Sunday Gospel Reflection, May 31, 2026: Blessed are you, O Lord...

Blessed are you, O Lord…

How can we pray to a God who is Three Persons in One? 

    From the beginning of time, humankind has had trouble capturing an image of our ineffable God. In the Book of Exodus, when Moses goes back up Mount Sinai, taking along the two new stone tablets on which the Lord will again write his commandments, God proclaims his name and then offers three important insights into his own identity: he is the LORD, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in kindness and fidelity. Having stood with the Lord, Moses can invite him to come along with them on their journey through the desert and receive them as his own. In this scene, we do not get a complete picture of God in God’s fullness, but we do get a sense of what it means to experience the presence of God in a grace-filled moment of theophany on the mountain. 

    In John’s Gospel, Jesus tries to help the Pharisee Nicodemus to understand that God sent Jesus, the image of the intangible God, for the salvation of all, because God loves all: God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might have eternal life. Jesus, God’s Son, incarnate, is God’s gift, freely given – he is the very grace of God, an embodied invitation to Nicodemus to be born again. It is an invitation Paul will extend to the recalcitrant Corinthian community: Mend your ways, encourage one another, agree with one another, live in peace. The Corinthians do not yet know union because they can’t get beyond their own worldly divisions. Paul’s wish for them is essentially Trinitarian: The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you. Such a multi-dimensional experience of the Lord’s presence would indeed allow them to rejoice! 

    The three Persons of the Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – are bound in love to one another, indeed, so perfectly in love that they are one. We may not be able to get our minds around this concept very easily, but if we are one in Jesus, we are one in God and one in the Spirit and they are one in us. Yet this relationship is not static; there is a dynamism to the Trinity that invites us to grow in knowledge of the Lord who has given us life, welcoming the transformation such knowledge entails, that we might have an ever better experience of how God is active in our lives, everywhere, always, involved in everything. Then we too can rejoice and pray, as in the canticle of the Book of Daniel, Glory and praise to our God who is exalted above all forever! 

This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture Class.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com

Sunday Gospel Reflection, June 15, 2025: How wonderful your name in all the earth!

How wonderful your name in all the earth!
How do we understand a God in Three Persons? 

   We struggle to get our human logic around the concept of the Trinity, but logic only gets you so far when you’re talking about the perfection of love. For that is the Trinity: a perfect and intimate union of three Persons bound together by love. This concept was unknown to authors of the Old Testament, although the Book of Proverbs offers us a portrait of a personified Wisdom that is at the root of our concept of the Trinity. Proverbs tells us that the Wisdom of God was present at creation itself: When the Lord established the heavens, I was there; when he fixed fast the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him as his craftsman, and I was his delight day by day. God created us out of the intimacy of this absolute and perfect love, an act echoed in Psalm 8: You have made man little less than the angels, the psalmist sings. O Lord, our God, how wonderful your name in all the earth! 

   In John’s Gospel, Jesus hints at the complexity of the Trinity during his Last Supper Discourse, in which he states that what humankind will receive from the Spirit is the same truth Jesus himself received from the Father and handed on to his disciples. In his Letter to the Romans, Paul offers an early Trinitarian statement: we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Moreover, the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. Father, Son and Spirit are all active in the love that save us; faith gives us access to and awareness of God’s love present in our lives. Ultimately, we are called to ever greater union with God and closeness to God, because of the love that connects us to the Father, Son and Spirit, and to each other. We can’t find our way there by logical thinking, only through our access by faith to this grace in which we stand. 

   Faith leads us to a paradox and asks us to step one step beyond it. Will you let God’s love take you beyond your own human boundaries, so that your faith journey may continue its glorious trajectory of expansion? 

This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com

Sunday Gospel Reflection, May 26, 2024: In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit...

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit…

What does our relationship with the Trinity call us to? 

    In the Book of Deuteronomy, Moses makes it clear that the Lord God seeks a relationship with his people. God, Moses states, continues to support and sustain the people with strong hand and outstretched arm; the people, for their part, must remain faithful to God: You must keep his statutes and commandments, Moses tells them, that you and your children after you may prosper. Most importantly, Moses stresses the fact that the Lord is God in the heavens above and the earth below, and there is no other. It is this one unique God that Psalm 33 portrays in all his goodness: Upright is the word of the Lord, and all his works are trustworthy. God has been with God’s people from the beginning, delivering them from death and preserving them from famine. Faith in this one true God is essential to the survival of the people of Israel. 

