trinity sunday 2011

Homily for Trinity Sunday 19 June 2011

Today is Trinity Sunday (whatever that means, do I hear you say?). During the course of the year the Church proposes many aspects of God for us to consider in the various feasts that come and go - last week the great mystery of the work of God the Holy Spirit claimed our attention at Pentecost. Now today what are we supposed to be focussing on? The Trinity, but what is the Trinity? This word is quite simply the technical term the Church has been using for nearly two millennia to describe the life of God, the nature of God. So today we need to refresh our memories about God- who is this God who is our God? What kind of a god is God? And does it matter?
The best place where we find the answer is in the two creation accounts in Genesis, where we find that God is the benevolent Creator, who approves of everything that he makes and whose desire is for intimacy with the human race which he has created in his own image and likeness- yes, God wants us to be his friends, that is the whole point of creating this world and us in it. That is what God does all day- creating, sustaining, loving us. The great Dominican mystic of the 13th century Meister Eckhard said “I never give God thanks for loving me, because he cannot help it”. In the early 18th century an English spiritual writer from the Anglican tradition, William Law, has this to say: “from eternity to eternity no spark of wrath ever was or ever will be in the holy triune God….and this, for this plain reason, because he is in himself in his Holy Trinity nothing else but the boundless abyss of all that is good and sweet and amiable” He says too that God is in “an eternal impossibility of willing and intending a moment’s pain or hurt to any creature”. What wonderful words, and they are true. If you look at the two forms of the Opening Prayer for today’s mass, you see all this spelt out. In the first one, we hear that God the Father sends us the Word (Jesus, of course) to bring us truth and the Spirit to make us holy- that is how we can come to know the mystery of God’s life. The second one speaks of God “drawing us to share in your life and your love”.
And look at our first reading today. In this episode from Exodus, Moses has just told God that, far from welcoming the ten commandments as the start of a close and binding relationship between God and his people, the Israelites have rejected them and have made themselves a nice new god, a Golden Calf they can dance around. You remember, Moses got so angry he smashed the first lot of tablets up. What we have here is God saying to Moses, it’s OK, I can cope- I am “a God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in kindness and faithfulness”. And he gives Moses two new tablets, just as good as the old ones- this time, try not to break them! – and so this contract that God so desperately wants to have with his people is back in force, as if it had never been spoilt. That is what happens when we go to Confession isn’t it- we have broken a few commandments I daresay (in fact, I wonder if you examine your conscience by going through the ten commandments, that used to be a very common and very good practice), we have messed up, but we know that the priest we confess to will be the voice of the “God of tenderness” who is “slow to anger” – when we say like Moses “forgive us our faults and our sins” and ask to be back in the close friendship of God Our Lord will indeed “adopt us as his heritage” and all will be well again, as if –just as if- we’d never gone off the rails in the first place. Now that is exactly what this Gospel of ours today is saying, isn’t it. “God sent his Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but so that through him the world might be saved”.
Why send his Son at all? That is another question, and one to which books of devotion give usually quite crazy answers- paying the ransom for sin, settling mankind’s debt with the Devil, I can’t bear it! God, being goodness itself, is forever communicating that goodness- it is as simple as that. And Jesus is the good that God the Father wants to communicate to us. This man William Law speaks of “the goodness of God breaking forth into a desire to communicate good….He is the Good, the unchangeable, overflowing fountain of all that is good that sends forth nothing but good to all eternity”. And of course the greatest good he communicates to us is that aspect, that humanly knowable aspect, of himself that is Our Lord Jesus.
Of course, such is the madness, the perversity of the human race that we run a mile at the prospect of a God offering us relentless love- just as we often do when our fellow human beings offer us love, it is just too frightening, we think, to fall into that embrace of Someone who claims they will never let go of us no matter what. We want more independence than that, because surely all this constant loving is going to be stifling, isn’t it going to curtail my freedom severely? So thought the Israelites at Mt Sinai, who, when they first heard that Moses and God were holding this great converse from which came the Ten Commandments, “were afraid and trembled and stood afar off” (Exod 20 xviii- xix) and begged to hear no more- “let not God speak to us”. The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews refers to this episode too when he speaks of “a Voice, whose words made the hearers entreat that no further messages be spoken to them”. (Heb 12 xix) Bring on the Golden Calf we say, we know where we are with that! Our dear Holy Father spoke only last week about this very phenomenon, the Golden Calf- he says “this is a constant temptation on the journey of faith: to avoid the divine mystery by constructing a comprehensible god who corresponds with one’s own plans, one’s own projects”. (8 june 2011 gen aud)
No, dear friends, we don’t want to avoid the divine mystery, we want to meet it and live in it! We want our full destiny as children of God, and that is nothing less than to be drawn into the divine mystery that is the life and love of God. Heavenly Father, we keep smashing up the tablets of the law that are written on our hearts, but we recall today that you are “a God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in kindness”; we are indeed in the words of Moses “a headstrong people, but forgive us our faults and our sins and adopt us as your heritage” Amen.