TRINITY 2015 From: Fr. Raymond Homily

       

 “A white counter on which is written a name known only to ourselves and to our Creator”.  That is how the book of the Apocalypse so poetically describes it.  This priceless gift of personhood enables us to relate to others and to share in their lives just as the three Divine Persons share in the one Divine Life of the Trinity.

 Fw: TRINITY

Holy Trinity, Mass Homily, 

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----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Fr. Raymond ....
To:     
Sent: Monday, 1 June 2015, 7:07
Subject: TRINITY

TRINITY 2015 From: Fr. Raymond Homily

Mankind has acknowledged its God, its Creator, from the dawn of time.  there is plenty of evidence for this through all the ages.  Even in the most apparently God-forsaken places, in the most primitive of societies, men have worship a god of one kind or another.  St Paul, in his speech in the Areopagus attributes this to the loving providence of God.  And St Augustine says that God did not abandon his children altogether when they first sinned against him.  The story of the fall in the Garden of Eden is only the beginning of a great love story because God was going to lead his children back gradually and patiently to reconciliation and to full knowledge and communion with himself.  God’s call of ‘Adam!  Where are you?’ when he hid himself in shame after his fall wasn’t the call of an angry, offended Deity.  No!  It was the cry of a Father who has lost his Son!  “Adam!  Where are you?” And mankind on its part, for all its waywardness, still hankered after its Maker.  It needed him!

It is only in relatively recent times that man has grown so self assured that he sees no need for a God of any kind.  He now imagines himself to be so much in control of his “Tower-of-Babel”, this “Tower-of-Babel”of a society that we have built for our-selves, that we have no longer have any need for him!  There seems to be nothing that we can’t accomplish for ourselves now.  We can reach out to the stars; we can split the atom; we can manipulate nature; we can even engineer human life itself now!  No wonder we read in Genesis that God repented of making man.  When they built their tower of Babel God said “This is only the beginning!  When they set their minds to it now there is nothing they won’t be able to accomplish!

But, although God repented of having made man, and although he could look down the centuries and see the terrible accumulation of evil that man would pile up, yet he still didn’t abandon him.  Indeed we might take the words out of the mouth of Job and put them into the mouth of God: “Even though they slay me yet will I love them!” And how prophetic those words are:  “Even though they slay me yet will I love them!” because that is precisely what came to pass.  We put our very God, our creator, to death.  We nailed him to a cross.  

In spite of all this our God continued, not only to seek after us, but also gradually to reveal himself more and more clearly to us.  We tended to think of him in human terms.  We made our God in our own image and likeness, as it were.  We thought of him in many different forms.  The Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Lands of the East, all had their different ideas of him.  Polytheism flourished everywhere.  But God carefully nourished and shepherded one unique people, the nation of the Hebrews, the descendents of Abraham, to guard jealousy the true idea of one, only, all powerful and eternal God. And eventually, into that nation he himself descended from heaven in the person of Jesus to finally reveal the great secret of the  Godhead, namely that although he is one, and only one in his divine being, yet he is three in person.

And this Trinitarian nature of our Creator is manifest throughout his handiwork of creation:  1. All things exist in one or other of three forms, be it liquid, solid, or vapour.  2. All things exist in three dimensions: length, breadth and height.  3. All time is enclosed in past, present and future.  4. The human race exists and survives as man woman and child.

But surely the most sublime gift of our wonderful human nature and the one that most intimately likens us to the Trinity is the sublime gift God has given each of us of our own individual personhood.      “A white counter on which is written a name known only to ourselves and to our Creator”.  That is how the book of the Apocalypse so poetically describes it.  This priceless gift of personhood enables us to relate to others and to share in their lives just as the three Divine Persons share in the one Divine Life of the Trinity.