Fr. Victor Baltazar, SJ
The Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity
May 27, 2018
To Pray and Ponder On: Exodus 34, 4b-6.8-9; 2 Cor 13, 11-13; John 3,16-18
Id quod volo (That which we desire most): To contemplate our Triune God and be in awe with the ever-intensifying love that God reveals to us, food for our hearts and souls, exemplar for our journeys.
“We have peace in God through our Lord Jesus Christ . . . and 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 to us.”
Because an eternal God is really beyond any time and space, there is no sense of speaking of God as “ever intensifying love,” except to say that within the Eternal Godhead dwells Jesus–the Word who became flesh and who continues to be the human in the Triune God–one who was of human flesh, time-bound, culture-bound, a man who grew up a good Jew and in whose life and teaching and death and rising, arose a new religious tradition bearing his name–Christianity. We can also think of “ever intensifying love” as the ever growing reception in our hearts of the constant love being poured by God into the human family. Creator-God, Redeeming God, Sanctifier and Giver of Gifts: the Father, Son and Spirit as a Trinity has revealed to us a God whose constant love has grown in intensity in our hearts as we gained more insight into the core of God’s person through generations.
Not only has God been originally revealed as Creator, but even as we write, God creates us, we draw life’s breath from God moment by moment. And every breath is witness to a God who constantly raises in us holy desires to be good, to do good, and to be more and more like God in love and service. God did not only create humans in that far distant beginning of time, no, God is Creator, moment by moment in the very foundation of our existence: sustaining us, making us grow, penetrating the most interior parts of our person, moving our hearts to love and give of ourselves to God and others.
But more than giving these gifts of creation moment by moment, we also receive this Creator-God as redeemer, as one who pays ransom for us by his offering of life. Sin has rendered each of us indebted, enslaved in the wiles of the evil one. Yet this God has drawn the evil one into a wager it could not refuse. God’s wager made the evil one think that love was just too weak to withstand the violence of power-hungry leaders or cowardly followers or messianic dreams gone political and women devotion gone too emotional. God’s wager was just too attractive to refuse: the Word of God in the Messiah crucified on the cross and silenced forever? What a victory for hell! The Messiah’s ministry failed and folded up, followers all fleeing in fear?
Yet death was not to be the last word in Calvary. When Jesus breathed his last–he also unleashed the Spirit who was to be the completion of his life–the love poured out for all. Love was to be the final word in Calvary, and this time Love was not to be silenced, for even death, love has conquered and vanquished. Love would break the walls of time and space, and shatter even the power of sin and death. No human experience would henceforth be inaccessible to God’s life and love.
Now the Spirit of God can penetrate into the inmost recesses of the human soul, dwell in the heart and carry out the sanctifying action of God: recalling to us everything that Jesus taught and did, inspiring us with virtues and dispositions that help us divest of anything worldly and resistant to God and elevating our desires from the base and sensual to those that are deeply spiritual and directed heavenward. That we are human, need no longer be excuse to be worldly, for our Lord remains human, and is gloriously Divine as well. And all of us are called to the same destiny. We need no longer murmur, “sapagkat kami’y tao lamang, marupok at mahina” (because we are mere humans, weak and vulnerable), because Jesus enables us to say, “kami’y tao at sa bawat sandaling kami’y tunay na nagpapakatao, higit kaming nagiging maka-Diyos” (We are humans and as we become more truly human we become more and more truly divine too). At the heart of this pagpapakatao which I’d dare translate into, “sanctification,” is the Spirit of God at work, converting us, healing our every unfreedom, elevating our desires to make them holy, and forming us into those facets of Christ which our own charisms and cluster of gifts suggest.
We thank this Triune God for gently revealing Godself to us: Creator-Redeemer-Sanctifier! Three persons in one God who continues to abide in us until Christ can gather all in all through the sanctifying work of his Spirit onto the final days when Christ will restore us all back to the Father’s loving embrace. God Bless!