Trinity – Tony Lusvardi, S.J.

The Trinity, mystery and relationship: homily for Trinity Sunday

This month I’ve been asked to contribute Sunday homilies to the Homiletic and Pastoral Review. You can find the rest of the month’s homilies there as well. Here’s this week’s contribution:

Homily for Trinity Sunday (C)

*The Holy Trinity*, Camarines Sur, 18th century, molave wood (St. Augustine Museum, Manila)

There’s an old saying, which probably goes back to Socrates, that the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know. This observation on what it means to be truly wise is not meant to discourage learning or study or reflection. When used in a Christian context it’s not meant to suggest, for example, that our faith should be reduced to a couple of folksy slogans. Nor does it mean that when reflecting on the doctrine which we remember today—the Most Holy Trinity—that we should take an anti-intellectual approach—it’s a mystery, just have faith, don’t ask any questions.

The Trinity is a mystery, but today’s readings suggest the attitude we should have toward “mystery” in the context of our faith. Calling the Trinity a mystery means that we will never get to the end of understanding it, but that should not make us want to throw up our hands and give up. Instead, it should make us want to know more. There’s a great history podcast that I listen to, and, after each episode, I often want to go online and start buying books about the subject to discover more. Usually, I have to restrain that impulse because the books start to pile up and I don’t have time to read them!

When we talk about the mysteries of our faith, that’s the dynamic we’re suggesting: not that we don’t want any questions, but that there will always be more to say and our capacity to learn is limited. Jesus suggests as much in the Gospel when he ways, “I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now.” Those words tell us something important about God. Jesus talks about knowing the Father by seeing the Son and living in the Spirit of truth. If you tried to diagram what that meant, you might end up with a triangle and lots of arrows going back and forth between the angles. Perhaps that’s not a bad start because one thing that we can take from the invitation of Jesus to know him and know his Father and know the Holy Spirit is that he is inviting us into a relationship that will change us. It’s a relationship that, in a way, is always moving.

Giving credit to the Holy Spirit: a homily for Pentecost

As I mentioned last week, this month I’ve been asked to contribute Sunday homilies to the Homiletic and Pastoral Review. Be sure to pay them a visit. Here’s this week’s contribution:

Homily for Pentecost (C)

Guido Reni, *Trinity of the Pilgrims* (1625-6)

Today’s feast of Pentecost is a great reminder to give credit where credit is due. For us Christians, both as individuals and as a Church, credit is due to the Holy Spirit.

This is something that is easy to forget because the Holy Spirit, being spirit, is unseen. The Son of God, the second Person of the Trinity, becomes visible to us in the Incarnation. And in the Gospel, Jesus explains that when we see him, we see the Father. He makes God accessible to us in a visible, human way. Not everyone who sees Jesus, of course, recognizes him as God. Recognizing Jesus for who he is requires a certain openness from us, and, for some people—probably for most—it requires being opened up by the Holy Spirit. It requires the Holy Spirit to break through our blindness.

The necessity of the Holy Spirit’s intervention is made especially clear in the events we celebrate today. Jesus promises to send the Holy Spirit to his disciples after the Ascension. They certainly need it. We remember, of course, the behavior of the apostles at the time of the crucifixion—Peter denying Christ and the rest of the group scattering. Even after the Resurrection, the disciples seem uncertain. Out of fear, they lock themselves indoors. After the Ascension, they seem dumfounded by the event and require two angels to appear and shake them from their paralysis. I can’t blame them, actually; the events that they had witnessed were beyond any human experience. Knowing how to respond to them was beyond any normal human capacity. They needed the Spirit that Christ would send.

Mary the Mother of God and the relationships that define us: homily for the Solemnity

Madonna and Child, Umbrian , 14th century, Spoleto

Homily for the Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God

Today we celebrate the Solemnity of Mary Mother of God. Fortunately, as you came into church this morning, you did not see armed troops guarding the doors, nor bishops jostling and shouting angrily at each other in Greek. We should be grateful for such peace and calm this New Year’s Day, 2024. Sixteen-hundred years ago, you might have seen just that. At that time, the fiercest controversy in the Catholic Church was over whether the title “Mother of God” could be applied to Mary, a controversy settled by the Council of Ephesus in 431. Before the Council of Ephesus, Nestorius, the bishop of Constantinople, had claimed that Mary could be called the “Mother of Christ” or the “Mother of Jesus” but not the “Mother of God.”

If you think for a minute about what is at stake in the title, you’ll realize that the controversy was not really about the identity of Mary, but the identity of her son. Mary can only be called “Mother of God” if Jesus is, in fact, fully man and fully God. The Council of Ephesus declared Nestorius a heretic for obscuring what we celebrate this Christmas season: that the Son of God has become man, that from the moment of his conception in Mary’s womb Jesus was and is God.

But today is a Marian feast. What does this title tell us about Mary? You have probably heard many times that Mary always points to Christ. Her final words recorded in Scripture are to the servants at Cana, after she has dropped an unsubtle hint to Jesus about the need for more wine at the party: “Do whatever he tells you,” she says (Jn 2:5). It is hard to think of a more exalted title to bestow on anyone than “Mother of God,” yet there’s a humility in the title too because by exalting Mary we are first exalting her son.

Mary is a woman of both humility and strength, of contemplation and action, of wisdom and patience, of courage and compassion, and yet her greatness—what makes her the greatest woman to have lived, worthy of the title of today’s feast—is the relationship she has with her son. And there is a lesson here for us, a lesson about the importance of relationships.

Trinity Sunday homily

If you go to Mass on Trinity Sunday, there’s a very good chance that you will hear the word “mystery.” What does that word “mystery” mean? When we’re talking about a mystery of faith, it doesn’t mean a detective story. A mystery of faith is something we can always understand more deeply, something we can never reach the end of, something that never gets old. No matter how many times you see the sunset across the ocean, the beauty of it is always new, the colors always a little different each time.

Trinity Sunday is a celebration of the mystery of God. To be more precise, it’s a celebration of the fact that God has given us a starting point to discover him, to know him, and to be united with him. God is so different than anything we know that without his help we could say almost nothing about him. God is not a very big thing. He’s not like a gas that gets into the nooks and crannies of everything. He’s not nature and the universe. We know he’s the Creator of the universe because the universe exists, but nothing in the universe is capable of creating the universe. And it’s true that he exists and we exist, but even his way of existing is different than ours. You know who Harry Potter is, so in a way he exists. But he doesn’t exist in the same way that J.K. Rowlings exists. They have different ways of being. And it’s the same with us and God.