LED BY THE SPIRIT, SONS OF GOD, CO-HEIRS WITH CHRIST
Here’s the Good News:
We don’t have to wait until we get to heaven to be with God!
The wonderful thing about the Holy Trinity is that right now, we get to know, and love, and be with every aspect of God:
a Father who never gives up trying to win the hearts of His children;
a Brother-King who keeps on protecting and saving His sibling-friends;
a divine Presence that lives in our very souls, constantly whispering and nudging, showing where the correct path home is.
No, we don’t have to wait to get to know God.
The problem is, like the Israelites, we keep tuning out our God and turning to the gods of Earth. It’s like a lot of relationships: complacency sets in, doubts descend, attention wanes. Happens with parents and kids, spouses, siblings, friends, etc. (Sound familiar?)
The Holy Trinity is all about relationship. The Triune God is perfectly whole in unity. God didn’t need to create our kind. Maybe He should have stopped after the angels and the animals. He had to chase after an erratic species that blew hot and cold and couldn’t seem to make up its mind whether God could be trusted. Never mind that He kept calling after them as Hosea says (Hos 14: 1-8). Never mind that He worked so hard to save them, ‘with strong hand and outstretched arm, and by great terrors’ (Deut 4:34), or that He actually spoke to them ‘from the midst of fire’ and they still lived.
God fell in love with a fallen race and still hasn’t stopped trying to win its love in return.
In today’s readings we see a God passionately desiring a people to share His life in the Trinitarian love. Do we have the same passion for Him? The solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity asks us: how exactly are we living as sons and daughters of the Father? How are we protecting our heavenly inheritance as co-heirs with the Son? How well do we heed the divine presence of the Spirit within us?
As Catholics our lives are steeped in the Trinity: in all the Sacraments, in our profession of faith, in the Trinitarian formula. What about in daily life? Do we involve God as Father, Son, and Spirit, in all we do?
‘May they be one as we are one’ (Jn 17:22), Jesus prays. Then He sends His sibling-friends out into the world to tell them that God wants a relationship with them. He doesn’t say they have to be perfect. He says ‘observe all the commands I gave you’ (Matt 28:20). What was His greatest commandment? ‘Love one another as I have loved you’ (Jn 13:34).
That call to love embodies Trinitarian love: selfless, steadfast, single in unity. It’s the goal we aim to reach, in our human relationships with all our differences and complexities, and as we continue Jesus’s mission. We don’t need to understand the mystery. We only need to trust and follow Him. Today’s readings show us how: ‘keep His statutes and commandments’ (Deut 4:40). Remember we are blessed and chosen (Ps 32). Believe that ‘the Spirit himself... (bears) witness that we are the children of God’ and that if we suffer with Him…we may also be glorified with Him’ (Rom 8:16-17). Trust Jesus, who promises He is with us ‘always, until the end of the age’ (Matt 28:20).
In His eagerness God wants to walk this life with us, through His Son and His Spirit. And as our relationship with Him deepens, our love for Him grows and spills into the world around us. The call to love and the call to mission are intertwined: we cannot embrace God in His Oneness if we cannot willingly share the love of the Father, the salvation of the Son, and the gifts of the Spirit. So in our broken gratefulness, we give back our imperfect, passionate love to Him and glorify Him, saying, ‘Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.’
Amen.
May the flame of the Holy Trinity’s love burn bright within you and light the way for all who seek God!
Article by Joyce Norma, HFC Blog Contributor