by Jude Siciliano, OP

Dear Preachers:

The title of today’s feast can be misleading to both congregation and preachers. This is not a day we celebrate a dogma of the Church. Dogmas are important, but we don’t worship them as we gather for liturgical celebration. Nor is a day for a catechism lesson on how one God can have three faces and be called by three different names. I don’t plan to take a shamrock into the pulpit this weekend to show how God could be one and three at the same time.

Someone said once, “Anyone who talks of the Trinity, talks of the cross of Jesus and does not speculate about a heavenly riddle.” (Sorry, I don’t know the source for this quote.) Christians know about God through our experience and key to that experience is something we have in common – suffering and the cross. I know a 56 year old woman who is a vibrant and fun-loving woman. She loves her family and they return that love. She has been described by her children as “the glue that holds the family together.” She had severe back pain and an X-ray revealed a broken vertebrae.

But when she was in surgery they discovered cancer. Further tests showed the cancer had spread to her lungs. It had metastasized. Her daughter called a young woman friend and wept hysterically over the phone asking, “Why did God do this to her?” It is a question we have all heard during similar crises and maybe is a question we too have asked at similar times in our own lives. It is the question we ask out of pain and confusion, when life takes a harsh turn and threatens our faith.

It is really a Trinity question, isn’t it? Who is our God? What is our God like? It isn’t a question about church dogma or “heavenly riddles.” When Jesus looked at what was coming at him in the Garden of Gethsemane he felt it was more than he could bear, so he asked God for it to be taken away. But God wanted to stick it out with us, not pull the emergency brake and get off. If Christ had been given a quick exit that night in the garden, then we would feel even lonelier in our struggles and pain. Instead God stayed with us; Christ showed us in his obedience that no matter how many physical or emotional stresses we have on us, God is not a stranger to our pain: no stranger to emotional pain – Jesus wept; no stranger to physical pain – Jesus was broken on the cross. That’s in the scriptures.

What’s not in the scriptures is that God sends us pain and suffering to test our faith. After all, what good parent would do a thing like that to a beloved child? And we do believe God loves us and that we are God’s children, don’t we? Paul reminds us in the letter to the Romans today, “The Spirit bears witness with our spirits that we are children of God,...”

What is also not in the scriptures is what some people say to others who are in pain to console them. “God never gives us more than we can bear.” When people say things like that, I imagine God pressing down on someone to test their faith, but stopping just short of their breaking point. What a miserable and harsh God that would be! That’s not the God we celebrate on this feast of the Trinity. Here’s another one: “God helps those who help themselves.” I can’t tell you how many times I have heard that quote used to describe God. I have even heard people say that in scripture groups with open bibles on their laps and they quote it as if it were in the Bible they were holding. If we could help ourselves we wouldn’t need God, would we? When we are struggling and feeling lonely in our pain, we don’t need to hear about a God who will help us, but only if we can first help ourselves.

No – life has its ways of testing us; sometimes giving us more than we can bear. God is the one who helps us carry what life piles on us. Not only so we can just bear up under our burdens, but that we can even grow and mature through them. God can get us through to the other side of suffering stronger than when we first entered in. Now that’s the triune God Jesus sends his disciples into the world to proclaim.

When Jesus sends out his disciples to baptize, it is in the name of the God we have come to know through him: “Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” God the Creator – the source of life, the Creator who loves the works God had made. God the Christ – God in our flesh, who walked our walk all the way through death to resurrection. God the Spirit – the very life of God, in Jesus, offered us again here today as we celebrate and pray together.

How do we define the Trinity? Jesus tells us – “I am with you all days, until the end of the age.” Jesus has “defined” God for us – revealed God already with us. So, when someone calls us on the phone or weeps on our shoulder, and asks, “Why did God do this to me? What have I done to deserve this?” We can respond, as the young woman I mentioned above did, “I don’t understand all this. But I know God didn’t put this suffering on your mother. God is with us in this and God is crying with us too.” This young woman who said this to her friend is a high school graduate with three small children – she was balancing the youngest on her hip as she gave this response to her friend. There she was, a theologian, explaining the Trinity in a way her grieving friend could understand and embrace!

Click here for a link to this Sunday’s readings:
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/052624.cfm