Trinity Sunday Year B 2024

Title

The One and the Three

Outline

Trinity Sunday is difficult to preach on, for it pulls us into the unfolding mystery of the One God who is a Trinity, Love in person, and who has brought us into that love union through our union with Jesus. But lets break a spear on that.

The One, the Almighty Providential Father

This is the message of the first reading, the one God before whom all other so-called deities fade into something other than God, who created and who guides history, but whose being was not revealed until he took a people for himself from another nation, trouncing their so-called gods, and then spoke to them directly. He was unseen by them - fire and smoke being symbols of his transcendence - but he spoke to them, revealed himself to them, and gave them a way of life. This way of life is expressed in “statues and commandments” which bring life and prosperity to his people and their children. Yet more remains to be revealed.

There is Jesus God-man who leads his evangelizing people

Jesus, whose birth is narrated in Matthew, is seen for the third time on a Galilean mountain (Sermon on the Mount, Transfiguration, and now post resurrection), but now they worship, for he is not a new Moses or a trinity with Moses and Elijah but the all-powerful joined to the Father and the Holy Spirit. He is using his disciples to call new disciples of, not just the original nation, but that and every nation. Now disciples are personal adherents of a leader who follow the way of life the leader gives and so “observe all that I have commanded you,” but the leader in whose name (singular) they are immersed is not simply Jesus, but “the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.” God has come down to his people in visible form, not only to give them his way of life, of living loyalty to the kingdom, but also to remain with them and lead them: “behold I am with you always until the end of the age.” That is, of course, sacramental, but there is more.

There is the Spirit, which Romans says binds us to the Trinity.

Theologically we think of the Spirit as the love that joins the Father and the Son, but he is in us bringing the presence of Jesus and joining us to the Trinity.

Now Paul uses adoption language because he is in debates about the relationship of the increasingly Gentile Jesus movement to Israel, but it is not different in effect from John’s and 1 Peter’s rebirth language.

We have received a “spirit of adoption” and we like Jesus and the Jews at their best cry “Abba” which is “Father” not because we are young, for the term is never dropped, but because we are family, children.

We are children if we are led by the Spirit of God, who is a spirit of adoption. The Spirit in us bears witness in our spirit (not our bodily ears) that we are children of God. And of course he is leading us into the way of life of the family.

The end result is that we are heirs of God, joint heirs with Christ, the unique Son, which means that all that God has is at our disposal.

But there is a caveat: if we are one with Jesus that we are also one with his suffering and that is our unity in this age. We will be glorified with him when his glory is revealed beyond this age.

The Trinity is revealed in this the penultimate act of the Theodrama

[Hans Urs von Balthasar]

Adam had a oneness with God, a familiarity in the Temple Garden of Eden, which would have led to transcendent oneness.

We have been called back to that oneness, that familial relationship, through the Providence of the Father, through the Son’s becoming one of us, and through the Spirit being in us. This is why the baptismal formula is essential.

The response on our side is to follow the commandments of the Father as reinterpreted by the Son according to the leading of the Spirit. That is, to live like children coming ever closer to the character of Christ, the unique Son, whose siblings we are. As we do this we will catch glimpses of the Trinity, at least with our spirit eye, showing us that there is more to come.

Is this your way of life? Does your life celebrate your place in the Trinitarian Theodrama?