A Trying-Hard God (Trinity Sunday C)

Reciprocity is an essential element in loving. Love cannot thrive in isolation. It naturally transcends itself and seeks and reaches out to a beloved and yearns for reciprocity for its fulfillment.  An unreciprocated love grieves in pain and may eventually perish; if not, it endures the agony of rejection in silence like a mother weeping in secret because of her ungrateful child. But when love is reciprocated, it celebrates with joy.  It throbs with life. It turns itself into a powerful creative force. It becomes life-giving.

God as Trinity of Love.  God is love; and the best way to appreciate this truth is to see it in terms of a dynamic reciprocity of loving within God’s self. One of the analogies presented by St. Augustine for an understanding of the mystery of the Trinity, albeit not his favorite, is the analogy of interpersonal love.  Love requires a Lover, a beloved, and the reciprocal bond of love that unites them. The Infinite Lover, whom we call in human language, Father, reaches out to the object of his self-transcending love, the Beloved whom we call Son. The Son, in turn, eternally reciprocates the Father’s love, hence, giving rise to the mutual love that unites them. We understand this bond of love as the Holy Spirit. Thus, God is a Trinity of love. As such, God’s love is not static. It is dynamic as it is an eternal movement of reciprocal loving.

God’s dynamic self-transcending love provides the ground for God’s creative act and God’s self-revelation. Simply put, God created us and revealed God’s self to us because He is love, because it is love’s greatest joy and desire to share and care for another. Today’s readings point to these two acts of the Triune God-- creation and revelation.

Trinity’s Creative Act and Self-Revelation. The first reading (Prov 8:22-31) alludes to the eternal presence and role of the Holy Spirit in God’s creative act.  Proverb’s personification of wisdom finds her present with God in the entire process of creation. As the wisdom of God, in the language of the Old Testament, the Spirit was with God before the creation of the earth, water, mountains and hills. When the Lord established the heavens, made firm the skies, fixed the foundations of the earth, and set the limits of the sea, the Spirit was there “beside” the Lord as his craftsman (v. 30).

The gospel reading (Jn 16: 12-15), on the other hand, illustrates the Trinitarian act of revelation.  Jesus, the Son, is the Father’s revelation. Everything that the Father has is possessed by the Son.  It is this “truth” that Jesus has spoken of and nothing more.  The Holy Spirit, the Advocate, as promised by the Lord, serves two important functions: to enlighten the disciples in the fuller understanding of Jesus and his revelation; second, to glorify Christ as the sole mediator, the “truth” of God.

Solemnity of the Most Blessed Trinity.  Today’s solemnity allows us to appreciate the truth that God is a Trinity of Love.  And out of love, God acts as a Trinity first in creating the world, the universe, and us. And as if it were not enough, He not only created us, He revealed Himself to us through God’s Word, Jesus Christ, and through the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit.

What I see amazes me tremendously.  God has gone out of his way creating us and revealing Himself to us because He is love. His desire is to reach out to us and share God’s life.  God desires to be in relationship with us his people because it is love’s nature. In the book of John, God always does the initiative in loving. God has loved us first. He is a God who offers his love and He is really trying hard.  We probably believe that God does not need us because He is self-sufficient.  So, all too often, we don’t’ take seriously his offer of love.  On this Trinity Sunday, we see a trying-hard God, a God who has done everything in his power to manifest his love to us. We ought to understand, as God’s image and likeness, that when love is offered, it longs for reciprocity.  When it is reciprocated, it rejoices; when ignored or rejected, it grieves. God, I believe, longs for all creation to accept and respond to his offer of love.  No wonder that the Lord Jesus always exclaim that there is much rejoicing in the heavens when a sinner comes back to God’s embrace.

No wonder, too, from among the hundreds of commandments, Jesus points quite easily to the most important of all to guide us: First, love of God and, second, love of neighbor.   The Kingdom of God in its fulfillment is undoubtedly characterized by this dynamic reciprocity of loving, which is, after all, the very nature of the Triune God.

This Sunday, let us heighten our awareness of God’s offer of love.  Our God, the Triune God, longs that we love him in return.  When we are not ready, know that He, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, will do everything to draw us close to Him until we love him freely.  He is a God who really tries hard.

