The Trinity: A Burning Peace
Today we hear the Lord Jesus assure us yet again: Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Such is the untiring promise of the risen Christ. He has to repeat it over and over again to us, his disciples, because we have thick skulls and embattled hearts, and it takes a while for such an enormous promise to penetrate our capacity to believe. The simple fact appears to be that, through his beloved Son, whose love has triumphed over death and therefore over all distress and sadness, God wants to make us partakers of the serene and undefeatable joy in which consists the Blessed Trinity’s eternal life. Let us not forget that the Paschal Mystery is not some far-off, impersonal, vaguely cosmic proposition! Christ became incarnate of the Virgin Mary and entered chaotic human history for us; Christ died on a bloody cross for us; Christ descended into hell and rose from the dead for us. If we pay attention we will see that there is nothing more intimately personal than these dynamic events, which therefore ought to concern us vitally.
But will we have the capacity to receive Christ’s peace even as he extends it to us? Peace, by its nature, is not something that can be simply handed over like any material gift, a bouquet of flowers, say, or a blank check that passes from its giver’s ownership into ours. Lovely as the promise sounds, what does it actually mean, we may still ask, for the Lord Jesus to give us his peace? How is such a gift even possible? Lasting peace, shalom Adonai, the peace that only God can give, is probably the deepest desire of the human heart, and so this question is an urgent one indeed.
Even God cannot simply “transfer” either his peace or his love from his heart to ours. By their nature these divine gifts cannot be imposed or given in the manner of a transaction. They require that the person who receives them enter actively into a free, interpersonal relationship with their Giver. For this relationship is the gift! Christ’s peace and love are essential aspects of his Person, the intimate spiritual treasures of his own Being. We can come to enjoy them as our own only by allowing Christ to share them with us, and he can share them with us only by means of the astounding event that the gospel describes in this way: Whoever loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling within him.
This tells us that the peace of Christ, the very peace Christ wants to give us, is inseparable from his own nature as eternal Son of the Father. As such, Christ’s peace cannot be conceived of apart from his love for and obedience to the Father. Christ’s own peace is an overflow, as it were, of his filial obedience to the Father, a fruition of his faithful and ceaseless love for the Father. We may say that the peace we speak of is like the very Breathing of the Persons of the Trinity, the atmosphere that sustains their eternally circulating love. Such peace is not a state of mere temporary placidity; it is a dynamic happening and can only exist within a relationship founded on the unending and reciprocal self-giving of Persons. In Augustinian language it may be called pax ardens, “a burning peace”, a unitive conflagration of love seeking to enkindle anyone it touches with the divine charity that generates it.
The Father exists only because he continually generates the Son, and the Son exists only because he receives his being continually from the Father, and the Holy Spirit exists only as the vibrant relationship of love between them. In other words, deep, life-giving peace can only be the fruit of the surrender of self, even within the Trinity, and never the result of the imposition of one’s own will in order to manipulate others through the acquisition of power. That would be the dreadful peace of a cemetery! The power of love is always other-oriented, always intent on the good of the other, always desirous to contribute one’s own substance in order that the beloved may flourish.
In the Blessed Trinity there are three Lovers who are simultaneously also three Beloveds, and as such the Trinity is the grounding principle of all human community. Genuine peace can only flow from infinitely faithful love. By making us the promise of his peace, Jesus is in fact saying that he ardently desires to share his divine Trinitarian life with us, his disciples. This is why he says: If you love me you will keep my word, and my Father will love you, and we will come to you and make our dwelling within you. Jesus knows that the human heart withers if it lacks lasting love and peace. He also knows that we, radically limited creatures that we are, could not ever possibly discover on our own the Sphere of Everlasting Joy that is the life of God. Therefore, he must bring down that Blessed Sphere to us, saying: My Father will love you, and we will come to you and make our dwelling within you.
Christ’s love for us transforms us from cowering and whimpering creatures into the dwelling places of the Blessed Trinity, exquisite abodes of love where the fullness of divine Life can exist and thrive. To define the magnificent event of this divine indwelling within us we have not only the very intimate language of the Gospel of John but also the rather outlandish, visionary language of the Book of Revelation, where we just heard this: The angel … showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God. It gleamed with the splendor of God. This exterior, ecclesial language complements the intimate, personal language of the divine indwelling, and together the two modes attempt to describe one single reality: that God takes delight in making his dwelling among us and with us in order to share with us all the treasures of his own immortal life and peace. In both cases we have a rather shocking affirmation that subverts all of our neat categories: the Higher rejoices in coming to the lower, the Greater to the lesser, the Eternal to the mortal, and not for a while only but with a finality that faithfully corresponds to the abiding permanence of true love. This is a love that delights in filling with light, joy and everlasting peace a void where previously there had been only doubt, darkness and distress.
Yet notice the opening of the extravagant promise of divine indwelling made to us: If you love me you will keep my word… The fulfillment of Christ’s promise crucially depends, not only on divine fidelity but also on us, as chosen hosts of Trinitarian presence and life. It depends on our hearing and keeping “the word”—that is, the teachings—of Jesus in fidelity to his person. Only by receiving and internalizing the Word of the Savior can we come into possession of the divine Life. Only the power of our response in the form of a generous and active faith can throw wide open the doors and windows of our soul to welcome Jesus, his Father and their Spirit as our Guests and constant source of life. I repeat: embracing and fostering the growth of Jesus’ word within our hearts is the habitual spiritual action that continually says yes, yes, yes, to welcome the divine indwelling within us.
Now, what it means “to keep Jesus’ word”, as we well know, has been summed up by Jesus himself magisterially in the one all-containing commandment: Love one another as I have loved you. God will not violently knock down our locked doors, or demolish our resistance to obeying this commandment. This opening can only occur through our freedom responding to grace. The only condition to being nourished by him is that we open wide our mouths: he will not pry them open by force; and we cannot receive his love without giving his love to others, which is the proof of actually having received it. These are the various inseparable elements of the one act of divine love. If the almighty and eternal God could not keep his love for himself, how could we dare attempt to restrict it to ourselves? Such is the essential foundation of genuine Christian living, and not any kind of circumcision or uncircumcision, dogmatism, kosher laws or partisan ideological allegiances.
When we receive the Body and Blood of Christ, we welcome into our persons and our lives far more than only the risen Christ. Christ can never be isolated from the total mystery of the Blessed Trinity, can never be degraded as our personal commodity. Where Christ is, there necessarily are also the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory and Majesty of God. Along with the whole person of the Lord Jesus—body, soul, humanity and divinity—in this Eucharist we receive as well his Father and their Spirit, along with the eternal Life that is the essence of Their triune relationship.
The Divine Indwelling within us is no mere edifying metaphor, the elusive product of dreamy wishful thinking. The energetic life of the Blessed Trinity within us is as real, concrete and momentous as the holy, sanctified Food we are about to receive from this altar, and as fraught with ethical consequences. We cannot receive Holy Communion and remain indifferent to the starving children of Gaza. We do not receive the Presence of God into ourselves with impunity! This Trinitarian Presence is the condition that alone can make the peace of Christ rule in our hearts, the precious and costly peace to which we are being called in one body (cf Col 3:15).
