The Feast of the Holy Trinity is, in a way, a recapitulation of our Easter journey. It summarizes what the last six weeks have told us about God and what he expects of us. This is a God of relationships. His whole nature is to be in relationship. That’s why our understanding of God can always become deeper, is never static, must always be evolving. A relationship that doesn’t change is dead. Our God is alive, as we sang at Easter.
God’s revelation didn’t start with Easter. In our reading today from Deuteronomy (Dt 4:32-34, 39-40), Moses asks “Did a people ever hear the voice of God”. “Did anything so great ever happen before?” For Moses the revelation of God is set in the context of a people looking to establish themselves with a clear identity and a fixed place to live. Not surprisingly their view of God was tied up with that struggle: “did any god venture to go and take a nation for himself from the midst of another nation, by testings, by signs and wonders, by war, with strong hand and outstretched arm”.
By the time of Jesus the view that God was about political action and a Jewish state was still common – in the Acts of the Apostles (as we heard on the Feast of the Ascension) the disciples were still asking Jesus at the very last minute before he left them: “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6)
Finally, after the Holy Spirit took over the church, it became obvious that Jesus was not in the business of nation building. Paul captures, in our second reading, the more developed understanding of God’s presence (Rom 8:14-17), not in signs and wonders and battles, but as a loving father. Those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God: you received a Spirit of adoption, through whom we cry, “Abba, Father!”
We may still suffer today the temptation to think that God has a special relationship with our country, or our people (however we might define that), with those who are “like us”. But Matthew makes it clear (Mt 28:16-20), in the last words that he has Jesus speak to his disciples, that this is not true: “go make disciples of all nations… behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age”.
Our God is a god for all people, for all time. He does not lead us in battles against one another. As Peter was brought to realize: “In truth, I see that God shows no partiality. Rather, in every nation whoever fears him and acts uprightly is acceptable to him.” (Acts 10:34, from Sixth Sunday of Easter).
We are all children of God. We have to act like it. Matthew spells that out in the same way as Moses: “observe all that I have commanded you”. And John perhaps summarized that “all” most clearly: Love one another as I have loved you (John 13:34).