Trinity Sunday 2024
Deuteronomy 4:32-34, 39-40; Romans 8: 14-17; Matthew 28: 16-20
I have invented something. Actually, I probably haven’t: no doubt thousands of people have come up with this idea before I did, but never mind—I thought of this without assistance from anyone, and so I am going to claim it. “What is it?” you may ask. It is a classification of feasts under the headings “static” or “dynamic”.
Bear with me. By “dynamic”, I mean those feasts or seasons which celebrate something which happened and/or is happening, and which constitute the vast majority of feasts and seasons throughout the Church’s year. Thus, the Church’s year begins with Advent, which expresses our never ending longing for God who came, who will come, and who is coming at every moment of our lives.
This leads into the feast of Christmas, the rejoicing in the Incarnation, the coming of God in our human flesh; and then into Epiphany, the showing forth of that same Son of God to the nations, represented by the wise men; as Beloved Son of the Father at His Baptism, and as one who shared the glory of God, revealed at the marriage feast at Cana.
Soon we move into Lent, as we enter into the wilderness journey of Jesus; and Holy Week, when we travel with Him to the Cross, before keeping vigil, awaiting the greatest feast, the Easter celebration of the Resurrection. The Easter season encompasses the Ascension, and culminates in Pentecost, recalling and re-living the descent of the Holy Spirit. All of these are what I would call dynamic feasts and seasons.
Now, however, we have a series of what I term “static” feasts, celebrating something which IS, rather than something which happens. These are Trinity Sunday, Corpus Christi, and the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart. The Trinity IS: the Body and Blood of Christ ARE. Admittedly the Body and Blood are given to us, consecrated in every Mass, but that feast marks their reality, not their origins, which are recalled on Holy Thursday. The Sacred Heart shows us an aspect of Jesus the Lord, rather than something which He did, and the liturgical year is rounded off with the anachronistic Solemnity of Christ the King, which was already outdated at the time of its institution in the 1920s, when kings were already fading from the scene.
Why do we have these static feasts? They remind us of truths which we might take for granted, or even forget. We shouldn’t forget that God is a Trinity, three persons in one Godhead: after all, we assert it every time we make the Sign of the Cross, and the Church uses a Trinitarian formula, addressing the Father through the Son in the unity of the Holy Spirit—God—at the conclusion of most of our liturgical prayers. Yet, when something is done regularly, it may sometimes fade in importance, become part of the background: consequently we are given this annual reminder of the central truth of our faith.
The Trinitarian reality of God is too vast a subject to tackle in a Sunday homily. The early Christian Fathers wrote volumes on the subject, and if you suffer from insomnia, I suggest that you try reading some of them. Today I would like to focus on one aspect of the Trinity, namely community and/or communion.
In the first account of creation, in chapter 1 of the Book of Genesis, God tells the sea creatures, the birds, and finally human beings to be fruitful and multiply. In the different account provided by chapter 2, God comments that “it is not good for the man to be alone”, and out of man He creates woman. Solitariness is seen to be not a good thing.
Why should this be? It is because God Himself is not solitary, though He is not part of a pantheon of various gods as pagan cultures believed. Instead, His whole nature is a community, a community and a communion of love, the Father begetting the Son through the Holy Spirit, who forms the bond of love between them.
If then we are to share the life of God, we too must be communitarian: we are made for one another. In the opening chapter of Lumen Gentium, the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, we are told that the Church is “a kind of sacrament or sign of intimate union with God, and of the unity of all humankind”. Lumen Gentium goes on to state that God’s plan was to “dignify human beings with a participation in His own divine life”.
All humankind is created to share “intimate union with God”, and the Church “subsisting in the Catholic Church which is governed by the successor of Peter and by the bishops in union with that successor” as the document states, exists to be an effective sign of that union. That is the case because God Himself is unity, community, and communion. The Trinity reveals that to us, and gives us our own nature and the point of our striving.