God’s Two Hands (6th Sunday Easter C)

The Father works with his two hands: the Word and the Spirit. It was Irenaeus of Lyons, one of the early Fathers of the Church, who expressed this Trinitarian understanding of God’s activity in salvation history. This Trinitarian outlook can help us approach the gospel reading today (Jn 14:23-29) with a keen awareness of the complimentary roles of Jesus, the Word of God, and of the Spirit, the Advocate, in making God present in our Christian living.

God is made present in our lives through the Word and the Spirit. Today’s gospel stresses this truth: God lives in us when we keep his Word and as we allow the Holy Spirit to empower us in our Christian witnessing. Let us have a word for each of these two agents of God’s indwelling in us.

Keeping the Word of God. Jesus is the Word of the Father. We can only come to know God through his Word, his self-revelation. No wonder, Jesus stresses, as part of his leave-taking discourse, the principle of the concurrence of the indwelling of God with the observance of his word. As we have it in the gospel today: “Whoever loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him” (v. 23).

To Keep the Word of God means getting to know Jesus, listening to him, and obeying his commandments. It means living out in our daily lives everything he has taught us. When we do this, God lives in us. Negatively expressed, today’s gospel reminds us of the incompatibility between living in God and disregarding his Word. No one can honestly claim loving God and living in him when one does not observe God’s will.

All too often, our Christian living suffers this incompatibility. We easily claim God being with us but we fail to show it in actual witnessing. How, for instance, can we claim to be followers of Jesus and at the same time be comfortably part of a culture of corruption that gnaws at every fibre of our social life like a silent cancer?

Today’s gospel then allows us to see the indispensability of knowing Jesus, the Word, and living by his precepts in order to enjoy the peace of God’s abiding presence. Without the Word becoming incarnate in our own lives, how then can we have God dwell in us?

Invoking the Holy Spirit. The Spirit works hand in hand with the Word. The Spirit, the Advocate, teaches and reminds us of everything Jesus, the Word, has told us (v. 26). The Spirit helps us understand God’s Word, shedding light on the salvific meaning of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. It is the Spirit that emboldens us to become fearless witnesses of Jesus. The Spirit empowers us to keep the word of God, hence, the Spirit ensures God’s abiding presence in us.

As a Christian, am I aware of this crucial role of the Spirit in my everyday witnessing? Do I invoke his empowering presence especially in moments when courage and conviction are called for in order to keep God’s word amidst a culture that jeers at the very core of the gospel values?

Left on our own devices, we always end up insecure and fearful about what we can do in terms of witnessing to the Word of God. My own feeling is that a great number of Christians have remained insecure as they honesty doubt their human capacity to keep the word of Jesus. They have forgotten to allow the Spirit to work through them, to embolden them, to assure them that, no matter what, it is God who is always in charge.

In the final analysis, God works with his two hands—the Word and the Spirit—in order to make sure that his love is effectively communicated and his Word kept that we may live in him and God may live in us now and forever.

We have just done our national and local elections, let us continue to invoke the power of the Holy Spirit to guide our nation into the path that God wills for us his people. We dream of a better nation, then let us listen to the Word in our consciences and allow the Spirit of God, the God who acts in history, to work through each of us and collectively, in our effort for nation-building. God does not leave us in the inadequacies of our own device. After all, He is the God of history; He acts in history, gently, mightily, with his two hands.

Three Lovely Moments with God (Trinity Sunday)

An atheist was walking through the woods. 'What majestic trees! 'What powerful rivers! 'What beautiful animals! He said to himself. Suddenly, he heard a rustling in the bushes behind him. He turned to look... and saw a 7-foot grizzly bear charge towards him! He ran as fast as he could along the path. He looked over his shoulder & saw that the bear was closing on him... He looked over his shoulder again, and the bear was even closer... and then ... He tripped and fell. Rolling over to pick himself up, he found the bear was right on top of him reaching towards him with its left paw and raising the right paw to strike! At that instant the Atheist cried out, 'Oh my God!'

Time Stopped ... The bear froze ... The forest was silent ...

A bright light shone upon the man, and a voice came out of the sky ... "You deny my existence for all these years, you teach others I don't exist and even credit creation to cosmic accident. Do you expect me to help you out of this predicament?" "Am I to count you as a believer?"

The atheist looked directly into the light. "It would be hypocritical of me to suddenly ask you to treat me as a Christian now... but perhaps you could make the BEAR a Christian?"

A pause ...

"Very well," said the voice. The light went out. The sounds of the forest resumed. And the bear dropped his right arm, bowed his head and made the sign of the cross... “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Bless, O Lord, this food which I am about to receive...”

