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Readings for June 19,2011
Exodus 34:4-6, 8-9
2 Corinthians 13:11-13
John 3:16-18
We return to Ordinary Time this Sunday, to the familiar green banners that sway above the altar, to the liturgies of summer where the windows are open and the fans are on. But before we settle into a series of readings from the letter of Paul to the Romans and return to the Gospel of Matthew, the Church focuses our attention on two particular celebrations: the Feasts of the Trinity (this Sunday) and of the Body and Blood of Christ (next Sunday). After fifty days of Easter, we are just not quite ready to stop feasting!
But why feast the Trinity in particular? It's not as if we haven't started and ended every Mass, on Sunday and on weekdays, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit! Throughout our liturgies, in the prayers and in the creed, the Trinity is invoked. But the Catechism insists: "The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of Christian faith and life... It is the most fundamental and essential teaching in the 'hierarchy of the truths of faith.'" [1] Perhaps it is good, then, to wrestle with this essential mystery at least once a year.
Yet, when turning to the Scriptures for this feast, we find only one direct reference to the Trinity and it's in the salutation that is actually the conclusion of Paul's second letter to the Corinthians ("The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.") It sounds so much like the liturgical language we use that we'll all probably answer, "And also with you!" before the lector says, "The Word of the Lord."
The rest of the scriptures for this Sunday are more indirect. In the first reading, Moses hears one of God's most fundamental revelations of God's self - a God merciful and gracious, even in the wake of the people forsaking God for a golden calf. In the Gospel reading, we hear one of the most familiar scripture passages of all time (for Evangelical Protestants, anyway!): "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son..."
But today I hear, in the epistle, an exhortation that gently catches my breath: "Greet one another with a holy kiss." Sometimes it takes an oblique reference, a passing whisper, to open to us the unfathomable. And the Catechism insists that the Trinity is a mystery so profound it is inaccessible to reason alone.[2] What I hear in these almost unnoticed words is an invitation to relationship. A kiss is one of our strongest human symbols of relationship. A kiss, whether it's a peck on the cheek like the French do when greeting one another or the prolonged kiss of lovers long after the dust has settled, requires another. A holy kiss absolutely requires honest relationship with another.
But the exhortation I hear today, in the context of the Holy Trinity, calls me beyond the relationship of two. It calls me to community, to the relationship of a God who is more than two yet always one. The theology of the Trinity might be too dense for me to comprehend but I can live it when I greet you - perhaps with a handshake instead of a kiss - and offer you God's peace.
Daniel Cochrane grew up in an Evangelical Protestant missionary family and was received into the full communion of the Catholic Church at Ascension parish ten years ago. He serves as occasional catechist for the Christian Initiation of Adults, 11am choir member and cantor. He works in the Wheaton-Warrenville school district as a district-wide assistive technology specialist and coordinator.
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