HOMILY for Trinity Sunday (June 4th)
The Christian teaching that God is wholly other, and yet is also completely and fully present in the man Jesus of Nazareth, and also completely and separately present to each of us as Holy Spirit, seems utterly beyond reason. You can see and hear me give this Homily on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Egto5MvlU6s
Indeed, many people like Jews and Muslims see it as a semi-pagan belittling of God. They would say that God can be none other than utterly outside and beyond our little human world. I would always assert however, that far from belittling God, it actually is a claim that God is far greater than anything we humans can imagine. To say God cannot be like this, that God can only be other, is to limit God’s power. Why should God conform to our idea of what God can be like? So we can think of God as utterly beyond us, as the power underlying the Universe, and call God “Father” as Jesus did; yet know that this same God can be fully present for us in the man Jesus, and also know and experience that same God working within us, and know that God present in this way is God the Holy Spirit.
Strictly speaking, the translation we have in our Gospel today (John 3:16) gives the wrong impression of what was actually said. The phrase that misleads is that “God loved the world so much” which misses the point that the love by which the world and we are loved is not some expression of God’s feeling for us, but is actually God himself who is love, expressing himself fully in Jesus. A more accurate translation reads “God so loved the world”, making clear that Jesus is God as love, rather than part of God, however much or little that part might be. It may seem like nit-picking, but it is actually very important. Jesus is not part of God, as if God could have different parts, nor is the Holy Spirit another part of God, as if God were a thing with different parts. God is so beyond our understanding that he can be fully one thing and fully another at the same time.
Faced with this mystery of the majesty and glory that is God, it is not surprising that sometimes in the Old Testament the presence of God becomes so overwhelming that the only response is to bow right down to the ground in prostration, as we hear Moses doing in our 1st Reading. (Exodus 34:4-6.8-9) Indeed when the risen Jesus is revealed to the disciples in Matthew’s Gospel (27:18) most translations speak of them “worshipping him” but actually the original Greek says that they “prostrated themselves before him”. In other words, the only complete response to the glory of God fully revealed is to fall down flat on one’s face, saying and doing nothing, for there is nothing to say. It is interesting that in the Catholic Liturgy there is only one moment in the year when the priest does this, and that is at the beginning of the Good Friday Liturgy. The mystery of God’s love revealed by Jesus dying on the cross cannot be responded to in any other way than this, when all words and all human actions fail.
I hope this helps people who worry that they cannot find any words to say to God when they pray. I am much more worried about people who can find the words. It has sadly not yet dawned on them that sometimes the only response to God is silence, which is why even when we say or sing words to God, we must somehow be offering also an inner silence that is beyond words. Great poets know this well don’t they, as they run out of words to express God’s glory. I am thinking particularly of that great Poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins. He wrote “The world is charged with the grandeur of God” which in itself expresses something beyond words; but in another poem he just sets a string of words together which almost make no sense, and yet somehow do, once you know he is trying to speak of the God who is beyond words.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
Perhaps this is why some Catholics are keen on the Latin Mass, or having some Latin in the Mass; not always simply because it is Latin, the traditional language of the Western Church, but often because being in words one doesn’t fully understand, it expresses much more than the ordinary words of one’s own language. It’s why I also love to be at a Mass in Italian or French. I know what the words mean, and yet somehow, because they are foreign, they express something more of the mystery that is God.
So God as Trinity is the mystery of a power that is wholly other, utterly beyond our understanding, revealing itself as more than just an IT. It is a being which does not just have but is what makes us most human, that intangible thing that is so important for us and yet is so hard to name. Surely, since each of us is a person and God cannot be less than we are, God is not just an it, but possesses what we might call personhood, and so we can think of him as a person rather than an it - Father – Lord – Almighty God – even though he is always more than any of these words. Thus God can be and is utterly other, and yet can both be and is human just like us, and can be and is within us in a way that does not destroy or even change what we are at our best. Getting to know another human being is always a movement into a mystery that is beyond words, where we can spend a life with someone and still be getting to know them. Similarly getting to know God is like this, but multiplied a million million times – a greater mystery - way beyond any words or thoughts we can ever utter.
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