1. God Is Love
2. “I Am Here for You”
3. Our Blood Relative
Introduction by the Celebrant
1. God Is Love
To most of us today’s feast of the Trinity may not be as stirring and touching as Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, yet it sums up all of these. It is simply the feast of one God who shows three loving faces to us. We can call him Father, even “Daddy,” as Jesus said. We can call him our brother in Jesus. We can call him our breath in the Spirit, who is our force and life and love that keeps us alive and moving and building a Church and a world. And if we want to sum up God in one word, we say with St. John: God is love. If God loves us so much we can do no less than love one another.
2. “I Am Here for You.”
To many people God is all too often a far-away God, very distant and vague, a God apparently not easy to approach, but to whom we turn when all else fails. Would that we were more aware of the reality! Our God is near, very close to us. Already in the Old Testament he gave his name as “I am the one who is there [for you],” the God who feels our miseries and our joys. In Jesus, he made himself one of us, a brother, a companion on the road of life. Through the Spirit of love he lives in us and makes us capable of community and love. If we were only aware of all this! Let Jesus awaken us to God’s riches and beauty.
3. Our Blood Relative
Where is God for us? Far away, in his high heaven, and very remote from our everyday life, as someone we fear to make angry? Today, as we celebrate the Blessed Trinity, we honour a God who lives in the community of a covenant relationship with us; that means, a God who makes us like his blood relatives, a God as close to us as a marriage partner, a God who preferred us to his own Son as he let Jesus give his life for us, a God who keeps stirring us through the Spirit with the inspirations of love and tenderness, of compassion and courage. Let this Eucharist be a song of thanksgiving to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
First Reading: God Is the God of People
God, the creator, guided the destiny of his chosen people Israel to show himself as a saving God and to make this beloved people a sign of salvation to all.
1 Reading Deuteronomy 4:32-34, 39-40
Moses said to the people:
“Ask now of the days of old, before your time,
ever since God created man upon the earth;
ask from one end of the sky to the other:
Did anything so great ever happen before?
Was it ever heard of?
Did a people ever hear the voice of God
speaking from the midst of fire, as you did, and live?
Or did any god venture to go and take a nation for himself
from the midst of another nation,
by testing, by signs and wonders, by war,
with strong hand and outstretched arm, and by great terrors,
all of which the LORD, your God,
did for you in Egypt before your very eyes?
This is why you must now know,
and fix in your heart, that the LORD is God
in the heavens above and on earth below,
and that there is no other.
You must keep his statutes and commandments that I enjoin on you today,
that you and your children after you may prosper,
and that you may have long life on the land
which the LORD, your God, is giving you forever.”
Responsorial Psalm 33:4-5, 6, 9, 18-19, 20, 22
R. (12b) Blessed the people the Lord has chosen to be his own.
Upright is the word of the LORD,
and all his works are trustworthy.
He loves justice and right;
of the kindness of the Lord the earth is full.
R. Blessed the people the Lord has chosen to be his own.
By the word of the LORD the heavens were made;
by the breath of his mouth all their host.
For he spoke, and it was made;
he commanded, and it stood forth.
R. Blessed the people the Lord has chosen to be his own.
See, the eyes of the LORD are upon those who fear him,
upon those who hope for his kindness,
To deliver them from death
and preserve them in spite of famine.
R. Blessed the people the Lord has chosen to be his own.
Our soul waits for the LORD,
who is our help and our shield.
May your kindness, O LORD, be upon us
who have put our hope in you.
R. Blessed the people the Lord has chosen to be his own.
Second Reading: The Spirit Makes Us God’s Children
Through the Holy Spirit of God in us, we know that we are children of the Father in heaven and called with God’s Son, the Risen Christ, to be heirs to a future world.
2 Reading Romans 8:14-17
Brothers and sisters:
For those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.
For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear,
but you received a Spirit of adoption,
through whom we cry, “Abba, Father!”
The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit
that we are children of God,
and if children, then heirs,
heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ,
if only we suffer with him
so that we may also be glorified with him.
Alleluia Revelations 1:8
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Glory to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit;
to God who is, who was, and who is to come.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel: In the Name of Father, Son and Spirit
We are the missionary people of God, baptized in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. We come from God, and with Christ alive among us we have to lead the world to God.
Gospel Matthew 28:16-20
The eleven disciples went to Galilee,
to the mountain to which Jesus had ordered them.
When they all saw him, they worshiped, but they doubted.
Then Jesus approached and said to them,
“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,
teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.
And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age.”
Commentary:
Almost the whole world, it seems, is now familiar with Roublev’s famous icon of the Trinity. I already quoted a short passage from Evdokimov’s meditation on this icon (see March 24). Here is another:
“Gazing at the three faces raises the question, ‘Who are they? What are they saying?’ and we, in our silence, can perceive something of this secret. The heads leaning towards one another can be seen from a distance—it looks as if they cannot abide being apart at all—each one is there only for the other.… Each one of them is giving himself to the others, defenceless before the other. That is why their faces are full of an infinite tenderness, the tenderness that is without resistance before what the other offers or asks.
And what if in face of humankind they are in this same attitude of total non-resistance, vulnerability and defenceless tenderness…?
In the background, shapes can only just be seen, as if hidden in the golden light: a mountain, a tree, a house. Why not just the three Persons alone? The great wind which returns from the Spirit to the Father through the Son is drawing the landscape after it by its irresistible force. The mountain and the trees are bent in same wind. The great Liturgy which they celebrate among themselves eternally and for evermore, sweeps all creation up in the rhythm of its dance.”
Blessing
Through our baptism
in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit,
God has become our God;
he has made our destiny his own
and his life ours.
May he always be near to us and bless you all:
the Father, whose sons and daughters we are,
the Son who is our brother and Saviour,
the Holy Spirit who lives in us. R/ Amen.
Let us go in peace and be near to those around us as God is near to us.
R/ Thanks be to God.