But how do we live out our relationship with the Holy Trinity?
From time immemorial, God has sought relationship with humanity – not in the aggregate sense, but individually. It has taken some time, however, for us to come to an understanding of what that relationship might look like. In the Book of Deuteronomy, Moses reminds the people that the God that created them also gives them commandments by which to live – commandments which involve not a set of rules to follow, but an opening of oneself to God, that we might know his will and do it. Commandments are meant to reveal the will of God to God’s people, that they might live in his ways, with him as their God. Moses reminds the people that this invitation to relationship is extraordinary: Did anything so great ever happen before? Psalm 33 similarly stresses that God’s covenant, as expressed through God’s kindness and justice, is itself an expression of God’s love for all God has created; we must thus put our hope in God, trusting in his promises.
Those promises will be fulfilled in the person of Jesus, who invites us to union with God, a union made possible by his death and resurrection, which gave us access to God, and by Jesus’ ascension, which enables the Holy Spirit to dwell in our hearts. By that Spirit, Paul tells the Romans, we experience adoption as sons of God and heirs with Christ. We fear death, but Christ conquered death, freeing us from fear, from the spirit of slavery, and allowing us to embrace our adoption as children of a God whose love is limitless. Jesus thus exhorts his followers in Matthew’s Gospel to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Go out, in other words, and gather all nations into this adoption, that all might be heirs, free of slavery to sin, joined in relationship and union with God and with each other in a shared life of love and connection, indeed, to a life in which love is revealed in connection, knowing he is with us, always, until the end of the age.
The Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity reminds us to open our hearts to God regularly and often, to listen to the Lord, and be present to him, to live in him and to allow him to live in us. In so doing, may we find our identity in a God whose very existence in the Trinity is an expression of divine love for all, a love – and a relationship – we are called to share with our world.
This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com
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