The Trinity, The Word, And Words – Trinity Sunday – Sermon by Father Levine

Fr. Joseph Levine; Holy Family Catholic Church and Missions, Burns, Oregon; May 26, 2024

Blessed the people the Lord has chosen to be his own.

The Lord has chosen us to belong to his people, through our baptism in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Today, we celebrate the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity. First, let us make a quick review of the basic doctrine.

In eternity, the Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God; they are not three gods, but only one God. Yet, the Father is neither the Son, nor the Holy Spirit; the Son is neither the Father, nor the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit is neither the Father, nor the Son; they are three distinct divine persons, each fully and equally God, and yet all together the one God, the Holy Trinity, eternal, almighty, all-knowing, the Creator and Lord of all.

In the fulness of time, God, the Son and Word, the 2nd person of the Holy Trinity, Jesus Christ, was visibly sent to us, becoming man born of the Virgin Mary, who was crucified for our salvation, rose from the dead, and in his sacred humanity is now seated in glory at the right hand of the Father.

The Holy Spirit was also visibly sent into the world, by way of a sign, the dove resting on Jesus Christ at his baptism, revealing him to be the Son of God; the cloud at the Transfiguration, again revealing Jesus to be filled with the glory of God; and in tongues of fire on Pentecost upon the Apostles and disciples, manifesting the holy Catholic Church to the world, as the Body of Christ and Temple of the Holy Spirit, which continues Christ’s work throughout the course of time, until he returns in glory.

With the basic truth of our faith set before our eyes, guided by the word of God in sacred Scripture, let us now try to enter into the meaning, exploring a little of the vast ocean that the mystery of the Holy Trinity opens up to us.

In today’s 1st reading we heard Moses say to the people of Israel: Did anything so great ever happen before? Was it ever heard of? Did a people ever hear the voice of God speaking from the midst of fire, as you did, and live?

God speaks to his people. We must not take this for granted. Rather we should stop in wonderment and gratitude before this amazing reality that is already the foundation of the Old Testament. God’s word to his people has been memorialized in sacred Scripture, which has been brought to completion by the New Testament, and through the Scriptures God continues to speak to his people. He speaks to us in human words that convey a divine meaning.

Through our human words we are able to manifest to others the knowledge of our mind and the intentions of our heart. Through his words to us, God has made known the truth of his inner mystery, the reality of creation, his plan of salvation, and the benevolent intention of his love for us. He thereby invites those who receive his word in faith into a communion of knowledge and love with himself.

This also reveals that by our capacity for thought, speech, and intelligent love, we have been made in the image of God and for that reason are capable of communion with him. This is already the message of the Old Testament.

In the New Testament an even greater reality is made manifest. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God; this was in the beginning with God, through him all things were made. … The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father. (Jn 1:1-3;14)

Here we learn that in eternity God speaks one Word, in which he says all that he himself is and does, one Word that is so perfect that it is equal to himself, is itself God from God, Light from light. True God, begotten not made, consubstantial to the Father, the only begotten Son of God. This has been made known to us because God has spoken this very same Word to us, in the fulness of time, through the whole economy of the Incarnation, the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ born of the Virgin Mary. In Jesus Christ God tells us all that he has to say because Jesus is himself the one, unique, and perfect Word of God. (cf. CCC 65)

By revealing the eternal Word of God through whom all things were made, God also makes known his supremely intellectual and rational nature.

This, however, causes us problems because we have come to think of the mind as either “cold and calculating” or “abstract and remote.” This comes about because in human life mind and will can be, and all too often are, separated.

Last Sunday we heard about the opposition between the impulse of the Holy Spirit and the impulse of the “flesh”. The created human mind is situated between these two impulses, as a result, the will often fails to cleave to the true, the good, and the beautiful, but instead lets itself be carried away by emotion and imagination, the “flesh”, which should be ruled, rather than rule. The mind, then, either drifts off into a world of idle curiosity, becoming abstract and remote, separated from the concreteness of our bodily life, or it is enlisted as a servant of the flesh, calculating means to fulfill fleshly desire.

In the holy and inseparable Trinity, this is not so. The Word is the Word that breaths love, God, the Holy Spirit; the love by which the Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father; the love by which God loves the eternal truth that he himself is; the love by which he willed to bring into being this vast, well-ordered universe, as a manifestation of his goodness; the love by which he created the rational creature, angels and men, calling them to share in his life of knowledge and love. The revelation of the mystery of the Holy Trinity is the revelation of the eternal wisdom and love that lies at the origin of the universe and touches each one of us in the depths of our own personhood.

