Trinity Sunday – Year A

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 A), the readings are chosen from important chapters in the Bible and each reading underlines a highly significant moment in God's love story with the human person. The first reading is from chapter 34 of Exodus, where God reveals to Moses the divine attributes that describe God's presence among the people: "The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means clearing the guilty, but visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children's children, to the third and the fourth generation" (Exodus 34:6-7).

The second reading from Saint Paul's Second Letter to the Corinthians contains the blessing of the apostle on the community: "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you" (2 Corinthians 13:13), a blessing that has become an invocation of the Trinity used at the beginning of the celebration of mass.

The reading from the Gospel of Saint John (3:6-18) recalls the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus in Jerusalem as Jesus explains to the sage the role of the Spirit and of the Son in God's loving plan of salvation.