My little joke got great laughs the first three times I delivered this homily, but you could have heard crickets the fourth. So I'll spend this afternoon pondering the great mystery of just what it is that makes a joke funny...
A
priest asked the catechism class,
“What
is the Holy Trinity?”
A
little boy answered very weakly,
“The
Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”
“I
didn’t understand,” said the priest.
“You’re
not supposed to,” replied the boy. “It’s a mystery!”
The
Most Holy Trinity is indeed a mystery:
the
mystery at the very heart of the Christian faith.
But
I believe we’ve taken to making the Holy Trinity
even
more of a mystery than it already is.
One
way we do that
is
by keeping the Good News to ourselves.
A
recent study shows that 62% of U.S. Catholics
seldom
or never share their faith or view of God with anyone else.
We speak
about our beliefs at an even lower rate
than
Americans who don’t believe in God at all.
In
other words: atheists in this country
We
also make the Trinity more of a mystery
by
convincing ourselves
that the Triune God is complicated.
With
almost 2,000 years
of theological reflection under our belt,
we
have entire libraries filled with intricate speculations
and
a specialized vocabulary of tongue-twisting terms
which
most folks can’t spell, leave alone comprehend.
To
many minds, when faced with all of this,
God
has become a puzzle to be solved,
an
abstract idea in need of explanation.
How
can 1 + 1 + 1 = 1…and not 3?
Perplexed,
we gladly leave not only talking about God,
but
even trying to get anywhere close to him,
to
the “professionals,” to the “experts.”
The
result? From the same survey…
Less
than half—48%—of U.S. Catholics today
are
certain that you can have
a personal relationship with God.
And
29% of Catholics think of God
merely as some sort
of
impersonal superpower
or “force.” (cf. Pew U.S. Religious Landscape Survey)
By
sometimes saying too little,
and
by other times saying too much,
we’ve
managed to make the mystery of God
into
a great big question mark…
…and
no one is much inclined
to give his or her time and attention—
leave
alone their very life—
to
a question mark.
Page around in your Bible a little bit,
look through the ancient Creeds,
the
prayers of the Mass, and the lives of the saints,
and
you’ll get a very different impression of God
than
the one which so many of our contemporaries
have
come to accept.
The
God of Christianity,
the
God revealed to us by Jesus Christ,
the
God we preach and confess and adore
not
just on this solemnity, but Sunday after Sunday,
isn’t
some nameless, faceless energy
existing
simply to keep in motion
the
massive mechanics of the universe.
No—the
God of Jesus Christ is personal.
The
God we believe in is so intensely personal, in fact,
that
this God is three Persons—a divine Trinity.
And
the God of Jesus Christ is also relational—
so completely
relational, in fact,
that
this God is an eternal exchange of love.
And
this perfect communion, this perfect unity of love
is
not a relationship closed in upon itself;
rather,
salvation history is the story
of
that relationship spilling over again and again:
God
the Father crafting the heavens and the earth out of love,
and
taking delight in the human race;
God
the Son dwelling among us in human flesh
and
dying for love of sinful mankind;
God
the Holy Spirit poured as love into our hearts
and
guiding us into all truth.
Is
the Most Holy Trinity a mystery? Of
course!
But
not in the sense that God
is a
question to be answered or a riddle to be figured out.
One
God in three Persons is a mystery
in
the way that the beauty of a sunset is a mystery,
in
the way that the birth of a child is a mystery,
in
the way that falling in love is a mystery.
You
see, the life-changing mystery revealed to us in Christ
is
that the All-knowing, All-powerful, All-holy Lord of all things
so
desperately desires to draw each one of us into his inner life—
to have
a personal relationship with you and with me.
What is man, O Lord, that you should be mindful or him,
or the son of man that you should care for him? (Ps. 8:5)
God
loves.
And
God wants to be loved.
So
simple! So mind-boggling!
That’s
a mystery we can believe in...
...and maybe even one we can begin to understand.
...and maybe even one we can begin to understand.
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