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Today the One who cannot lie—the very one
who is “the Way and the Truth and the Life”—addresses us as his intimate
friends and makes us a solemn promise: I have much more to tell you, but you
cannot bear it now. But when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you
to all truth. As the source, foundation and final end of all lesser truths,
surely the Reality of God’s Triune Being as a mystery beyond words, but
embraced in faith and adored with love, is the deepest and most precious
revelation that the Holy Spirit makes to the Church and to humanity.
This Mystery of the Holy Trinity that we
celebrate today is eternally unfathomable, infinitely more so than the
magnificence of all universes, real or imagined. Yet this ineffability is
really no valid excuse for muteness, because mystery is the very spice of
celebration, and human celebration requires language, no matter how imperfect
and groping—rather like a blind person trying to describe the bright splendor
of the sun while only feeling its heat.
But we shouldn’t approach God’s Tri-Unity as
a head-splitting conundrum we must wrestle with once a year to make a dutiful
bow to dogma. If I have grasped anything in today’s readings it’s that the
Trinity is not a remote, abstract puzzle, forever frustrating my feeble
attempts at believing it. The triune God revealed to us in our Lord Jesus
Christ is not some abstract, mystifying construct but a perennial, personal Event
of life and joy, endlessly overflowing over all creation with grace, love,
compassion and transformative power. The God we believe in as Christians—the
Blissful Trinity—is, purely and simply, Eternal Life outpoured and perfectly
received.
Let’s first relish the following confession
of love that God’s Wisdom herself sings to the universe, lifting the veil on
God’s inner life: “The Lord possessed me, The beginning of his ways…I was [his]
delight day by day, Playing before him all the while, Playing on the surface of
his earth; And I found delight in the human race.
For God to be Trinity means that God
explodes with delight from within. Such delight requires mutuality of persons,
for it is delight at knowing and being known, delight at belonging to Another, delight
at the inability of having one’s own existence apart from that Other, delight
in never—for all eternity—having been absent from the life of the beloved
Other, delight that celebrates its freedom in a playful, unstoppable dance that
has as stage the whole enraptured cosmos and that thrills in abiding with the
blessed Two who are Persons other than Oneself. This explosive, world-creating energy
of delight wells up from the bosom of the Blessed Trinity like the most
powerful of geysers bursting forth from the heart of the earth.
What is good is “diffusive of itself”, says
St Thomas Aquinas, quoting Aristotle, I believe. God is too good, and therefore
too “diffusive” of himself—too exuberant and squandering of his Being—to keep
his secret delight to himself. The action of a divine self-outpouring is a
central biblical category already at work from the first verses of Genesis: In
the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…. And the Spirit of God was
moving over the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light.’
Each of these verbs—creating, moving and
saying—imply a dynamic outward movement on God’s part, beyond the sphere of his
own self-sufficient Being and into the void of nothingness, that he might pour
himself out into what is Not-God. Note the Trinitarian undertones present in
Scripture from the outset: God creates not out of a splendid isolation but with
the collaboration of “the Beginning (the Archê)”—that is, the First Principle,
who says: I was beside him as his craftsman—and God sends out their common Ruach
(or Breath) to flutter lovingly like a mother-bird over the primal egg of
chaos, to incubate a beautiful, orderly cosmos. And when God says, Let there be
light, this implies his uttering his all-powerful Logos or Word as foundation
of the universe. The Father created all things in the Word through the
Spirit.
Every action of God is a self-outpouring of
divine life that in no way depletes the Being of God. This unending divine
action, however, does not first occur with regard to creation—that is, with
regard to ourselves and all other creatures—but within the interior life of God
himself. This is crucial. For, if God is to be love for us, he must first be
love within himself, and this implies eternal Relation, Mutuality, which in
turn requires radical difference of Persons within absolute unity of Being.
This is the meaning of Tri-unity. We have heard Wisdom affirm: From of old I
was poured forth, at the first, before the earth… I was brought forth while as
yet the earth and fields were not made, nor the first clods of the world.
