Easter is over, and we return to “Ordinary” Time. But not quite. We still have two more big feasts. Next week is the Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, and today of the Holy Trinity. It’s like Easter continues to echo or reverberate for another couple of weeks before we get back to our life as normal.
Today’s Feast of the Holy Trinity is something of a recapitulation of everything we’ve learned from Easter. How the relationship of Jesus and the Father and their abiding Spirit put the world in a new light and gives us a new relationship with God, a God we now understand is defined by being a relationship.
The triune God, a perfect three way relationship where each part sustains the others and is sustained by them. We have a vague awareness of what such a relationship means. We know something of the two-way relationship between lovers, and of the three-way relationship of parents and child. But these are very limited examples or demonstrations of that perfect relationship that forms the world and holds it in being.
So, what about the readings the Church gives us today to reflect on this wonderful and extraordinary God of relationships?
They seem to be all over the map.
The first (Ex 34:4b-6, 8-9) tells of the time just after Moses receives the commandments of the law from Yahweh, and the people almost immediately head off in the wrong direction and make the golden calf to worship. Moses is so upset he smashes the first set of tablets and has to go back for a second set! A powerful demonstration of how God keeps trying to guide the stubborn and willful (stiff-necked) people, but no obvious connection to the Trinity.
The second is the very end of Paul’s second letter to his church in Corinth, his signing-off (2 Cor 13:11-13). Yes, there’s a sort of passing reference to the Trinity, if you squint a bit, but it’s hardly front and center.
And finally we hear from John (Jn 3:16-18) who has so many wonderful passages talking about the relationship of Father, Son and Spirit. But this isn’t one of them. There is no mention of the Spirit and it doesn’t seem to relate in any way to the Trinity.
One thing we can perhaps take from this apparently strange selection of readings is that there is more to the Trinity than just a definition of God, as though we were somehow describing something in a scientific experiment. God is beyond any description or explanation. That’s why we refer to the Trinity as a mystery. But that shouldn’t let us duck the question and somehow hide in the shadow of obscure metaphors – if that was the situation there would be no point in any of this and no value in a celebration of the Trinity. We would have removed all meaning from it.
These readings can lead us to recognizing that the Trinity is not just a statement about God, but a statement about us as well. We are part of the God relationship. God isn’t just in some relationship with himself, to be admired on a mountaintop. Moses came down from the mountain, twice. We are part of the relationship. God does “come along with us”. Jesus says : “I am in my Father and you are in me and I in you” (Jn 14:20). The Trinity is not a mystery of a God who is distinct and separate from us, it is a mystery of us bound up with our God. We are tied to him, even when stupid and willful. We are bound to him though all our relationships with other followers of Jesus, since it is the God of relationship that animates and sustains all those connections. We are saved through all eternity by a God who pulls us into his relationship, if we just allow ourselves to be connected with him.