Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity (Cycle C) – May 30, 2010

Scripture Readings
First Proverbs 8:22-31
Second Romans 5:1-5
Gospel John 16:12-15

Prepared by: Fr. Peter John Cameron, O.P.

1. Subject Matter
• What it means for us that God is a Holy Trinity of Three Persons; we are made in the image
of the Most Holy Trinity
• Why we “need” God to be the Holy Trinity, i.e., why the Trinitarian God is the most perfect
“form” of god
• The indwelling of the Holy Trinity and what it means to live our faith in a Trinitarian way

2. Exegetical Notes
• “When the Lord established the heavens I was there:” “God’s wisdom is closely connected
with his creation. God not only brought all things into existence but also chooses to direct the
course of human events…. Wisdom existed with God before creation itself came into being.
Wisdom was at his side at the creation of the world, the mirror of the power and goodness of
God.” (Scott Hahn)
• “We boast in hope of the glory of God:” “Once justified, the Christian is reconciled to God and
experiences a peace that distressing troubles cannot upset, a hope that knows no
disappointment, and a confidence of salvation of which he can truly boast…. The Christian
who boasts puts his boast in something that is wholly beyond his ordinary natural powers—in
hope…. What the Christian hopes for is the communicated glory of God…. By [God’s glory] is
meant the resplendent external manifestation of Yahweh’s presence…. For Paul glory is
something communicated to man as he draws close to God.” (J. Fitzmyer)
• “He will take from what is mine and declare it to you:” “Through the Paraclete, the whole
Church is intimately connected with the revelation of Jesus Christ and at the same time taken
beyond it in so far as new insights and decisions are required by changing historical
situations. Through the help of the Paraclete, the truth of the Gospel is increasingly disclosed
and its message becomes a source of new strength to the Church, which can, in and from
the Spirit, thus know what Jesus told, gave and promised it. However difficult that process by
means of which the truth is discovered at every period of history may be, it remains valid that
 ‘we know that he abides in us by the Spirit which he has given us’ (1 Jn 3:24; cf. 4:13).” (R.
Schnackenburg)

3. References to the Catechism of the Catholic Church

• 234 The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of Christian faith and
life. It is the mystery of God in himself. It is therefore the source of all the other
mysteries of faith, the light that enlightens them. It is the most fundamental and
essential teaching in the "hierarchy of the truths of faith". The whole history of
salvation is identical with the history of the way and the means by which the one true
God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, reveals himself to men "and reconciles and unites
with himself those who turn away from sin".
• 221 But St. John goes even further when he affirms that "God is love": God's very
being is love. By sending his only Son and the Spirit of Love in the fullness of time,
God has revealed his innermost secret: God himself is an eternal exchange of love,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and he has destined us to share in that exchange.
• 260 The ultimate end of the whole divine economy is the entry of God's creatures into
the perfect unity of the Blessed Trinity. But even now we are called to be a dwelling
for the Most Holy Trinity: "If a man loves me", says the Lord, "he will keep my word,
and my Father will love him, and we will come to him, and make our home with him":
O my God, Trinity whom I adore, help me forget myself entirely so to establish myself in you,
unmovable and peaceful as if my soul were already in eternity. May nothing be able to trouble my
peace or make me leave you, O my unchanging God, but may each minute bring me more deeply
into your mystery! Grant my soul peace. Make it your heaven, your beloved dwelling and the
place of your rest. May I never abandon you there, but may I be there, whole and entire,
completely vigilant in my faith, entirely adoring, and wholly given over to your creative action. (Bl.
Elizabeth of the Trinity)
• 2845 The communion of the Holy Trinity is the source and criterion of truth in every
relationship.
• 2565 In the New Covenant, prayer is the living relationship of the children of God with
their Father who is good beyond measure, with his Son Jesus Christ and with the
Holy Spirit. The grace of the Kingdom is "the union of the entire holy and royal Trinity
. . . with the whole human spirit." Thus, the life of prayer is the habit of being in the
presence of the thrice-holy God and in communion with him.

