“God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might
not perish but might have eternal life.” (John 3,16) Today our gospel message begins with this
very beautiful revelation of God’s love for humanity through the gift of his Son. John will go on to proclaim in his first letter to the Church that “God is love.” God has revealed himself to us over the centuries as love. We do not merely affirm that “God loves,” but rather our faith leads us to the truth that “God is love.” In giving us the gift of the Son God is inviting us to participate in his divine life of love. In Jesus God gives us a name by which we may know him and call upon him, he shows us a face which looks upon us with compassion and he makes us brothers and sisters in Christ and heirs to the eternal life of love that is shared in the Trinity. To know Jesus the Son is to know God the Father and to have seen Jesus is to have seen the Father because they are one in the Holy Spirit of love and unity that is shared between them. Knowing and loving Jesus is knowing and loving the Father because as Jesus affirms, “I and the Father am one.”
This helps us to begin to penetrate the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity. God is a community of persons that dwells together in the oneness of love. The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are always together because of the oneness that they share. The mystery of the Holy Trinity reveals the inner life and reality of God as a communion of persons in love. Pope Benedict shares with us this truth in his angelus message of 2005, “Jesus revealed to us the mystery of God: he, the Son, made us know the Father who is in Heaven, and gave us the Holy Spirit, the Love of the Father and of the Son. Christian theology synthesizes the truth of God with this expression: only one substance in three persons. God is not solitude, but perfect communion. For this reason the human person, the image of God, realizes himself or herself in love, which is a sincere gift of self.” (Angelus message, 2005)
In our world that is so often characterized by individualism and egoism God speaks to us in a voice that says “we” and not “I”. Everything that God reveals to us and commands us is done in the light of love. God does not act capriciously but rather everything that he does is motivated by love and is ordered to love. God would never merely appeal to authority and justify his requests with the capricious reason, “because I told you so,” but rather his commands and actions in the world are justified by the highest reason expressed in the truth, “because I love you.” To follow Jesus, who is the way, is to follow the way of love. The mystery of the Holy Trinity teaches us to do everything out of love and to order our entire lives to love. The Trinity teaches us to live always oriented towards the other in our life. In this way our lives become an expression and experience of ecstasy as Pope Benedict points out in his encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, “Love is indeed “ecstasy”, not in the sense of a moment of intoxication, but rather as a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God: “Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will preserve it” (Lk 17:33), as Jesus says throughout the Gospels (cf. Mt 10:39; 16:25; Mk 8:35; Lk 9:24; Jn 12:25). This is the true meaning and purpose of our human existence.
“If you see charity, you see the Trinity”, wrote Saint Augustine. The mystery of the Holy Trinity becomes a visible reality to us in the charity that we see shared in the world. “No one has ever seen God. The only Son, God, who is at the Father’s side, has revealed him.” (John 1,18) Jesus has revealed to us the mystery of the Trinitarian life through the love and compassion that he has towards all of creation. We also are called to a life of charity as participants in the Trinitarian life of love. For this reason our charity must be organized and the means of our witness to the presence of God in the world. The Church has always existed as a visible expression of the Trinity.
Pope Benedict reminds us that family life also must be for us an expression of our faith in the Trinitarian mystery of love. May our celebration of the Trinity help us always to live as an expression of the love in communion of persons that God has called us to share with him in the family of God.