Trinity Sunday

The revelation of Christ that the one God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, must have caused many to scratch their heads in wonder.  How can one God be three at the same time?  I believe what Christ wanted us to focus on is not the ‘how’ but ‘why’. Why is God a Trinity? God is love and love demands relationships. If God is eternal, then within God there must be the dynamic of relationships between persons because God is love.  The ‘how’ we must consider is not how God is one and three, but how we can love the way God wants us to love. The love of God concerns three persons.  It is not a simple family of three but of three equals.  When I was very young, before I was baptised as a Catholic, I remember an older Catholic boy I knew telling me that the Trinity was Joseph, Mary and Jesus.  During my catechesis before baptism, I realised that he was wrong.  The Trinity is not analogous to a human family.  God is community.  That is why Christ had trained his apostles to live as community from the beginning.  The apostles knew what their master had taught them.  Thus, they began to live in community.  We see this in the Acts of the Apostles.  At the same time, the Christian community is not a inward-looking community. It is a community with a mission. Thus, we see how Paul moved with his companions from place to place, forming Christian communities.  How apt it is that after the feast of Pentecost, the first manifestation of the Christian community (the Church) in the world, we celebrate the feast of the model of community: the Holy Trinity.  Following this feast, we celebrate the means by which we sustain the community, the feast of the great Sacrament left us by Christ: His Body and Blood.  It is not incidental that when we receive Christ’s Body and Blood, we say we receive Holy Communion.  The sacrament is a sign to show that we are, together, the one Body of Christ.  Thus, holy communion is meant for us to sustain our community life.  Whatever spiritual nourishment we receive, it is not solely for the individual.  The spiritual nourishment is meant to fuel the love we have as we engage one another in the community.

Trinity Sunday: the Feast that is the foundation of the what we celebrate the week before it and the celebration after it. Let us thank God for gracing us with way we are to love as Christians.

Postscript:  I apologise for not posting for the last three Sundays.  Rather than posting something for the Sunday past, I thought it would be more appropriate to post a reflection for the Sunday to come so that when one enters the celebration of the Eucharist, there is something already being reflected in mind.