4. Patristic Commentary and Other Authorities

• St. Thomas Aquinas (ST Ia q. 45 a.7): “In all creatures there is a representation of the Trinity
in a vestigial mode, in the sense that we find in each of them something that we must
necessarily refer to the divine persons as its cause… Indeed, insofar as it is a substance, a
creature represents its cause and principle and thus manifests the Father, Beginning without
beginning. Inasmuch as it has a certain form and species, the creature represents the Word,
for the form of the work comes from the artisan who conceived it. Finally, insofar as it is
 ordered to other realities, the creature represents the Holy Spirit as love, for the orientation of
one thing to another is the effect of the creative will.”
• St. Thomas Aquinas (ST Ia q. 32 a. 1 sol. 3): “Knowledge of the divine persons was
necessary for us for two reasons. The first is to make us think rightly about the creation of
things. Indeed, to affirm that god made everything through his Word, which is to reject the
error that God produced things by natural necessity, and to posit in him the procession of
Love, which shows that God produced creatures, not because he had to, nor for any other
reason exterior to him: it was through love of his goodness.”
• Pope John Paul II: “The Triune God, who ‘exists’ in himself as a transcendent reality of
interpersonal gift, giving himself in the Holy Spirit as a gift to man, transforms the human
world from within, from inside hearts and minds.”
• Fr. Hans Urs von Balthasar: “The inner truth of God is this: as Source and Father, he
continually and absolutely communicates his ‘Word’ or ‘expression’ or ‘image’, which is
‘begotten’ in this very act of total self-giving, an act of the most original love that can only be
answered by equally absolute reciprocal love.
• Fr. Maurice Zundel: “It would be terrifying if God were a God who was the greatest force and
was not renouncement and poverty, the God before whom we feel profoundly at ease
because he is but a heart, a love, because everything in him is gift of self. The Blessed
Trinity frees us from the false God and places us, at last, before the interior God, the God
who is a Presence, a Heart, the God who has nothing, the God who is God precisely
because he has nothing, who is not bound to himself as we are to ourselves. That God is the
true God, the only living God whom we immediately recognize because, in fact, he frees us
from this self behind which we stifle ourselves. He is the One our conscience aspires to,
because if we must struggle against a stronger God, we are always tempted to rebel. If God
is love and nothing but love, there is no longer any capitulation because love rises from our
own greatest depths. Love is born only from within and it invites us to become what it is:
generosity, gift, detachment, love. It is only the gaze of a love which can no longer be turned
on itself because it no longer knows what it is…. This is the only God who can exercise an
attraction for us.”

5. Examples from the Saints and Other Exemplars

• Bl. Elizabeth of the Trinity (+1906) was a French Carmelite nun with a profound devotion to
the Blessed Trinity. She wrote: “I am ‘Elizabeth of the Trinity,’ that is, Elizabeth disappearing,
losing herself, letting herself be possessed by the Three…. Let us join in making our days
one continual communion: in the morning let us awake in Love; all day long let us surrender
to Love, that is, by doing the will of God, in His presence, with Him, in Him, for Him alone. Let
us give ourselves all the time in the way that He wants. And then, when evening comes, after
a dialogue of love which has not ceased in our heart, let us also fall asleep in Love. Perhaps
we will see faults, infidelities; let us abandon them to Love: it is a fire which consumes, so let
us make our purgatory in His Love!... There, in the depths of my heart, in the Heaven of my
soul, I love to find Him, since He never leaves me. ‘God in me, I in Him.’ Oh, that is my life!
‘Marie-Elizabeth of the Trinity’ I think this name indicates a special vocation; isn’t it beautiful!
I so love this mystery of the Holy Trinity; it is an abyss in which I lose myself!”
6. Quotations from Pope Benedict XVI

