Three Persons In One God
Supernatural Mystery

Homily 05 26 2013
Trinity Sunday C

View the Readings for this day

Today we celebrate one of the Feasts of Devotion, or a Feast of an Idea, coming from the 4th and 5th Centuries.

Since the year 800 in Spain there has been a Mass of the Trinity...and since the year 1,000 there has been the Feast of the Trinity celebrated immediately after Pentecost in France, but it became a part of the Universal Church until the 14th Century. In 1334 Pope John XXII placed it on the universal calendar.

Christian belief in God as trinity is a response to the manner in which God has chosen to make God know the us.

A contemporary theologian, Rosemary Haughton observed: A healthy and living theology must grow out of actual experience.

So too, our experience cannot make ultimate sense without God because our experience drives us continually to new ways to express what God is doing to us.

In order to really bring this feast to life as we celebrate it today, the Trinity must be understood in more than just a conceptual way; a concept can be easily be set aside or be very abstract from our experience.

Each of the readings for today's liturgy invites us to consider our experience of God as the Triune Reconciler of Humanity. We hear of the Father, Son and Spirit in relationship.

We pray a lot with the Sign of the Cross and with reference to the Trinity.

Recently there are people speaking out asking that non-sexist language be used in talking about God. It's hard telling what could happen with this, but it brings us in contact with our questions of who God is.

Our language will always fall short of capturing the reality of God. All the dogmas that we have about God that we believe, those even that are meaningful to us, are formulas to help us.

They are not faith in themselves...but our Eucharistic Celebrations, the Mass contain the possibility for a renewal of life because we reflect our lives against that of Jesus and his own story.

A lot of times we move from those things that frighten and paralyze us or which weigh us down, when our problems are over-whelming, and it is so easy to see the darkness.

But God does work in our lives and in our experience.

This feast is celebrated each year on the Sunday following Pentecost. The early Church who experienced God in these different manifestations, formulated the belief of the 3 persons in one God.

As we celebrate the Feast of the Trinity each of our experiences of the Trinity is different. Some of us relate more to one person than the others.

The shamrock, a kind of clover, is a leguminous herb that grows in marshy places. St Patrick, the missionary patron saint of Ireland, used the shamrock to explain the Holy Trinity.

The story goes that one day his friends asked Patrick to explain the mystery of the Trinity.

He looked at the ground and saw shamrocks growing amid the grass at his feet. He picked one up one of its trifoliate leaves and asked if it were one leaf or three.

Patrick's friends couldn't answer - the shamrock leaf looked like one but it clearly had three parts.

Patrick explained to them: "The mystery of the Holy Trinity - one God in three persons: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit - is like this, but more complex and unintelligible."

St. Cyril, the teacher of the Slavs, tried to explain the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity using sun as an example. He said, "God the Father is that blazing sun. God the Son is its light and God the Holy Spirit is its heat - but there is only one sun. So there are three Persons in Holy Trinity but God is One and indivisible."

St. John Maria Vianney used to explain Holy Trinity using lighted candles and roses on the altar and water in the cruets. "The flame has color, warmth and shape. But these are expressions of one flame. Similarly the rose has color, fragrance and shape. But these are expressions of one reality, namely, rose. Water, steam and ice are three distinct expressions of one reality. In the same way one God revealed Himself to us as Father, Son and the Holy Spirit."

A priest went into a second-grade classroom of the parish school and asked, "Who can tell me what the Blessed Trinity means?" A little girl lisped, "The Blethed Twinity meanth there are thwee perthonth in one God." The priest, taken aback by the lisp, said, "Would you say that again? I don't understand what you said." The little girl answered, "Y'not thuppothed to underthtand; i'th a mythtewy."

jjl

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