HOMILY FOR MOST HOLY TRINITY SUNDAY, June 4, 2023. The Gospel of John 3:16-18. Theme: Sharing in Divinity
Today’s liturgy focuses our minds and hearts on the great and unique Christian revelation about God that separates us from all other world religions. I am referring of course to the mystery of the Most Blessed Trinity, which means that the One True God is a plurality of persons - Father, Son and Holy Spirit. How can this be? We’ll never really know, which is why we call it a mystery, but it was revealed to us by God the Son himself, when he came down from Heaven and was made flesh. And so, we accept His Word and we profess this mystery by faith alone, trusting in the fact that Jesus cannot and would not ever deceive us.
However, we can get an idea of WHY this can be true. You see, once we accept the Word of Scripture which says, “God is love” (1 John 4:8) then it can begin to make a bit of sense to us that there must be more than just one Person who is Divine. Because love is relational, that is, because it is only possible within a communion or fellowship of persons, it can begin to make sense to us that if God is love then there must be more than just one Person in this reality. And so it is that the Scripture teaches us that there are three: the Father Who loves the Son and the Son Who loves the Father. This relationship of theirs is so perfect and so powerful that it brings forth the Holy Spirit, who is said to be the Love of the Father and the Son personified.
And that’s pretty much all that we can say with some certainty about the Trinity. Anything else would simply be theorizing and speculating. But what we do know is that this awesome mysterious God Who is love reaches out to us, to each one of us individually and personally. Indeed, God has gone to the utmost limits to make known to us His infinite love that touches our hearts and captures our souls. And through the Heart of Jesus which beat for love of us, God makes it possible for us to enter into the Trinitarian relationship by sending us the Holy Spirit who tenderizes our hearts making them sensitive and responsive to this invitation to love.
Our Gospel today affirms this reaching out to us by God when it says that the Father sent the Son into the world to save or rescue us, not to shame or condemn us. Jesus came to planet Earth to show the depths of God’s love which moved Him to even share in our humanity. In doing so He entered completely into our human experiences and even our deepest miseries, with the exception of sin. But even while remaining holy and innocent Himself, He freely chooses to take on the consequences of our transgressions and in a sense forms a sin-solidarity with us. And as if all this in itself wasn’t enough, Jesus invites us into the relationship of love with the Father and the Spirit by making it possible for us to share his divinity. Yes, God’s love is so mysterious and unselfish that He actually wants us to share in his divinity!
Now, this doesn’t mean that we Christians can become gods like the Trinity! It means that once the Trinity pulls us into their dynamic love and makes us part of that relationship, it completely changes who we are supernaturally because we begin to share in the life of God by grace. On the outside we look like everyone else, but on the inside we have become a spiritually new creation, a new type of being! This is a reality that is not true for those who are unbaptized. But we who do respond to the love-invitation of God through Baptism enter into the process of spiritual transformation that is called “divinization”. You may be more familiar with this process by its more common names such as “adoption as children of God” or “growing in holiness”.
Our individual divinization begins at our Baptism, when the Father and the Son send the Holy Spirit to live within us. This presence and power of the Spirit is then intensified within us by Confirmation. And throughout our lives this divine life of grace is nourished within us and grows stronger by the Spiritual Food of the Eucharist. As a matter of fact, our sharing in divinity is so intimately connected with the Eucharist that a prayer for our divinization is recited at every Holy Mass by the deacon. He prays it on behalf of the people while he pours water into the wine of the chalice, saying: “By the mystery of this water and wine, may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity.”
This divinization prayer is intentionally said as we prepare for the Consecration of the Gifts into Christ’s Sacred Body and Precious Blood because it’s through the Eucharist that we most intimately grow in divinity. Through this Sacrament we deepen our identity as children of the Father, and we more speedily progress towards growth in holiness. Through the reception of Holy Communion we become one with God by actually taking Him into us. We mix. We combine. We become what He is.
You can find this teaching on the Eucharist and divinization in the 6th chapter of the Gospel of St. John. In it Jesus himself says that those who eat the Bread of Life will participate in the relationship He has with the Father and will have divine life within them. So you see, we have God’s own Word assuring us that because He sent His Son into the world it's now possible for us humans to participate in the intimate relationship of the Holy Trinity while we are still here on planet Earth, and if we remain faithful then it’s a sharing that will be perfected and last forever in the Kingdom of Heaven.
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