Trinity Sunday - Year B

In our Hebrew-speaking communities, we call this feast: the feast of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, God is one". The term "Trinity" is a complex theological term and is not always understood even among Christians. In our communities, the name of this feast is long and complex but this reflects the development of the belief in one God who is revealed to us in three: as Father, creator of heaven and earth, as risen Son and as Holy Spirit. However, the length of the name of the feast also reflects the long love story of God with the human person.

There is no doubt that it is impossible to understand the feast without going back over the various chapters of the history of salvation - God's story with humans from the beginning of creation to the end of the world - a story told in the Bible (the Scriptures of Israel and the New Testament). From a liturgical point of view, the feast is placed one week after Pentecost and serves as a summary of the entire period the Christian faithful have lived since Holy Week (passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ) until the giving of the Holy Spirit (on Pentecost). Therefore, in order to enter into the spirit of the feast, we must remember both the history of salvation and the great feasts and their meaning.

This year (Year B), the readings are chosen from important chapters in the Bible and each reading underlines an important moment in God's love story with the human person. The first reading is from chapter 4 of Deuteronomy and is a part of Moses' summary of God's story with humanity in general and with Israel in particular. "For ask now about former ages, long before your own, ever since the day that God created human beings on the earth; ask from one end of heaven to the other: has anything so great as this ever happened or has its like ever been heard of?" (Deuteronomy 4:32). The thing "so great" in Moses' words to the people of Israel as they await to enter the land, is that God, creator of heaven and earth, speaks with a people from among the peoples of the earth (Deuteronomy 4:33), that he has chosen it (4:34) and loved it (4:37). The vocation of this people is to bear witness that: "the Lord is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other" (4:39). The people of Israel, and the Church with them, are called to bear witness to the world that one God has made the heaven and the earth and created the human person in his image and according to his likeness. As a loving Father, he does not hide from his children his will and so Moses exhorts them, saying: "Keep his statutes and his commandments, which I am commanding you today" (4:40). God the Father acts for the sake of his beloved human person, called to be his son and to carry his image and his likeness to the ends of the earth through a life of commandments and Torah that God gave.

The second reading this year for the feast is from chapter 8 of Saint Paul's Epistle to the Romans. This chapter emphasizes the role of God's Spirit in God's relationship with the human person. God, our heavenly Father, creates the human person to be his son. This is the meaning of the expression "in his image according to his likeness" - the human person is like his Father, a resemblance that comes to expression in a life based a Torah of holiness ("Be holy as I am holy" is the refrain that repeats itself at the heart of the Torah, in the Book of Leviticus). The life of God flows in the human person, as it is written in the Book of Genesis: "he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life" (Genesis 2:7). The Spirit we received on the Feast of Pentecost is the same one we received at creation, however by choosing the path of distance from God and lack of observance of the commandments, we lived not according to the Spirit of God but rather according to the impulses of the world. Jesus renews in us the Spirit of God by his total obedience to the will of his Father. The Spirit that lives in Jesus during his earthly life and especially when he rises from the dead is the same Spirit given to us that transforms us from slaves to sin into children of God. In the Spirit, we are brothers and sisters of Christ and so: "children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ - if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him" (Romans 8:17).

The reading from the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 28, focuses on the figure of the Risen Jesus. This year, for the feast, we read the last verses of the Gospel of Matthew. These verses are important for the feast because in them Jesus formulates an understanding of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19). He commands his disciples to go and change all nations into disciples through baptism in the name of God: "Father, Son and Holy Spirit". He adds immediately thereafter that the baptism in the name of God is so that they might learn his Torah that comes to expression in the life of Jesus, the one who came "not to abolish but to fulfill" the Law and the Prophets (Matthew 5:17). The disciples, who are going out to baptize the nations, are obligated to teach them all that Jesus has commanded them (Matthew 28:20). In the writings of Israel, after the commandments comes the promise as a blessing and here too, at the end of the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus after formulating the commandments of baptism and studying the commandments, promises: "I am with you always, to the end of the age" (Matthew 28:20). These words are a reminder of Jesus' other name in the Gospel of Matthew - Immanuel (cf. Matthew 1:23, Immanuel means "God is with us"). Jesus is the perfect son of the God who created the human person to be his son. Jesus fulfils the word of God and thus lives fully the life of his Father. The Risen Jesus is with us always because he is the fulfillment of the promise "Immanuel - God is with us". He came to make reparation for our sins and to lead us back to our Father so that we too might be united with him. Jesus cannot be separated from his Father even if we distinguish between him and God the Father. The Spirit of God in him unites him to God so that we can indeed say: "Glory be to the one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen".