Fr Columba McCann OSB
A few weeks ago I looked at our notice board and saw that I was down to preach on Trinity Sunday. I said, ‘Just my luck! I get to preach on the most mysterious aspect of our Christian faith – the Holy Trinity!’ Because the mystery of God is totally beyond our comprehension. Trying to comprehend God is like trying to fit the entire ocean into a little bucket. And St Augustine said that, if you think you have an understanding of God, then it’s not God. Nonetheless, God does want to be known, very much so!
Moses pleaded with God: ‘Let me see your face!’. God’s response was: no, you won’t be able for it, but I will give you something – I will give you an intuition of who I really am. And so, as we have in today’s reading, the Lord passed before Moses and proclaimed, ‘The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.’ Another translation of the same Hebrew words speaks of ‘a God of tenderness and compassion’. When we look at the vast mystery of the universe, the amazing wonder of biology, the mystery of reality at a sub-atomic level, isn’t it extraordinary to think that, pulsating at the heart of it all, is tenderness, compassion, steadfast love and faithfulness…
Moses however moves this beautiful language into very concrete territory: we are a headstrong people, he says. We have complained and bickered and refused to believe, but if your tenderness, compassion, steadfast love and faithfulness towards us are real, please be with us and adopt us as your own. Maybe each of us could issue a similar plea to God; each of us knows the ways in which we seem undeserving of such special treatment, but we can invite God’s love in nonetheless, with the absolute certainty that we will get a positive response.
Moses’ request was answered by God, centuries later, in a way that went beyond his wildest imaginings. God decided to be with his people by becoming one of them, and here the Trinitarian life of God begins to spill out openly into the world. The only-begotten Son becomes human. The tenderness, compassion, steadfast love and faithfulness of God become flesh in our world. God adopts us as his own by becoming one of us!
In the life of Jesus we see tenderness towards the sick; compassion towards all the sinners who flocked to him; love so steadfast that he would rather die than withdraw it; faithfulness even towards those who killed him, as he forgave them. Jesus the only begotten Son of God reflects the one who begot him, referred to as the ‘Father’ in Christian tradition, even though this one is beyond male or female. ‘Whoever has seen me sees the Father’ Jesus says; whoever sees me sees the mysterious one who begot me from before the beginning of time. I come from him; I am his image.
The tenderness, compassion, steadfast love and faithfulness that came into the world are a divine life that cannot be killed or contained, and so the risen Jesus breathes his Spirit upon his disciples; divine love spreads like wildfire across the Roman empire and has continued spreading ever since. Jesus proclaims himself the vine, and we the branches, and we could say that the Holy Spirit is the sap that flows from him to us, so that we in turn bear fruit of tenderness, compassion, steadfast love and faithfulness.
I remember the story of a man, a number of decades ago, who was really grappling with this idea of the Holy Spirit. For him it was just an idea and he wanted to have a more real sense of what it meant to speak of the Holy Spirit. One day, on a bus, he pleaded with God to give him some sense of what the Holy Spirit was all about. Suddenly, without warning, he was filled with an overwhelming feeling of love for everyone on the bus, even though they were total strangers. A God
of tenderness, compassion, steadfast love and faithfulness. Today’s feast of the Holy Trinity is not about trying to squeeze our brains to understand how you get three into one, or one into three. It’s an invitation to enter into God’s love, which is the Holy Spirit, breathed out upon us by Christ the only begotten Son of God, God from God, light from light, true God from true God. And the best way to enter into that feast of love, a way that surpasses all others, is to do what we are just about to do, to celebrate the Holy Eucharist at this altar.
At this altar we will pray to God the Father, asking him to send the Holy Spirit to transform the bread and wine, so that sharing in them, we become one body, one spirit in Christ his Son. We can actually receive God’s tenderness, compassion, steadfast love and faithfulness into our hands and our bodies so that we may live in turn the life of the Holy Trinity.