Readings:
1st Reading; Exodus 34 : 4 – 6, 8 – 9
Responsorial Psalm; Daniel 3 : 52 – 56
2nd Reading;2 Corinthians 13 : 11 – 13
Gospel; John 3 : 16 – 18.

Today is celebrated in commemoration of the Most Holy Trinity. The subject of the Trinity is as incomprehensible as the mystery of the Incarnation and the transubstantiation. It is one of the most questioned beliefs by some Christian faiths and non-believers. I have had so many questions about this and like others about the nature of God, I have little to say. I have told questioners before, though not convincingly that the Trinity is the ways, our Invisible and Omnipresent God has presented Himself to mankind in Salvation history. This may raise further questions but the belief to me, is likened to my using many words to express the same idea. A human trying to explain the Divine!!! Any explanation of the Trinity can be as unsatisfactory to human thought as is the human intellectual inability to comprehend God.

Centuries have come and gone without any intellectual explaining the nature of God or the Trinity satisfactorily. One great scholar of the Church called Augustine (of Hippo) is said to have spent a good part of his life praying to God to understand how there can be Three persons in One God. One day during one of his solitary prayers along a beach, he came across a small boy who had dug a tiny hole in the sand and was using a container to bring the sea water into the hole. Augustine was surprise to see a little boy at such a lonely place and stopped praying, then asked the lad what he was doing. The little boy explained that he wanted to transfer all the sea water from the sea to the little hole he had dug in the sand. Augustine looked at him for a moment and told him that it was practically impossible to bring the whole ocean into that little hole. The boy, looking up at him told him, just as if he knew the subject of his prayer along the beach that time, that it was not also possible to understand how there can be three persons in one God. And before Augustine could blink his eyes, the young lad had vamoosed. 

Our first reading shows Moses staggering up the mountain with tablets of stone in great disappointment and fear that God will reject his pleas. Moses’ stubborn followers had made a god and were worshipping when Moses arrived with the Decalogue. So, out of anger, Moses tried to shatter the stone tablets in which God had written the ten Commandments. Before Moses has time to plead, God acts Godly – showing His mercy, kindness and steadfast love. Moses hears the attributes of God; tenderness and compassion,  slow to anger and rich in mercy and faithfulness.

The Gospel affirms God’s love, compassion and mercy. The so often quoted verse about God’s love ( John 3:16) that speaks of God’s love for mankind. Though we have continued to go astray, God has not condemned us. It is this infinite love of God for mankind that makes God to express Himself in ways different from and incomprehensible to human ways. 

John tells us here that God’s love has no limits, no boundaries. It is for every person and nation. For God to send His Son to save us, means we have first gone off His ways. If God goes thus far, it teaches us that God’s love is unearned. Is there really any other kind of love? Can we persuade or cajole someone that he ought to love us? We can! But such love will have limits. Limits because if the person is not convinced, love does not follow. This is not the kind of love God wants us to have for one another. God is teaching us that our love should not be a matter of owing someone for favours done. If we love without pre-conditions,  we will show compassion, mercy and forgiveness when one goes wrong. Can you remember the kind of feeling and satisfaction you get when  you go out of your way to help a neighbor in need without placing a condition on the help?  This is the kind of love that involves nourishing someone else’s soul and not love that only someone else will nourish ours. 

Such love is usually gentle, like the sun on the buds in late spring when they refuse to open. Tightly wrapped up in themselves, they are as hard as stone. The wind shakes them. The hail beats them. The frost squeezes them in a fist of iron and all three shout out, ‘Open up! Open up!’ Instead of opening up, the buds reinforce their shells and retreat even more deeply into themselves. Then the sun comes along. It issues no threats and makes no demands. It just creates a friendlier climate and what happens?  Almost overnight, the buds begin to soften and expand. Then their shells crack and they burst out.  If you love like God requires, then you are gentle like the sun and there are certain tasks which only gentleness can accomplish.

Such love is usually gentle, like the sun on the buds in late spring when they refuse to open. Tightly wrapped up in themselves, they are as hard as stone. The wind shakes them. The hail beats them. The frost squeezes them in a fist of iron and all three shout out, ‘Open up! Open up!’ Instead of opening up, the buds reinforce their shells and retreat even more deeply into themselves. Then the sun comes along. It issues no threats and makes no demands. It just creates a friendlier climate and what happens?  Almost overnight, the buds begin to soften and expand. Then their shells crack and they burst out.  If you love like God requires, then you are gentle like the sun and there are certain tasks which only gentleness can accomplish.

There cannot be love of God without love of neighbour. Quite often, God expresses Himself through our neighbour. We know stories in which God comes to someone who has been praying and asking for something, through a familiar person or even a stranger. I remember a story of a young boy who stood watching a gypsy as he drank from a well in the town sqaure

After drinking, the man continued to gaze into the well, as though looking at someone. He was a giant of a man but had a friendly face. So, the boy approached him and asked ‘Who lives down there?’. ‘God does’ answered the gypsy. ‘Can I see Him?’ ‘Sure you can’ said the gypsy. Then taking the boy into his arms, he lifted him up so that he could look into the well.All the boy could see, however, was his own reflection in the water. ‘But, that’s only me’ he cried out in disappointment. ‘All I see is me’. ‘Ah’ replied the gypsy, ‘now you know where God lives. He lives in you’.

A Little Prayer.

Thank You Lord Jesus for making me know the ways the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are presented to me. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. As it was, is now and so shall it be. Amen. 

 Have a blessed Week!

Bobe  Talla Toh.