the Holy Eucharist.
• We know that every Sunday is, in a very real way, 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.
• “The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity,” we read in an incredibly important paragraph in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “is the central mystery of Christian faith and life.” It’s the central mystery, note, 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 mystery of the Trinity enlightens the mystery of Creation, the mystery of Redemption, and 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, including the celebration of the Mass.
• 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 Christian life is meant to be a Trinitarian life. Your life, my life, is meant to be a Trinitarian life.
• How do we live a Trinitarian life?
• We certainly are helped to live this reality liturgically. In the Eucharistic Revival, part of the first pillar of reinvigorating worship is helping everyone to recognize that they at Mass enter into the presence of the Triune God. In the Gospel for this Sunday, Jesus tells us, in his valedictory words immediately before his Ascension, “All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them 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.
• 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. 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. 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 assists 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 [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.” The Mass is not just about our revering and receiving Christ, but what Christ wants to do in us, namely help us as his Bride and Mystical Body glorify God the Father by the power of the Holy Spirit who unites us to each other and to Christ.
• All our prayer, including our personal prayer, is meant to immerse us more deeply in God’s Trinitarian life. Prayer is possible because, as the future Pope Benedict once wrote, God is an eternal 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 Mass, in the other 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, together with Jesus, “Abba, Father,” with the confidence of much beloved sons and daughters.
• But liturgy and prayer should never be separated from life. 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. And so this Trinitarian Life that is emphasized and effectuated by the Sacraments, particularly the Sacrifice of the Mass, 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.
• God is first a Communion and that’s why Jesus prayed so hard on Holy Thursday as part of the first Mass 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 put people into different camps, right/left, republican/democrat, rich/poor, young/old, black/white, male/female, Israeli/Palestinian, you name it. We Christians, if we live according to our Trinitarian image, 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 peace.
• Second, 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 (“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 that not only makes them united but makes them truly one, three persons in one God. 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 said 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 loving communion is meant to be reflected in the family, in the Church, and in society. The image of God is meant to be brought about in the Mass, so that, through Holy Communion and the power of the Holy Spirit, we may be one body, one spirit in Christ. And each of us, on this Trinity Sunday, is summoned to ask whether we really strive to live in a loving communion of persons in God’s image and likeness.
• God who is love loved us so much that he wanted us to share in and spread his love. 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 at a time when our society desperately needs it. It’s a time that, during the Eucharistic Revival, we’re called to ask Jesus to bring about through the awesome gift of himself in the Holy Eucharist. As we approach Mass, we thank Him for the gift and calling to that 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 the homily was based was: 

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