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Daily Scripture

+ 7th Week of Easter

We are to be consecrated in truth.

Readings: Acts 20:28-38 Psalm 88:29-30, 33-36 John 17:11b-19

Consecrate them in the truth. Your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, so I sent them into the world. And I consecrate myself for them, so that they may also be consecrated in truth. [John 17:18-19]

Read the Gospel very slowly and if possible, out loud and if necessary, three times! Although John’s literary style is quite complex, the farewell prayer of Jesus is as powerful as is Paul’s farewell message in Acts.

It is not likely that these passages are the actual words of Paul and Jesus. They are compositions that Luke and John or whoever wrote in their name and are based on the oral tradition of the sayings of Jesus and the preaching of Paul. They were written in the style of farewell addresses of prominent leaders of their times in order to win the attention of early believers to whom the message of truth was entrusted.

The ‘truth’ that is being proclaimed is not from a catechism nor is it a defined doctrine or dogma. It is the core truth about the God who spoke through the prophets and then through Jesus about the universality of God’s love.

During this time of immediate preparation for Pentecost, we are invited to think about our own responsibility to pass on the ‘truth’ of God’s goodness entrusted to us in Christ and how we are to live that truth in our daily lives, each in our own unique way. No one of us can do this alone and so we much join hands literally and figuratively within the community of believers everywhere.

To live the ‘truth’ is to live in the Spirit of Jesus Christ the fruits of which are charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, generosity, gentleness, moderation, self-control, reverence, etc. I’m sure you memorized these ‘fruits of the Holy Spirit.’

These are the true ‘marks’ of our authenticity as believers.

Feast of the Holy Trinity A

Saturday May 21, 2005

De Deo Uno et Trino

It’s an often-repeated story that has traveled centuries. St. Augustine, who was the know-it-all and tell-it-all theologian of the fourth century, is said to have had this encounter with a young boy while walking along the seashore. As he walked, he was pondering the mystery of the Trinity when he came upon a small boy digging a hole in the sand. The child repeatedly filled his pail with water from the ocean and poured it into the hole. Augustine asked him what he was doing.

“Sir, I am emptying the ocean into this hole!”

Augustine replied: “Son, don’t you know you can never do that? The ocean is too big; it just won’t fit into that tiny hole.”

The boy retorted: “Sir, I will empty the ocean into this hole sooner than you will understand the Trinity.” With that, he disappeared.

When I was a seminarian over a hundred years ago, the treatise on the Trinity was the introduction to our study of theology, “De Deo Uno et Trino,” translated, “About God, One and Three.” It was considered a foundational course. If we could grasp the Trinity, then we would be able to master all the other disciplines in our theological pursuits over the remaining three years of theological training.

Incidentally, it was also assumed in those days that we would learn in four years, everything we needed to know for a lifetime of priestly service in a parish.

I don’t know who was more naïve, students or professors!

It is not that the doctrine on the Trinity is unreasonable; it is beyond reason. It is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived. In fact, there is no way to explain it through the pursuit of theology. We must enter the mystery through the protocol of prayer.

Perhaps this is why so many of us fall short of the mystery. Although preachers may feel compelled on this feast of the Holy Trinity to unpack the doctrine, they would do better to write poetry and tell stories, which enable believers to ponder the reality of God’s life breathing within in us and in all creation.

Could you not smell God’s moist breath in the air today? This is better than complaining about the cold dampness in May.

But even poetry must begin with prayer. The 12th century Benedictine Abbess, Hildegard of Bingen was one among many mystics who expressed her belief in the Trinity through prayer:

To the Trinity be praise!
God is music, God is life
that nurtures every creature in its kind.
Our God is the song of the angel throng
and the splendor of secret ways
hid from all humankind,
But God our God is the life of all.

These words may seem a bit archaic to us who thrive on technology in our attempt to master every mystery, futile though that may be.

Contemporary thinker, educator, poet and incipient mystic, Michael Fox, places his prayer through the lens of another world view: God as parent—father and mother; Jesus as liberator, gift of freedom, and Holy Spirit, bond with God and all humanity, as sanctifier and source of all wisdom, ‘sophia,’ the feminine attribute of God—listen up, men!

Of course, each of us must pursue our unique relationship with God through our own unique personality, which also renders our prayer unique and special. Who is God for you?

Though God is surely absolute, objective and therefore real, God is also mystery and known only gradually in time and space; in our own time and space. The great theologian, Karl Rahner, so influential on the thinking of Vatican II wrote about God’s self-communication not just to our minds but to our hearts.

Say not that God is in my heart. Say rather that I am in the heart of God.

The encounter of Moses with God shortly after the destruction of the golden calf described in the first reading today was not his invitation to God but God’s invitation to him, an expression of God’s desire—no, of God’s promise to walk with Moses and the Hebrew people and with us. It is God, who breaks through the mystery, not we.

Saint Paul addressing himself to a very messy “Christian” community which makes our present church crises seem small in comparison, ultimately pleads with the believers to succumb to God’s grace not as a cover up but as an ultimate admission and confession that peace can be found only within the realm of the divine.

Within the life of the Church there can be no hierarchy other than that of the Trinity—Father, Son and Holy Spirit and whatever does not correspond to God’s life must be jettisoned and cast away—honors, title, pomp and power. Only through our surrender to the ‘Mystery’ can we find our strength. As the Church comes to accept its political weakness in the face of raw worldly power, will it come to know its strength in the presence of God.

Finally, in his Gospel, John the Evangelist presents the core of the message—divine love, expressed through agape, total self-giving love; pure unadulterated love flowing from the divine, eternal energy that we do not grasp but which enfolds us, envelops us in life as an introduction to the next life.

John tells us this is nothing more or less than the gift of eternal life to which we are introduced on this earth. It is ours for the asking, actually it was given to us as gift at Baptism, unmerited grace, unlimited potential for good, unrestricted access to God— if we ask, we shall receive and if we receive it wholeheartedly, it will change us and if it changes us, it will eventually change our Church and our world.

The earth proclaims the greatness of God
and all creation exults in God’s glory.
Jesus remains the perfect exemplar and everlasting covenant
who unites heaven and earth
and all humanity to the eternal Father.

Holy Spirit,
life-giving breath of God, ‘ruah’
that permeates the fiber of our being
giving strength to the weak,
courage to the fainthearted,
hope to the hopeless,
joy to the sorrowing,
may we succumb to the grace of this feast
and be for all humanity,
a sign that we have not given up on God
but more so, that God has not given up on us.

It was for this reason St. Paul concluded his second letter with these words:

“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ,
the love of God,
and the communion of the Holy Spirit
be with you all!”