The Church gives us this great feast of the Holy Trinity, the central tenet of our faith. The light of Easter is still with us as Pope Francis reminded us and this feast ring a bell telling us that God is not something vague and vaporous; he is concrete and not an abstraction, and has a name: God is Love! This love exists and is seen within him, in the Communion of Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, in a relationship that far exceeds anything we can imagine. This love is not something sentimental or emotive, but the love of the Father that is the origin of every life, the love of the Son who dies on the cross and rises, the love of the Holy Spirit, who renews man and the world. Experiencing that God is love changes everything because it shows us the way to love, to give ourselves to others, as Christ gave himself to us and became one of us.
The Trinity is not the product of human reason. It is the face with which God reveals himself to us, not from the heights of heaven, but walking with us. Jesus reveals the Father and promised us the Spirit. The first reading in today’s Mass from the Book of Deuteronomy is amazing in its concreteness. Moses is speaking to the people and asks them, ‘Did anything so great ever happen before? Did a people ever hear the voice of God, and live? Did any god ever go and take a nation from himself, from the middle of another nation, as he did for you in Egypt? This is why we can say…the Lord is our God and there is no other.’ This is a beautiful witness, and something new. The Jews until this point said that Yahweh was the strongest of the gods, now they say: there are no other gods, only Him.
And when we have a personal relationship to God like Moses does in this reading, we have the Spirit of Christ, the same Spirit that hopefully came to us on Pentecost. And therefore we no longer live in the flesh, meaning no more lust, no idols of money, no rivalries, or jealousies, bad temper and quarrels, etc. We live as different people, in peace.
At the final sending of the apostles in Matthew’s (28: 16-20) gospel Jesus promises that he will be with us always, God is with us, Emmanuel. The authority that he has in heaven and earth is given to us, and he sends us! Go to all the nations, and baptize them, help them to have this experience of love that exists in the Trinity.
God is faithful to his promise and is with us in every Eucharist, in every gathering of two or three in his name, until the end of time. So why are we afraid and anxious and have our doubts? Because we are haman. Our doubts and our weaknesses can lead us to the God and make it possible for us to experience the communion that exits in the Trinity. This is what we are celebrating on this feast of the Holy Trinity, let us not miss it.