Trinity Sunday, Year A
First Reading: Ex 34:4b-6, 8-9
Second Reading: 2 Cor 13:11-13
Gospel Reading: Jn 3:16-18
This Sunday, we celebrate what the Catechism of the Catholic Church calls “the central mystery” of our faith: that the one God is not one Person, but three.
This is not something we could have discovered for ourselves. It is something that God made clear in the course of his gradual self-revelation to his chosen people, exemplified in two of this Sunday’s Readings.
Everything Catholics believe is related to the Holy Trinity. For example, in the creeds, we say we believe in God the Father, and then mention the doctrines of creation and providence. We say we believe in God the Son, and then mention the doctrines of the Incarnation, the Redemption, the Resurrection, and the Ascension. We say we believe in God the Holy Spirit, and then mention the doctrines about Scripture, the Church, the sacraments, and our own resurrection.
In her doctrine of the Holy Trinity, the Church tells us about God. For example, she explains the claim made throughout the New Testament that God is love. If God were a single Person, the Church could not say this, for love is something that one person has for another person.
The kind of love found in the Holy Trinity is called, in Greek, agape. Agape is love that gives, seeking nothing in return, not even gratitude or love. It is simply and totally the gift of the self to the one who is loved.
St. Augustine suggested that we can think of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit as Lover, Beloved, and Love, or Giver, Recipient, and Gift. First, God is a Lover, he explains: the one who gives God’s self away. Second, he is the Beloved, the one who rejoices in that love and returns it. Third, he is the Gift of that love itself.
We can think of God, then, as an endless, infinite explosion of self-giving. No wonder some of the pagans looked on the sun as God!
However, in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, the Church also tells us about ourselves, for God deliberately made humans in His own image and likeness.
In the first creation account of Genesis, God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Accordingly, “in the divine image he created him; male and female He created them.”
The plural in “us” and “our,” St. Augustine says, implies that “the image of the Trinity was made in man, that in this way man should be the image of the one true God.”
In the second creation account, God created man, but then he said, “It is not good for the man to be alone.” Accordingly, he made a woman, and decreed that “the two shall become as one.”
A human, then, not only images the God who created and rules the world, “but also, and essentially,” the God who is a “divine communion of Persons,” Pope St. John Paul II said in his Theology of the Body.
The human being can be defined as the creature who can love. We are created to be lovers. That is what makes us human: the capacity to give ourselves away in love.
Moreover, God’s plan is to draw us up into the Holy Trinity, so that we participate in his bliss.
“At the heart of the divine act of creation is the divine desire to make room for created persons in the communion of the uncreated Persons” of the Trinity, says the International Theological Commission. “The ultimate end of the whole divine economy” – the Church’s sacraments, through which God dispenses divine life to us – “is the entry of God’s creatures into the perfect unity of the Blessed Trinity,” says the Catechism.
No wonder the Church habitually uses St. Paul’s greeting: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.”