Alas, in human life we tend to think of knowledge and love as separate and opposed to one another. If we reflect more deeply on the matter, we shall see how they are interwoven with each other and with our bodily life. Indeed, one cannot love what one does not know.

Consider how a person might love some good thing. If a person freely devotes time and energy to a topic of study, it is because he loves that topic, he loves learning about it and by the power of his will applies the effort of his mind and body to that learning. So also, if someone devotes time and energy to learning and developing some art, craft, or skill, which contain an element of knowledge as well as practice. So also, when one person loves another, he wants to know about the person’s history, his thoughts and desires, likes and dislikes, his way of thinking about life and reality; yet, it is only through the body that we are able to know and relate to each other.

So also with our love for God; there is knowledge about God, such as is taught in theology; there is the art of prayer; there is no history of God, but there is the history of salvation, of God’s dealings with men. I cannot love God just for my own sake, as though it were just God and me, rather, all the truth about God, about how to relate to him in prayer, how to live in a way pleasing to him, and his dealings with his people, from Abraham to the present, is a matter of concern to me, to the life of my body and soul. Here we might say that it is one thing to lack the capacity, another to lack the interest, or regard it as unimportant. Further, since God is the creator of all, there is no legitimate knowledge that cannot be caught up and transformed by the love of God. And all this knowledge is expressed in words, human words, the word of the heart and the words, which when spoken are such that the passing physical sound conveys an enduring intelligible and even spiritual meaning. These words reflect, in some distant manner, the Word that was with God in the beginning.

Yet, alas, we are inclined to say, “just words”, just “empty talk.” Alas, that it so often the case.

Jesus said, I say unto you, that every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof on the day of judgment. (Mt 12:36) And would that it were no worse than idle words. St. James, lamenting the wicked use of the tongue, declared, The tongue is a fire. The tongue is an unrighteous world among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the course of life, and set on fire by hell. … With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who are made in the likeness of God. (Jm 3:6,9)

Idle words, lying words, malicious words, the sins of the tongue are innumerable and they have a special malice precisely because they pervert what is most human, our power of speech, which makes us to be in the image of God, defacing the reflection in us of the Word that is God.

Let us, however, consider how contrariwise, rational love, expressed in true words, rather than passion driven love, expressed in manipulative words, can bear the image of the knowledge and love of the Holy Trinity.

Make your vows to the Lord and perform them. (Ps 75[75]:11)

A man and a woman stand before the altar of God, before the minister of God, and commit themselves to each other in marriage by means of their spoken words, words that must not be empty, words that should manifest their mutual love, but also express their mind and will.

For those words to be well-spoken there is some level of knowledge that needs to precede them. There must be a basic knowledge of self, a knowledge of the fiancé, a knowledge of marriage. Knowledge of self: am I ready to be a husband or wife, father or mother? Knowledge of fiancé: is he or she trustworthy and reliable; will he be a good father to my children, or she a good mother to my children? All of this implies a basic knowledge of what it means to be a man or woman, as well as a human being. It means knowing that marriage is a stable, lifelong and exclusive union between a man and woman for the sake of having and raising children together. This is not some esoteric knowledge but the sort of knowledge, bound up with our concrete, personal bodily life, that any 20-year-old should be capable of.

Further, there are all sorts of particulars involved, all the sorts of things that a young man and woman should discuss during the time of courtship, about each other, their thoughts, their desires, about their families and their hopes for family life, but also about God, about Jesus Christ, about their religion, about everything in heaven and on earth. All this knowledge needs to precede, prepare, and guide the act of the will; it also needs to govern and restrain the imagination and emotions. It needs to precede the union of bodies that should come only after the marriage vows, which is the only adequate consent for the bodily union, which then brings to fulfillment the total gift of self, first expressed in human words.

Then the spoken words of the marriage vows are truly human and noble. They manifest the mind and will, they express a promise to which the will is committed, a promise to which the couple must then be faithful in their bodily life, in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, for their entire life. Fidelity to a promise well-made shows the union of knowledge and will in human life, the union of knowledge and will that characterizes trinitarian love; the fidelity to the spoken promise, lived out in the life of the body reflects, the mystery of the Word made flesh. I gave the example of marriage, but the same is true of the priesthood, the same is true of the religious life, indeed the same is true of the whole Christian life, which must be a lived fidelity to the vows of baptism, baptism, which immersed us into the life of the Holy Trinity, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.