Trinity Sunday, 30 June 2021: Deuteronomy 4:32-34, 39-40; Romans 8:14-17; Matthew 28:16-20
Most solemnities commemorate an event—we may sing “This is the day Christ is born” or “Christ the Lord is risen today.” But today’s Solemnity celebrates the reality we encounter throughout the Liturgical Year: the revelation of the Triune God existent through eternity, present in time, manifest in the mysteries of our salvation.
Our theology of the Trinity tells us as much about ourselves as it does about God. In fact, reducing as it does the ineffable God to human concepts and words, anything we can say about the inner life of God may tell us more about ourselves than God. And yet that is not inappropriate since God is our foundation, and our very existence, our longing, our self-transcendence necessarily reflect the living God.
That indescribable exchange of Divine Love, which is each of the Divine Persons—so fruitful, so generous and so selfless—concretizes in creation something of that potential even at our level of contingent being. Not only conscious, self-reflective being but all creation is propelled on a path through genesis to divinization, beyond our empirical limits.
If we love this created realm, or one another, or even ourselves, we are cherishing the subject of God’s longing.
Were we to purify that love more and more to correspond to God’s way of loving, then we could, at one and the same time, hold it as lightly as we hold it dearly. We would never fix anyone or anything as a possession, but allow all creatures to become what, who they are created to be. We could relate to, we could foster, rather than hoard, the rich blessings of life, the people and encounters that are the vehicles of our divinization. And that potential reflects the character of the living God.
Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How inscrutable are his judgments and how unsearchable his ways…For from him and through him and for him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen. (Romans 11:33, 36)