To be a Christian believer is to accept as a central mystery of faith God’s self-revelation as a Triune God. Our God, as revealed through Jesus Christ, is Trinity. Or as the17th century English poet, John Donne, would have it in his Holy Sonnet XIV, “Three-Personed God.” Or better still, as any newly-converted-Christian bear would have it, “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

Today is Trinity Sunday. The most dreaded Sunday by preachers… because of the daunting task of illuminating the people about this central mystery of Christian faith and because such a task somehow brings the preacher back to those confusing days of classical and metaphysical discussions on the subject from which he managed quite triumphantly a barely passing grade after all the migraine attacks!

Today need not be a migraine day for us. What I would like us to have is an enjoyable way of approaching the mystery of the Trinity and allowing God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit to become a vital force that animates and directs our Christian living and prayer. Allow me then to share with you a way of praying that weaves the fabric of our daily lives into the matrix of our relationship with the Three-Personed God. I call this method “The Three Lovely Moments with God,” a method I’ve learned from my Jesuit spiritual directors. This is fundamentally an Ignatian examen of consciousness with a Trinitarian twist.

Granting that we have found a sacred space where we can enjoy peace and quiet for a few moments, and granting we have assumed a comfortable posture for praying, we begin by asking the grace of God’s presence and enlightenment in the three lovely moments with Him. Then we enter into the three moments.

The first moment is the moment with the Loving Father. In the silence, we go over our lives and, with God’s enlightenment, seek to see where we have experienced the loving presence and action of the Father. To the Father we attribute the beauty and bounty of creation. He is the source of every being and their sustenance. He is our Abba and from him overflows goodness on which we totally depend for our well-being as his children. How have we experienced this goodness and love? Acknowledgment of the significant moments of God’s goodness in our lives leads to a grateful heart. This first moment then is a moment of thanksgiving and praise to a loving God whose Fatherly (for some, Motherly) love sustains us.

The second moment is the moment with the Son. Much as we want to see our lives filled with nothing else but God’s grace, we do see traces of sin that sadly mars our beautiful relationship with God. Sin lurks and strikes like a poisonous scorpion in our most vulnerable moments. But the sting of sin and death has been vanquished by the Son, Jesus Christ, through his passion, death, and resurrection! We can courageously face, then, our moments of weakness and, with tremendous sorrow for having rejected God’s love, turn to Jesus, our Saviour, for the grace of forgiveness, reconciliation, and healing. This second moment therefore is a moment of true repentance and celebration of God’s mercy through the Son, Jesus Christ our Saviour.

The third moment is the moment with the Holy Spirit. The presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives as individual and as a Church is the fulfilment of the Easter promise. The Father and the Son sent the Holy Spirit to abide with us as the Paraclete, our Advocate. He is the Spirit of Truth who guides us to all truth (Jn 16:12). At Pentecost, the Spirit emboldened Jesus’ disciples to preach without fear the Good News to the ends of the earth. The Spirit empowers us and enables us to do what God wills us to do and accomplish that which brings greater glory to God’s name. This third moment then is a time for us to listen to God’s directions. What is God’s invitation for me to do? Do I have plans and projects? Are they mine or God’s? How am I to proceed? In this third moment, we then let the Holy Spirit guide us to the path where God wants us to take. This is the moment of empowerment and direction.

What a lovely life it is that we have as Christians! Baptized “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Mt 28:19), we share in the life of the Trinity. In the second reading (Rom. 8:14-17), Paul explains this sharing in the life of the Trinity as our spiritual adoption by the Father by which we become sons and daughters of God whom we call Abba! This makes us co-heirs with Christ as the Spirit united in our spirit bears witness that we are God’s children. 

Hence our life is a life of intimate relationship with the Triune God. A life dependent on a love that never fails, a life that tends towards perfection through the grace of forgiveness, a life that is directed and empowered to share in God’s creative activity.

This Trinity Sunday then, far from being a dreadful day, is a lovely day... a day to remind us to enjoy the three lovely moments with God as often as we can. Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit!

A Love that Saves (Trinity Sunday A)

(Photo by Rex Features. Caption added.)

What does Trinity mean to today’s man and woman who struggle in life each day trying to make sense of the mess, so it seems, or the brokenness, of our contemporary human existence?

