Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for Holy Trinity Sunday, Year C, Vigil

June 11, 2022

 

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.11.22_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us as we celebrate Trinity Sunday.

* In the Gospel we’ll hear, Jesus will say to us, “I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now. But when he comes, the Spirit of Truth, he will guide you to all truth.” Jesus goes on to say that just as he has given us what he has received from the Father, so the Holy Spirit will give us what he has received from Jesus. The Holy Spirit, whose outpouring on Pentecost we celebrated last Sunday, will guide us not only to truths but into the most important truth of all, the very truth of who God is.

* “The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity,” we read in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “is the central mystery of Christian faith and life.” It’s the core mystery not just with regard to what we believe but how we live. The Catechism goes on to say why: “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 Holy Spirit seeks to guide us into this truth at the top of the hierarchy and to help us to understand everything else in the faith in light of it. The Catechism paragraph concludes, “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” (CCC 234). Therefore, it’s crucial for us as human beings, not to mention believers, to pour ourselves — mind, heart, soul and strength — into the mystery of the Trinity.

* Since the 1300s, the Church has celebrated on the Sunday immediately following Pentecost a feast dedicated to the Holy Trinity, to help all of us focus more explicitly on who God is in his profound mysterious depths, and therefore who we’re called to be made in His image and likeness. Even though every Sunday is in some sense dedicated to God and therefore is in some way Trinity Sunday, the Church has wanted us to have at least one Sunday in which we focus on this central mystery of Christian faith and life, the most fundamental and essential teaching in all the truths of the faith. In an age in which many forget about God, when aggressive secularists are trying to drive even conversation about God from public spaces, it is important for believers to be bold not only in reminding society that God exists, as the Creator of all, but to help reveal him and his nature.

* God has revealed himself as a Trinity, a loving communion, one God in three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. He’s not a distant life force. He’s not an arbitrary omnipotent despot. As St. John wrote in his first letter, “God is love” (1 John 4:16), a declaration that strongly implies that the one God somehow had to be a Trinity of Persons. For God to be love, he could not have been solitary, because no one can love in a vacuum. In love, there is always one who loves, one who is loved, and the content of their love for each other. God the Father and God the Son, in all eternity, loved each other so much that their love generated (“spirated”) a third person, the Holy Spirit. They exist in an eternal communion of persons ...