Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit
1. God Is Love
2. “I Am Here for You”
3. Our Blood Relative
Introduction
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 thanks 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: Proverbs 8:22-31
Thus says the wisdom of God: “The LORD possessed me, the beginning of his ways, the forerunner of his prodigies of long ago; from of old I was poured forth, at the first, before the earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no fountains or springs of water; before the mountains were settled into place, before the hills, I was brought forth; while as yet the earth and fields were not made, nor the first clods of the world. “When the Lord established the heavens I was there, when he marked out the vault over the face of the deep; when he made firm the skies above, when he fixed fast the foundations of the earth; when he set for the sea its limit, so that the waters should not transgress his command; then was I beside him as his craftsman, and I was his delight day by day, playing before him all the while, playing on the surface of his earth; and I found delight in the human race.”
Responsorial Psalm: Ps 8:4-5, 6-7, 8-9
R. (2a) O Lord, our God, how wonderful your name in all the earth!
When I behold your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars which you set in place —
What is man that you should be mindful of him,
or the son of man that you should care for him? R.
You have made him little less than the angels,
and crowned him with glory and honor.
You have given him rule over the works of your hands,
putting all things under his feet. R.
All sheep and oxen,
yes, and the beasts of the field,
The birds of the air, the fishes of the sea,
and whatever swims the paths of the seas. R.
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: Rom 5:1-5
Brothers and sisters: Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith to this grace in which we stand, and we boast in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we even boast of our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, and endurance, proven character, and proven character, hope, and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
Alleluia cf. Revelation 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 John 16:12-15
Jesus said to his disciples: “I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now. But when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to all truth. He will not speak on his own, but he will speak what he hears, and will declare to you the things that are coming. He will glorify me, because he will take from what is mine and declare it to you. Everything that the Father has is mine; for this reason I told you that he will take from what is mine and declare it to you.”
Commentary
Almost the whole world, it seems, is now familiar with Roublev’s famous icon of the Trinity. “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, defenseless 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 defenseless 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 Savior,
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.