Open secret
The Most Holy Trinity (A), June 15, 2014 – Ex 34, 4b-6. 8-9; 2 Cor 13, 11-13; Jn 3, 16-18
God of love and peace (2 Cor 13, 11)
It is not good for a human being to be alone. But since a person can end up badly accompanied, it is beneficial for us to return, at Jesus’ behest, to the original source.
At the beginning God created us male and female in his image. Although he spoke in majestic first person plural—preferred by sovereigns—as he was about to create the human being, God is nothing like the greedy worldly monarchs. His greatness, his goodness, his love, brims over and gives rise to creation which proclaims his glory.
And God so loves us that he gives his only Son for our salvation. Jesus’ death for us sinners is the best proof of God’s love. Jesus is the one who reminds us convincingly of the kindly Father and gives us experience of his centrifugal love.
Emphasizing the importance of mercy, Jesus teaches that we ought never to forget that God is first of all “merciful and gracious” even with the stiff-necked. That is why he himself is a friend to sinners and even breaks tradition to help the needy. Through his Son, “the refulgence of his glory and the very imprint of his being,” God passes before those who find favor with him, more intimately now than before.
It is enough for us who seek to be favored, then, to know Jesus in order to know the Father. We take it that there is distinction between the Father and the Son, yet on account of our monotheistic faith, we have the intuition that one is in the other, that they are one, together with the other Advocate, sent by both. Indeed, if accepting his invitation, “Come and see,” we stay with him, not only shall we hear of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, but we will also be infected with the Spirit of the Father’s overflowing love in Jesus.
To taste and see how good the Lord is: this is what is most essential and is the basis of the healing of the division among believers who fight over doctrines; here lies the secret of good company, an open secret, since it is revealed by the one who has come to serve and to give his body up and shed his blood in order to gather into one God’s scattered children; this enables us to love.
Without love, opposed to all voracious individualism and all dehumanizing collectivism, we do not know God, one and triune, model of unity, as St. Vincent de Paul did not fail to mention (Coste IV 235-236). And according to St. Leo the Great, it is especially those with loving concern for the poor who reflect God’s fatherly care.
Ross Reyes Dizon
Tags: A Vincentian reading of the Sunday readings, Most Holy Trinity(mystery), Ross Dizon