LECTIONARY READINGS
First reading: Proverbs 8:22-31
Responsorial Psalm: Ps 8:44-9
Second reading: Romans 5:1-5
Gospel: John 16:12-15
Link to readings
Probably no feast of the Church’s year presents such terror for preachers as that of the Holy Trinity. The essential thing to keep in mind is that the Christian mystery of the Trinity arises out of a sense of God as an active communion of love – perhaps, at the risk of imposing rather trendy language on God, we could say an “outgoing” community of love.
PERSONAL RELATIONSHIP
The early believers came to understand that in their interaction with Jesus they were being drawn into the unique personal relationship that he enjoyed with the God he termed “Abba, Father”. The death of Jesus did not put an end to this experience. On the contrary, one of the key aspects of the disciples’ experience of the resurrection was a sense of still being grasped within and energised by this relationship between Jesus and the Father. So powerful was this experience that they recognised in it the creative power of God described in the biblical (Old Testament) tradition as the “Spirit” (Gen 1:1-2; Ezek 36:26–37:14). So personal was the experience that, eventually, they came to recognise it as involving a third divine person.
DIVINE COMMUNION OF LOVE
So, without injury to the basic monotheism which Christianity derived from the Jewish faith, the sense of Three Persons in the One God came into being – not as a remote heavenly mystery, let alone an arid theological puzzle, but as a way of expressing the Christian sense of being drawn into the divine communion of love. There they found the impulse and energy to be instruments of the saving outreach of that love into the world.
WISDOM TRADITION
From the start the early Christian Church had to reach for patterns in the Old Testament that provided some kind of foretaste and context for the unprecedented “entry” of the divine into the world in the person of the Word. The “Wisdom” tradition provided this best of all. Wisdom is, of course, an attribute or personal quality of God. But in biblical thought such attributes can in a sense become “detached” from God and portrayed as performing functions in a quasi-independent and personal way. So, in the celebrated passage from Proverbs 8 set down for today’s First Reading, we have a poetic evocation of divine Wisdom as a kind of assistant in God’s work of creation. (“Wisdom” of course is feminine in Hebrew, and the sense may be that of a little princess, who doesn’t so much help with creation but delight in it, as a child will delight in being with her father as he makes beautiful things in his workshop.) What the passage communicates is the sense of a divine being that is both “with God” (see John 1:1) and also “delighting” in being with the human race. So the Christian tradition picks up here a hint of the personal outreach of God involved in the incarnation.
MESSAGE OF HOPE
In the Second Reading, from Romans 5:1-5, Paul is describing the new state that believers find themselves in as result of the redeeming (justifying) action of Christ: “peace with God” and “access to the grace in which we stand”. Believers may still be part of a toiling, suffering world, but suffering is in no way an indication of disfavour on God’s part. On the contrary, it is pregnant with hope because God communicates a sense that those who suffer are grasped by God’s love. Paul expresses this in what is to my mind one of the most attractive sentences that he ever wrote: “Hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (v. 5). By “God’s love” Paul does not primarily mean our love for God (though that should follow) but a felt experience of God’s love for us, communicated through the gift of the Spirit.
As so often in the biblical tradition, Paul speaks of the Spirit in terms of water (“poured out”) – water that refreshes and brings new life (see John 7:37-39). So the Spirit is poured out into our hearts – that is, into the very depth of our being. We can know in our innermost heart that our lives are grasped by God and held in God’s love. This is the essential experience of God as Trinity.
GIFT OF THE SPIRIT
In the Gospel, from John 16:12-15, Jesus looks to the future when he will no longer be physically present to the disciples. He assures them that their privileged sharing in the intimacy of the relationship between himself and the Father will not cease but continue through the gift of the Spirit. The “truth” which the Spirit communicates is truth in the Johannine sense of the definitive revelation of God given to the world in the person of Jesus. The truth is ultimately the revelation that “God is love” (1 John 4:7, 16).