Homily for Holy Trinity Sunday – 15 June 2025

Our Christian identity is intimately tied to the Trinity, from the moment of baptism into the name of the Persons of the Trinity, and we make constant references to the Persons of the Trinity in our prayer and liturgy, such as when we make the Sign of the Cross or pray the 'Glory be' or the many trinitarian prayers that make up every Mass we celebrate. We are a people made for the heart of God, who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We are made for a love relationship with this God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in him.

God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, a Trinity. This is a fundamental mystery of the Christian faith, and yet we can never fully comprehend its depth and meaning. God, in his infinite nature, transcends our human language, logic and reason. This should not surprise us or disconcert us. For us finite human beings, a god who was fully within our grasp, simply wouldn't be God. God is necessarily infinitely more than we can ever grasp and understand.

Even so, it would be tragic if this inability to completely grasp the nature of God as a Trinity of Persons were somehow, in our minds and hearts, to make God seem far away or unrelated to us. The complexity of the theological truth and the richness of this mystery must not distance us from an experience of the loving and merciful God. The meaning of the Trinity is utterly opposed to the notion of God being far away. It is precisely in the closeness of God, in God showing himself to us, that we know that God is a Trinity.

Mystery, Love, and Revelation

It might well be said that we can understand something of the Mystery of the Holy Trinity more readily with our hearts than with our minds. Because God has shown himself to us as Trinity, we can know and experience him as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

We say that the Trinity is a central mystery of the Christian Faith. Mystery, in the theological sense, does not mean something that is impossible to know in any respect. It means multi-faceted, inexhaustible in the depth of truth that it carries. It means we only get glimpses at any given time, of this beautiful truth.

Actually, Trinity is just a way of saying God is love. Not only is God loving, not only does God love us and everything that exists, but God is love in himself. The phrase "is love" means that God's very being is structured according to love. St Augustine, in trying to explain the Trinity, said: Love implies one who loves; the object of love; and love itself. In the Trinity, the Father is the one who loves, he is the Lover; the Son is the one who is loved, he is the Beloved; and the Holy Spirit is the love they have for each other.

A God Who Comes Close

Not only is God love in himself, Trinity means that God reaches out to human beings in compassion and love. Think about how close God came to us in taking human nature in Jesus Christ, and in giving us his Spirit to live within us. In coming close to us, God has shown himself to be a Trinity of Persons. So we can say that "Trinity" means that God is a God-for-us. God shows us who he is, and that he is trinitarian, in the course of his reaching out to us.

This reaching out to us is expressed in the theological maxim that we considered last Sunday for Pentecost: that the Father sent his Son that we might be given the Spirit. In this maxim, we see again in a pithy way, that God is a Trinity of Persons.

The readings for today's Mass speak of these three persons of the Trinity and the relationship between them. In the first reading from the Book of Proverbs, the wisdom of God describes its association with God from the beginning of creation. Wisdom says, "ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth." Wisdom is described as a master workman, assisting God in creation. And this Wisdom together with God delighted in human beings.

This Wisdom can be understood as the Son of God, the Word, through whom all things were created. The Creed which we pray at Mass says of Jesus, "Through him all things were made." St John says to us in the beginning of his gospel: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, all things were made through him."

The passage from Proverbs can be seen as describing the relationship between the Father and the Son. Jesus, the Son of God, is the incarnation of a pre-existent Person who was with God from the beginning and participated in God's creation.

Communion, Salvation, and Love

In the second reading from St Paul's Letter to the Romans, we see that God reaches out to us in the Trinity. We see the three divine Persons working out our salvation and making it possible for us to live in communion with them. St Paul says that faith in Jesus has reconciled us to God. Jesus has removed the obstacle of sin between us and God, and through him the Holy Spirit has been given to us, which is the outpouring of the love of God in our hearts.

Then the Gospel reading speaks explicitly about the relationship among Father, Jesus and Spirit. As Jesus is preparing to return to the Father, he promises his followers the gift of abiding presence, the Spirit of truth, who declares the truth of the Son, who reveals the Father.

In the course of his long farewell to his disciples at the Last Supper, Jesus said that in the future the Spirit of truth would guide them to all truth. Jesus said that he had much more to tell them, but that they could not bear it now; the Spirit would finish what Jesus had begun to say. The Spirit is with us and in us, leading us to the fullness of truth: that we are loved by God who is a communion of Persons.

This is the real significance of the Trinity for us to consider today; rather than trying to understand how God can be three, we can consider that God is God-for-us. God shows us who he is and that he is three Persons in the course of reaching out to us. We say that the Father sent his Son to give us the Spirit. Because the Spirit of God has been given to us, we are called to communion with God. We are called to share in this intimate community of God, and God himself has made this possible.

God is in love with human beings. Our infinite, unfathomable God loves us beyond our wildest dreams and deepest longings. He goes to extraordinary lengths to show himself to us and share love with us. The whole history of salvation is a record of God bending over backwards, turning himself inside out in order to give himself to us in love. In this reaching out to us, he has shown himself to be Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

As you pray today, know that God is close to you, and that you are loved by him. This is the meaning of Trinity. The infinite and eternal God, has entered your history, to come close to you, to give himself to you in love.

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