    Our understanding of the one true God deepened significantly with the coming of Jesus who, at his Ascension, promised the gift of the Holy Spirit to remain with his disciple to the end of the age, as he says in Matthew’s Gospel. Jesus is the key that opens access to God to all of humankind, wedding heaven to earth through his death and rising, when the barrier between the two was destroyed. Thus, the disciples can go forward in his name, baptizing all in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. By invoking this clear Trinitarian formula, Jesus is asking his disciples to bring the faith they have to bear on others’ lives, allowing God – the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three in one – to be witnessed to through them. 

   As disciples of Christ, we who are led by the Spirit of God are sons and daughters of God, as Paul reminds the Roman community. We are called to embrace the Spirit of adoption that is ours through baptism, when God took us to himself and enclosed us in his infinite love, that we might enter into and accept the grace of God. The Spirit is one with us, bearing witness with our spirit, with the very essence of who we are as adopted sons and daughters, joint heirs with Christ. We gather at Mass in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and depart in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, entering into union with them and leaving in union with them. Heirs to the promise, we are children of God, and all power – the power of his love – is ours, that we too might bring our faith to bear upon our world as we witness to the power of the Trinitarian God in our own lives. 

This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com

Sunday Gospel Reflection, June 7, 2020: The God of love and peace will be with you...

The God of love and peace will be with you…

Do you know how much God wants a relationship with you?

  God has always wanted nothing more than a close, intimate relationship with humankind.  When, in the Book of Exodus, Moses descends with the tablets of the covenant written by God, only to find that the people have begun to worship a golden calf, it is not surprising that he erupts in anger, throwing down the tablets and and burning the calf.  But Moses then returns to the mountain, where God restates his covenant with the people:  The Lord, the Lord, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in kindness and fidelity. It is a covenant that will know further iterations throughout salvation history. Much later, in the Book of Daniel, when Azariah (whom we also know as Abednego) prays to God from within the fiery furnace, Blessed is your holy and glorious name, he is confident in his cohort’s strong relationship with the Lord, the God of our fathers, who is willing to look into the depths upon God’s people.  Azariah knows that God delivers those who are faithful; he is confident that God will come to their aid, and celebrates the relationship that is theirs.

  But it is only when God sends his only Son, Jesus, into the world that all past covenants are fulfilled once and for all. John's Gospel tells us that God so loved the world that he gave us Jesus, first in the Incarnation, then as a sacrifice on the cross, that the world might be saved by him; Jesus, in turn, opens up access for us to his Father, thus cementing the relationship God has long sought in the possibility of our perfect union with him, nothing short of eternal life. The cement of that relationship is the love between the Father and the Son, which takes the form of the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. In his second letter to the Corinthian community, Paul wishes upon them the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit – where grace is our experience of the Lord, love is his gift, and fellowship draws us together into relationship with them all.  Embracing that grace, love, and fellowship, the Corinthians can greet one another with a holy kiss, living in peace and rejoicing in their renewed and most intimate relationship with the Lord and with each other.  It is nothing short of this relationship that the God of love and peace seeks with us as well, that he might receive us forever as his own.  Will you say yes?

This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.

Image source:  www.wordclouds.com

Sunday Gospel Reflection, June 16, 2019: The love of God has been poured out into our hearts...

The love of God has been poured out into our hearts…

How do you reveal the love of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit?

  From the beginning of time, God the Father and God the Son have enjoyed a relationship of love out of which all things came to be.  The Book of Proverbs tells us that Wisdom was poured forth, begotten by God, possessed by God, of the very essence of God.  Creation comes to be when Wisdom herself – read by Christians as a figure for Jesus – stands beside God as his craftsman, causing the Father to delight day by day.  That delight is born of the love between the Father and the Son; we will later come to understand the Holy Spirit as that very love that flows unceasingly from Father to Son and back again.  Creation is nothing less than God’s Wisdom revealed, Christ revealed, coming to find delight in the human race, one among us, one with us.  How wonderful God’s name in all the earth! as Psalm 8 reminds us. Humankind is invited to a unique and intimate relationship with God in all God’s persons, that we might resonate with Creation and its order, and reveal God’s love to the world.

  It’s not easy for Jesus’ disciples to absorb the complexity of the Trinitarian relationship between Father, Son and Spirit.  In John’s Gospel, Jesus gives some intimation of the narrative role of each person of God as he reveals that, while he has much more to tell them, it is in fact the Spirit of truth who will guide the disciples to all truth, speaking the Word he hears from the Father himself.  Only when taken together can the three persons of God offer a full narrative of God’s truth, that is, of God’s love for us.  As Paul will tell the Romans, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ; what’s more, the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.  If Wisdom was once poured forth at Creation, manifesting as delight, thanks to Jesus, that same love is now poured into our hearts, that we might continue to pour it forth, revealing that love to all the world.

This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.

Image source:  www.wordclouds.com