The Most Holy Trinit
Exodus 34: 4-6,
8-9; 2 Corinthians 13: 11-13; John 3:16-18Today is the feast of the Holy Trinity…do I understand what this means? Sometimes I have participated in discussions trying to convince people of the meaning of the Trinity. Yet the most important point about the Trinity is a question: ‘Who taught us about the Trinity?’ It was Jesus…He defined the Trinity as the loving Father, the Son who redeemed and the Holy Spirit who sanctifies. The Father who sent Jesus to share the Father’s deep and unrelenting love for each person; the Son who witnessed that love and proved it and the Holy Spirit who continues each day to send help to each person to be ‘Jesus’…to be love. Why do I want to complicate this in ‘discussions?’
Alice Camille wrote this commentary on today’s Gospel from St. John in Exploring the Sunday Readings: “God so loved the world that He gave His only Son….Whether we believe it or not, we Christians are in the love business. Every morning when you and I get up, in our respective beds, homes, cities, and situations, the only task ahead of us is to love one another. We think our lives are about a million other things: buying this, fixing that, cooking and eating and cleaning up afterwards. We think we’re about work and paying bills, ferrying children to school or elders to doctor appointments. We think life is about the struggle, or the payoff, or the great escape. Yet it’s all about love. We’re here to love, to be loved, to participate in love. Because love really is the answer. And some days we may not like that idea so much. Some days we’re even convinced that love is the problem. At the source of everything, God disagrees. Everything comes from love and makes its way back there in the end.”
The readings today convince each person to stop and to review in their minds their faith history how God is present and how He has interacted with our ancestors in faith and what this tells us about God.
The scene in Exodus picks us the story of the giving of the Ten Commandments to Moses. Exodus 24:15-18: “Then Moses went up on the mountain, and the cloud covered the mountain. The glory of the Lord settled on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it for six days; on the seventh day He called to Moses out of the cloud. Now the appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the sight of the people of Israel. Moses entered the cloud, and went up on the mountain. Moses was on the mountain for forty days and forty nights.” The people knew that Moses had been called by God and that they are God’s people and He is their God. But they got restless: ‘why is Moses taking so long a time; has he forgotten about us; has God forgotten about us; are we to stay in this horrible desert wandering around for the rest of our lives; what kind of God would take us away from the ‘creature comforts’ that we had in Egypt; maybe God doesn’t care about us; let’s call on God ourselves…these sound so familiar at points in my life.
And that is what they did…while Moses was conversing with God from chapters 25 to 31 in Exodus, the people in chapter 32 reacted: “When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered around Aaron, and said to him, ‘Come, make gods for us, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.” So Aaron instructed them to bring him their gold jewelry and they formed these in a mold in an image of a calf…the Golden Calf and proceeded to worship the calf. Moses came down from the Mount with the two tablets of stone containing the Ten Commandments, threw them down, breaking them and then pleaded with the Lord to remember in love His people: “yet pardon our wickedness and sins, and receive us as your own.”…God did.
Today’s passage from Paul to the Corinthians is the conclusion of the so-called ‘Letter of Tears’ where Paul is strongly reprimanding them to change their ways and live in peace…a message for me.
Both passages look at the ‘sins’ of the people and it is a message today for myself and each person to look at our own sins: those of hurting, abusing, anger, hatred, all of the sins that show us living with the idea that I am the only person in the world; and therefore the most important and that I live just for myself. Yet Moses is telling us in Exodus and Paul is repeating this to the Corinthians that it is all about God: how God created us in love and God continually loves each and every person, each and every moment of each and every day. If we say anything else we are complicating the mystery of the Trinity that God is love.
Sunday
Homily Helps expresses
it this way: “So
perhaps we’re the ones who make the mystery of the Trinity so
complex. Maybe we complicate the fundamental essence of God: that
God is love.
a) In today’s Gospel, John teaches Nicodemus and us the
magnitude of God’s love: that God so love the world that the Son
was sent to save us. b) God’s love overwhelms us.
c)
God loves us so much that, as the Creator, God made us in God’s
own image.
d)
God loves us so much that God the Son became one of us to redeem us.
e)
God loves us so much that God the Holy Spirit, remains with us to
sanctify us…
Instead
of trying to reason our way thought the Trinity, we would do much
better trying to appreciate how the Trinity affects us, how it helps
us relate more loosely to God and to one another, and how it helps us
realize how personal and loving God is.”
So I reflect on:- I must spend
some time this week to reflect on how the love of the Father; the
example and love of Jesus and the grace to love the Spirit gives
impacts my life.
- Can I share
with someone else how important God’s love is to me right now and
how it has changed my life?
- If this
opportunity doesn’t present itself, can I take out my prayer
journal and write about God’s love in my life?
Lord make me more aware of Your loving presence in and around me.
No comments:
Post a Comment