THE MOST HOLY TRINITY SUNDAY 26 MAY

Gospel Luke 16:12-15   Jesus said to his disciples: "I still have many things to say to you but they would be too much for you now. But when the Spirit of truth comes he will lead you to the complete truth, since he will not be speaking as from himself but will say only what he has learnt; and he will tell you of the things to come. He will glorify me, since all he tells you will be taken from what is mine. Everything the Father has is mine; that is why I said: All he tells you will be taken from what is mine."

Meditation   All liturgical celebration, indeed all Christian prayer, is Trinitarian: to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. The liturgical celebration of the Holy Trinity as an "idea feast" finds its origins in the Carolingian Church of the eight and ninth centuries. A votive Mass of the Holy Trinity proved so popular that it began to replace Sunday celebrations. In 920 the bishop of Liège composed a full Mass and Office to be celebrated on the first Sunday after Pentecost. The feast was established for the entire Roman church in 1334. The smallest functional unity of human life is not the individual. Every man and woman, no matter how deformed in spirit or body, exists because he or she was born of the coming together of two human beings. No infant survives without acts of touching and feeding which are acts of human relationship. If we exist at all, we exist as the product of some form of human community. We profess that we have been created in God's image. Our self-image is so clearly and relentlessly one of life in community that we can not help but see in the scriptures suggestions and revelations of God's own life as life for and with the other. Though we will never come to know God as God knows himself, every sign of God's action in our world leads us to him as a God in interaction. Creation itself is God's self-expression, the extension of his love to that which is other than himself. God's ongoing dialogue with creation reaches its climax in Jesus who is God-among-us. This Jesus is taken up into the fullness of the Father's glory and the fullness of their love is poured forth upon us in the gift of the Spirit. Though we falter before the complexity of centuries of theology seeking to understand the unfathomable depths of God, we resolutely form the shape of our faith by praying day after day to the Father, through the Son and in the Holy Spirit. As we mark our bodies with the cross we utter the name of Father, Son and Spirit. So we enter into life with God through baptism. We shall enter into the fullness of that divine community through the gate of death.

Vienna International Religious Centre