Today we celebrate Trinity Sunday. And perhaps this Sunday of all Sundays seems like a day especially suited for highly technical theology — 

And I could give you something of an intelligent (and generally heresy-free) explanation of how God can both be One and Three at the same time… 

I could talk about how the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit are co-eternal and co-equal. Not separate “parts” or “modes” of Divinity but rather each True God… subsisting in the full Divine Nature and Essence, equally. 

I could articulate what St Thomas Aquinas taught about how the Persons of the Blessed Trinity are related to each other distinctly, the various processions and spirations.. the 4 real relations, etc, etc…

(By the way, if you want a really good summary of all this, I highly recommend Paul Glenn’s book “A Tour of the Summa” which is basically a paragraph-by-paragraph paraphrasing of St Thomas Aquina’s Summa Theologia and it’s extremely helpful!!!!)

…But as fascinating and beautiful as all of that theological precision is — those sorts of discussions all essentially boil down to the age-old familiar claim that is really the heart of the Mystery of the Trinity:

That God is Love.

In order for Love to truly be Love… you need 1) a Lover, 2) a Beloved, and 3) the Bond of Love that they share together.

…There is a triune structure to the very notion of love.

And that is what we believe about the Most Holy Trinity: 

  1. That God the Father is the Lover
  2. That God the Son is the Beloved of the Father
  3. and the Holy Spirit IS that Love they share

And we believe that this beautiful arrangement has been so from ALL ETERNITY: 

God is “Love.”

The Great I AM…The Lord of Hosts, the One True God… is Love.

And Love is a free gift of self.

When you truly love someone, you give yourself to that person. You offer yourself completely. Nothing is held back. Nothing withheld. Everything that you are (your whole BEING) is offered… and this is done in full freedom. You choose to make a gift of yourself. Nobody forces you to do it. It’s an active, conscious decision.

This is precisely what the Most Holy Trinity — Father, Son and Holy Spirit — has been doing FOREVER… Giving themselves fully to each other. Deciding… choosing to love fully, perfectly, and completely… Consciously making a GIFT of themselves to one another from before time even existed.

When the Son of God entered into time and took on human flesh in the Incarnation, He continued to reveal for us these eternal inner workings of the Most Holy Trinity…this eternal gifting of self.

In our Gospel today from John chapter 16, Jesus says point blank: “Everything that the Father has is mine.”

In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus says something very very similar: “All things have been handed over to me by my Father.”

Yes! Because the Father has given Himself totally and completely to the Son and HAS BEEN doing so from all Eternity! EVERYTHING that the Father has and is belongs to Christ! And because the Father is the origin of ALL,  then He has given ALL to the Son. The Father and Son are ONE. And the Father has been GIVING HIMSELF… pouring out EVERYTHING of Himself… into the Son…

But this is where things get interesting for us, mere mortals:

Because now God is offering ALL of that… 

The EVERYTHING that has been given to Jesus…

Is now being given…to us…

In our Gospel today, Jesus said: “He will take from what is mine and declare it to you.” Our Lord is referring to the Holy Spirit — the Spirit of Truth…

He will take from what is mine — namely, everything the Father has given Him — and DECLARE IT TO YOU.

So… the Father gives Himself to the Son… EVERYTHING is given over the Son… and now the Holy Spirit is to declare and pass along EVERYTHING that the Son has received… over to us…

Here we have come to the fundamental shocking claim of Christianity:

That Our God wants more than anything else to give Himself to us.

So we can truly have Him.

Be One with Him.

Participate in His life.

Really, the entire point of Christianity is for us to be LOVED by God.

…To receive the greatest Gift, which is the Gift of God Himself given to us.

St Catherine of Siena once wrote this: 

“O eternal Trinity, You are a deep sea in which the more I seek the more I find, and the more I find, the more I seek to know You. You fill us insatiably, because the soul, before the abyss which You are, is always famished. O unfathomable depth! O Deity eternal! O deep ocean! What more could You give me than to give me Yourself?”

That’s the question isn’t it?

What more could God ever give us… than to give us Himself?

St. Paul tells us in our second reading that “the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”

What more could we possibly ask for?

But we can get so greedy and ungrateful sometimes, right? We forget how much we have already been offered. We lose sight of the greatest possession we could ever hope to have: 

Our relationship with the Lord. …Our communion with Him.

Sometimes we can even get a little bitter and resentful… we can start to wonder if God is sort of holding out on us! Like He is a stingy God who doesn’t want to give us what we really need…

The story of the prodigal son comes to mind here… with that older brother who stayed at home and worked his fingers to the bone while his brother went off and wasted all his father’s money.

At the end of that story, you may remember — the older brother — filled with resentment and anger — confronted his father for throwing an elaborate party welcoming his brother home. He refused to come into the party, and the father goes out to try persuading him. 

But the brother said: “Look! All these years I served you and not once did I disobey your orders; yet you never gave me even a young goat to feast on with my friends. But when your son returns who swallowed up your property with prostitutes, for him you slaughter the fattened calf.”

Notice that bitter, self-righteous complaint of his: “I’ve been working so hard for so long, but you never gave me _____.”

He’s accusing his father of holding out on him… of not giving him what he wanted or really needed!!!

How often do we do this with God our Father?

“I want _____! But You never gave me _____!”

Then the father says to the older brother some of the most beautiful, most healing words in all of Sacred Scripture: “My son, you are here with me always; everything I have is yours.”

There it is again!

EVERYTHING I have is yours.

“Everything that the Father has is mine,” Jesus says — and the Spirit of Truth “will take from what is mine and declare it to you.”

Do we trust God enough to believe that He has given us EVERYTHING?

Are we willing to trust that the Father is NOT holding out on us and NEVER will?

Now I want to say this with great reverence and gentleness, recognizing that today also happens to be Father’s Day:

Not all of us are blessed to have had good earthly fathers. That is a sad reality of this broken, fallen world. But I know for a fact that ALL of us…no matter who we are… have been blessed with the very BEST of Heavenly Fathers, from whom ALL true fatherhood comes.

Perhaps we need to pray to this good Father we have and simply ask Him:

“Heavenly Father, what lies am I still believing about You?”

…Maybe that He’s cold and harsh? Distant and unloving…? That He is disappointed in you? That He doesn’t like you very much?

Whatever those lies are — RENOUNCE THEM:

“In the Name of Jesus, we reject and renounce all these lies about who the Father really is, and we declare that God the Father is GOOD.”

Remember:

He’s already given us Himself!

Which is to say: He’s already given us EVERYTHING.

“Take this, all of you, and eat of it… for this is my Body… which will GIVEN for you.”

When Jesus does that — when He says those words, it’s the Most Holy Trinity laying everything on the table. 

It’s all freely offered. All freely given. The EVERYTHING you crave deep down… that fundamental ache of your inmost being… is meant to receive more and more and more of God Himself. And that’s precisely what He’s offering.

What more could He possibly give us?

…What more could we possibly want?

If that’s not a good enough gift for us… then nothing will be.