Wisdom herself insists here that she was generated eternally, before the
creation.
God is love means, necessarily, then, that
God, already in himself and quite apart from creation, is Community of Persons,
since genuine love, whether in God or man, must circulate incessantly from Self
to Other and back.
The expansive throbbing of God’s triune
Heart can never quite contain itself because in God there are no “separate
egos”; from here flows the delight which is the primary quality of the utterly
free joy and in-joy-ment that blossom wherever Persons are in Love, are Love, beginning
in the depths of the Uncreated Godhead. The beaming forth of that primal,
triune Joy then provides the blissful pattern for all created love and
friendship. From the Trinity we learn that our own greatest joy should be to
fill someone else with life. Joy, in fact, may be said to be but another name
for God; for what is joy but the spark that jumps from heart to heart at the
sight of one another’s beauty? And where does this fire blaze more
magnificently than among the divine Persons?
Jesus says to his disciples, I have told
you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete. Here Jesus
is communicating to the disciples the essence of his being, which is his
relationship to Father and to Spirit—their triune Joy in one another as the
very substance of their common Life. My joy is Jesus’ superbly original name
for his relationship with his Begetter and their common Breath. And this
outpouring of Christ’s joy into our hearts reaches its culmination in the
intimate Pentecost of the Cenacle. There Jesus, eight days after his Resurrection,
breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’. The Greek text
literally says that Jesus breathed [the Holy Spirit] into [them]. The unusual
verb enephýsêsen (in English we could clumsily say insufflate) graphically
evokes mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and this word in John 20:22 duplicates
down to the last accent mark the word we find in Genesis 2:7 concerning the
creation of Adam: The Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed
into (enephýsêsen) his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living
being.
Thus, the ecclesial event in the Cenacle
amounts to nothing less than a re-creation and resurrection of the human race
in the person of the apostles. The Breath they receive from Jesus’ mouth is the
very Breath that sustains the life of the Three Divine Persons. All
post-Resurrection encounters with Jesus imply and effect the resurrection of
the apostles themselves. Jesus comes to transmit his own New Life to them, and
only in that context does he give them his final commands and their mission to
evangelize the world.
No wonder Christ immediately gives them the
power to forgive or to retain sins, clearly a divine prerogative, now shared
with weak and fallible human beings; but this enormity, which continually
scandalized the Pharisees when practiced even by Jesus himself, can be
explained only by the fact that Jesus, by this insufflation, is making the
apostles “partakers of the divine nature”. No wonder either that St Paul today
feels entitled to proclaim the astounding doctrine: We boast in hope of the
glory of God … because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts
through the Holy Spirit that has been given us!
What is, then, the practical conclusion we
ought to draw from the majestic mystery of the Most Holy Trinity, the central
article of our faith? I suggest the following: If we—as Trinitarian
communicators of life who have received the Holy Spirit into us—do not pour out
our lives in selfless service, infusing God’s Breath into the breathless and
loving them with God’s own creative Love, now active within us, then we will be
denying in practice what we proclaim in word and rite: namely, that the God who
indwells us, and whom we worship and glorify, is for us a revitalizing Trinity
of Persons.
But we should never forget that “selfless
service”, lovely though the idea sounds, can be learnt only with Our Lady at
the foot of the Cross: for it was from the Cross that the most palpable and
overwhelming divine self-outpouring of all occurred. On Golgotha, Jesus quite
literally emptied himself for our sake when one of the soldiers pierced his
side with a lance, and immediately blood and water flowed out.
In giving us Jesus, the Father has poured
out to us the Beloved of his heart and given us all things desirable along with
him. Our communion in Jesus’ Flesh and Blood will in a few moments fling open
for us the entryway into God’s ecstatic swirl of expansive delight. May we
allow the playful Wisdom of Father and Son come and delight in us, too, and
thoroughly possess us and so heal all our sadness with the Joy that is God.
Today's homily by Father Simeon.