In Manila, I’ve always been intrigued, if not fascinated, by taxi drivers making the sign of the cross whenever they pass by a church. Once I asked a driver about the meaning of his gesture when he touched the crucifix of the rosary dangling in front of him and quickly made the sign of the cross while driving. He replied rather sheepishly, “Sir, we just passed by a church.” He smiled and continued, “I’m a catholic... I have reverence for the house of God. I made the sign of the cross because that’s how we start our prayer.” “You mean you’re praying now?” I inquired. He scratched his head much like what Efren “Bata” Reyes does in difficult circumstance, and answered, “I really wish I’m in the house of God right now praying but, no, I’m driving... Sir, life is difficult... I touched the crucifix and made the sign of the cross because deep within me is a conviction that God won’t abandon me... I believe that God sees me... and has mercy on me... that God loves me and my family... and his love will see us through difficult times...” 

I could have continued the interrogation but I didn’t; honestly, I was awed and moved by the driver’s faith. Much was unarticulated... most part of it was existentially lived out as he stirred the wheel through the thick of the traffic while all at the same time hoping for the best for himself and his loved ones in most of their trying times.

I say that the taxi driver’s faith is attuned to the truth of today’s Gospel reading (Jn 3:16-18) and both can facilitate our reflection on the mystery of the Trinity. The driver believes in the Triune God as he unapologetically makes the sign of the cross—in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. As he makes this gesture, he believes deep down that God is love and full of mercy... that God blesses him and his family.

Today’s gospel reading shows that too: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him” (vv. 16-17). The gospel announces to us the heart of the Good News: the Father’s great love for us which is effectively manifested through the Son’s redemptive work. God’s love does not condemn. God’s love saves.

The redemptive work of Jesus Christ, the Son, the person in the Trinity who shared our humanity, can be the key to a deeper insight into the mystery of our faith in the Triune God. In theology, the contemporary approach to understanding the Trinity has already departed from a detached and out-of-this-world ontological exposition of the classical approach and has moved towards articulating what is closest to our human experience. The contemporary theology takes, for instance, the paschal mystery of Christ as entry point to a greater appreciation of our faith in the Three-Personed God. I believe this approach can help articulate the taxi driver’s faith in the God of the cross.

For most of us, the passion- death-resurrection of Jesus (or the paschal mystery) is easily appealing. At a recollection for the Eucharistic Lay Ministers (kaabag) of a certain parish, I played Mel Gibson’s film, “Passion of the Christ,” and that did the trick. They were all teary-eyed moved by the sacrificial love of Jesus, the Son. Hence, I didn’t have to belabour the point by an extended boring input! The paschal mystery interests us. Even captivates us. Draws us to an intimate relationship with our loving God.

The sacrificial love of Jesus is manifested in the most sublime way through his passion and death. “Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends” (Jn. 15: 13). His resurrection-ascension announces with joy the victory of the life-giving power of God’s love over the alienating and destructive propensity of sin. Love has overcome sin and death.

Therefore, the greatness of the Father’s love, a love that saves, is made known to us in human terms through the sacrifice and victory of Jesus Christ, the Son. The Father, out of his great love for us, gave his only Son that we may be saved and have life (Jn. 3: 16-17).

The Holy Spirit who dwells in us is the person in the Trinity that enables us to understand, appreciate, and actually experience in a real way the love so sublimely revealed in the paschal mystery we saw above. It is the Holy Spirit that makes us cry out a thanksgiving prayer for being so loved. It is the Holy Spirit that accompanies us in life, giving us the confidence, like the taxi driver, that no matter what, everything’s gonna be fine... that the mess I am in will eventually be alright because I am loved with a love that saves.

The driver touched the crucifix and made the sign of the cross in the name of the Trinity. Such a gesture, in his lack of capacity to articulate the beauty of the paschal mystery of Christ, is a simple act of faith in the unfathomable mystery of God’s love for him and his family. When we gaze at the cross of Christ, we pray to the Holy Spirit to enable us to see in it the greatest love of all. A love that does not condemn. A love that saves. It is the Father’s unconditional love expressed to us in human terms by the sacrificial and redemptive love of the Son, Jesus Christ. It is this love that enables us to trust in life despite its seeming brokenness.

When we look at the cross, meditatively, may our hearts well up with the love that saves—the love of the Father and the Son which we existentially experience, in whatever state of life we are in, through the indwelling of the Spirit.

Lord, thank you for the knowledge and inner conviction that I am loved with a love that saves in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.