Today, 26 May, the Church celebrates with great joy a key mystery of her faith: the solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity.
It was revelation that revealed to us that God is one and three.
Although we are unable to fully understand the Trinitarian doctrine, thanks to God’s aid, we can delve deeper into some of its life-giving features. One of them is its inherent value of communion.
Today’s gospel helps us decisively in this much needed faith exploration. Jesus told his disciples: “I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you” (John 16: 12-15).
Two things surface from this Johaninne pericope. First, true love is communion inasmuch as it is capable of sharing the loving person as a whole to the person that is being loved. Such love originates within the Trinity itself. It was Saint Augustine who aided us enormously to discover this insight precisely when he arrived at this conclusion after thorough reflection on John’s words “God is love” (1 John 4:
10). For the Bishop of Hippo because God is love he is Trinity! In his classic treatise ‘De Trinitate’, Saint Augustine writes: “Love implies one who loves, that which is loved and love itself” (VIII, 10. 14).
Applied to the Trinitarian mystery, it simply means that the Father, the origin and principle of what exists, is the one who loves. The Son is the beloved one. Whereas the Holy Spirit is the love with which the two Divine Persons love each other eternally.
But love is never meant to be kept inside one’s heart without being communicated into concrete acts of solidarity. For that matter, another great Father of the Church, Saint Irenaeus (115-190), skilfully explains how the Blessed Trinity entered into the history of humanity to save it.
"The Church, though dispersed throughout the whole world, even to the ends of the earth, has received from the apostles and their disciples this faith: ... one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all things that are in them; and in one Christ Jesus, the Son of God, who became incarnate for our salvation; and in the Holy Spirit, who proclaimed through the prophets the dispensations of God, and the advents, and the birth from a virgin, and the passion, and the resurrection from the dead, and the ascension into heaven in the flesh of the beloved Christ Jesus, our Lord, and His manifestation from heaven in the glory of the Father ‘to gather all things in one’, and to raise up anew all flesh of the whole human race, in order that to Christ Jesus, our Lord, and God, and Saviour, and King, according to the will of the invisible Father, ‘every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth, and that every tongue should confess; to him, and that He should execute just judgment towards all...’” (Against Heresies X.l).
The Trinity teaches us that true love must necessarily imply self-giving. In the order of Trinitarian love, a loving person surrenders uncompromisingly to God, who is love, and fully complies with his infinite loving designs for the objective good of the beloved person. Jesus said: “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).
St Sergius of Radonezh observed: “Contemplate the Trinity, to defeat the odious division in the world.” Can the diversity in love and unity in diversity of the Blessed Trinity stimulate us to conquer our seemingly irreconcilable differences of race, sex, culture, and way of thinking?
Fr Mario Attard OFM Cap
SAN GWANN