Last Sunday, Pentecost, we celebrated
the sending of the Holy Spirit, sealing God’s new covenant promised in and
through Jesus Christ’s self-giving sacrifice for us.
This Trinity Sunday we see that through
the covenant we share in the life of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It has
been noted since the time of St. Patrick and, intriguingly, by modern
scientists that God is revealed in triads in nature – through the endless
complexity of the cosmos. From the time
of Plato philosophers have understood that God is revealed in reason as it
interacts with faith. St. Thomas Aquinas developed a theology of the Holy Trinity
of self-giving love.
We share in this divine nature, divine
reason and faith through the sacraments especially the Body and Blood of Christ
poured out for us unendingly in the Mass.
Appropriately, three feasts conclude the
Easter cycle in the Church’s year – Pentecost, Trinity Sunday (today), and
Corpus Christi, the feast of the Body of our Lord ever present to us and for
us. This triad, a celebration of God’s
love, reveals the way in which God communicates self-giving love (caritas) with
humanity.
These feasts are signs of the love God bears
us as imperfect children on a journey of faith.
Chosen from before the foundation of the world, we are children of the
covenant (Ephesians 1:4-5).
The first reading and psalm today illuminate
how all God’s words and works were meant to prepare for the revelation of the
Trinity and of God’s blessing in Jesus Christ – the blessing we inherit in
baptism, and in which we are renewed at each Mass.
Some years ago my family and I visited
the Norman Rockwell Museum in Arlington, VT.
The museum has a fair number of Rockwell’s works on display in the
museum. It turns out that many of the people who volunteer and work there are
actually subjects in Rockwell’s paintings.
They posed for him 50 or 60 years ago —
a lot of them when they were young children. A 70-year-old woman who appeared
as a 10-year-old girl in one of his magazine covers may meet you at the door. There’s
something poignant and beautiful about the experience.
Norman Rockwell himself always insisted
on using ordinary people as models. Many were his neighbors and friends. He
felt that real people captured something you can’t find in professional models.
He once summed it up in these words: “All of the artist’s creativeness cannot
equal God’s creativeness.”
God’s creativeness, of course, so far
exceeds our own. Reflected in God’s creation is a love that overwhelms us. God the Father created the universe to reflect
self-giving love (caritas). God who loves so much became one of us, as Christ
– God the Son, the same God, remains
with us, among us and working through us in the Holy Spirit — abiding with us
and continuing, in astonishing ways, the one God’s creation.
God who loves us so much cannot be
contained. “Everything that the Father has is mine,” Jesus declares in John’s Gospel,
explaining that the Holy Spirit will also share God’s grace with his disciples.
God in Christ wants to share the life of the Holy Trinity with us in a
community of love..
Human life seems designed to discover
love and creativity, to delight in it in the worship and service of the God of
creation, the Father; in thanksgiving for the God of Redemption – the Son; and
in celebration of this wondrous life by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Simply put, God wants to be found in the
world He created. We are given so many
opportunities – so many times when we travel through even the darkest days of
our lives and then come out the other side to encounter, unexpectedly,
something surprising and beautiful and holy.
It might be on a mountaintop or it could
be in the mundane tasks of life. It
might be in watching a toddler learning to walk, or in hearing a kind word from
a stranger on the subway platform. It will certainly be in the broken bread and
the shared Chalice of the Eucharist. God is present. Our role is to look for
the One who wants to be found.
Norman Rockwell found something of God
in the ordinary people of Arlington, Vermont, and created some beloved popular
works of art. But each of us, in our way, is called to create our own work of
art from the many colours of our own lives. In so doing we discover the
greatest artist of all, The One whose creative genius guides everything.
God spoke and the heavens and earth were
filled with love, as we sing in today’s Psalm. Out of love, God called Abraham
and chose his descendants to be a peculiar people. In Deuteronomy (4:20,37)
Moses shows that through the Israelites God has revealed to the nations that He
alone is Lord and there is no other.
God led Israel out of Egypt, freed them
from slavery and now frees us from slavery of sin. St. Paul tells us that God
adopted Israel (Romans 9:4), and gives us the Holy Spirit through whom we can
know God as “our Father.”
As God’s heirs, we too receive the
commissions of Moses and Jesus today. We fix our hearts on the one true God and
observe all that God in Christ has committed us to in this new Covenant. Jesus has promised that he is with us until
the end of time. He will deliver us from death to live forever with the Father
and the Holy Spirit in the promised Kingdom of
God.
Deuteronomy 4:32-34,
39-40; Psalm 33:4- 6, 9, 18-20, 22; Romans
8:14-17;
Matthew 28:16-20
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