• “The whole of God, so faith tells us, is the act of relating. That is what we mean when we say
that he is a Trinity, that he is threefold. Because he is in himself a complex of relationships,
he can also make other beings who are grounded in relationships and who may relate to him,
because he has related them to himself.
• “The Trinity provides us with the means by which both the individual and the community of
the Church can disentangle the confusion of time. We shall not solve the problems that
trouble us today by theorizing, but by spiritual means, by entering, in other words, into the
form of the Trinity… a living interrelationship can develop, that growth can come about and
that we can be led The selflessness of those who bear witness to Christ gives authenticity to
the Church, just as Christ’s selflessness bore authentic testimony to himself and to the Spirit.
It is in this way that into the fullness of truth, a truth that is richer and greater than anything
that we can invent.”
• “Those who encounter Christ and enter into a friendly relationship with him welcome into their
hearts Trinitarian Communion itself, in accordance with Jesus’ promise to his disciples: ‘If a
man loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him
and make our home with him’ (Jn 14:23). For those who have faith, the entire universe
speaks of the Triune God. From the spaces between the stars to microscopic particles, all
that exists refers to a Being who communicates himself in the multiplicity and variety of
elements, as in an immense symphony. All beings are ordered to a dynamic harmony that we
can similarly call ‘love.’ But only in the human person, who is free and can reason, does this
dynamism become spiritual, does it become responsible love, in response to God and to
one’s neighbor through a sincere gift of self. It is in this love that human beings find their truth
and happiness. Among the different analogies of the ineffable mystery of the Triune God that
believers are able to discern, I would like to cite that of the family. It is called to be a
community of love and life where differences must contribute to forming a “parable of
communion.”
• “God has a name, and God calls us by our name. He is a Person, and he seeks the person.
He has a face, and he seeks our face. He has a heart, and he seeks our heart.”
• “Christianity is not oriented to our own hopes, fears, and needs, but to God, to his
sovereignty and power.”
• “Where human fatherhood disappears, it is no longer possible to speak and think of God. It is
not God who is dead; what is dead (to a large extent) is the precondition in man that makes it
possible for God to live in the world. If human existence is to be complete, we need a father,
in the true meaning of fatherhood that our faith discloses, namely, a responsibility for one’s
child that does not dominate him but permits him to become his own self.”
• “The Father’s and the Son’s unity must be in the fruitfulness in which each one gives himself
and in which each one is himself. They are one in virtue of the fact that their love is fruitful,
that it goes beyond them. In the third Person in whom they give themselves to each other, in
the Gift, they are themselves, and they are one.”

7. Other Considerations
• Archbishop Augustine DiNoia, O.P.: “You always must start with the Trinity. Or to put it
another way, also borrowing a wonderful phrase from another Lutheran theologian, ‘the
Trinity is not a puzzle, but is itself the solution to all of the other puzzles.’ The reason I think
we have to say this is that it is what Christ taught us, and therefore, what the apostles
commended to the Church to continue to preach and what Christ himself bears witness to in
our midst. It is the awesome truth that, God, who is in need of no one, desires to share the
community of Trinitarian life, with what is not God. Now, you know, we've gotten so used to
this, we've gotten so used to thinking of the Trinity as something that is difficult to explain, a
theological doctrine requiring a great deal of expertise, that we've tended to put it on the
shelf. I know priests who dread having to preach on Trinity Sunday because they just don't
know how to make sense of what they think is a complicated doctrine for people in the pew.
This is a disaster. This doesn't mean that the Church doesn't still possess a very deep and
strong Trinitarian faith, of course it does, but there is a reluctance to discover what huge,
immense, practical implications the doctrine of the Trinity has for life, not to mention theology,
but for life. What the Christian Church proclaims to the world and shares with all of the
churches that share the Nicean-Constatinopolitan Creed, is that nothing would exist--not us,
not stars, not our universe--apart from this divine intention to have persons who are not God
in the company of the persons who are. Given that it is a highly ramified truth it flows into all
the other departments of human thought and life from the perspective of the Christian faith.
This is not something that could be known, it is a more personal thing. We are very familiar
with this idea that you couldn't know this apart from God's revelation. It's like when you tell
someone whom you love things about yourself that no one else knows. And we are not
talking about revealing arcane truths in talking about the Trinity, we are talking about love,
pouring itself out so that love will be returned. That is what the theology of the Trinity is
about. Love will be returned in a way that is mutual, that is, it's not a matter of simply us
loving God, it's a matter of us, altogether loving God and loving each other in God. This is the
divine wisdom we have to proclaim: God wants to share the communion of the Trinitarian life
with persons who are not God in Christ and the Holy Spirit.”
(See: http://www.frinstitute.org/dinoia.htm)
Recommended Resources

Benedict XVI, Pope. Benedictus. Yonkers: Magnificat, 2006.

Biblia Clerus: http://www.clerus.org/bibliaclerus/index_eng.html

Cameron, Peter John. To Praise, To Bless, To Preach—Cycle C. Huntington: Our Sunday

Visitor, 1999.

Hahn, Scott:
http://www.salvationhistory.com/library/scripture/churchandbible/homilyhelps/homilyhelps.cfm.

Martin, Francis: http://www.hasnehmedia.com/homilies.shtml