Every so often things happen that make us ask questions about God. During the week I have heard people asking what must God be like if so many people can be killed in natural disasters like the cyclone in Burma or the earthquake in China. Sometimes people struggle to believe in God when they are experiencing great pain or suffering, or watching someone else suffer. Other people seem to have no problem believing in God, and can’t understand why others have doubts. These varied responses force us to ask a basic question, “What is God like?” I believe we have an answer in our readings today on this feast of the Holy Trinity – which is a feast that focuses our worship on God.
I found myself reading and re-reading that phrase in the gospel that says, “God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son”. Here, in this saying of Jesus, we have the basic Christian understanding of God. If you want to know God, then know that God loves. This may sound like a fairly easy thing to say, but we need to remember that at the time of Jesus there were competing images of God in the world. Other gods – pagan gods – may have exercised power; they may have acted in anger according to their mood on a particular day; or they may have exercised control over people’s lives, but you wouldn’t say that they loved. A god who loved would have appeared to many to be a weak god. Jesus preached something different; he knew what Moses knew, as we heard in the first reading, where God was described as a God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in kindness and faithfulness. The power of this God is demonstrated in love, and in God’s standing in solidarity with people. Rather than God’s greatness being demonstrated simply through his power over nature or his remoteness, the real greatness of God is found in his feelings for the people, in his desire for their welfare. For many people, this seemed like weakness, but in the message of Jesus this was God’s true strength.
The difference between this view of God and the pagan view is that the God Jesus reveals is a personal God who gets close to us. The other gods were nothing more than impersonal forces, perhaps like a cyclone or an earthquake. Jesus makes the point that God’s great act of love was that he gave his Son. The Son then reveals what God is like. The Son hasn’t come to condemn, but to offer salvation, to offer life. This means that God’s basic relationship to us is to be a friend to us. St Paul calls it fellowship.
I believe we can appreciate the real possibility of God’s closeness to us when we realise that he has given us the Holy Spirit as his gift. Paul talks about the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. In the first instance he is speaking about the relationship between the Father and the Son, and the love they have for one another. This is the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. But Paul is also saying that God invites us into that very fellowship by giving us the Holy Spirit. This is what Moses was referring to in our first reading when he prayed to God to adopt us as his heritage. It is also why St John talks about us as becoming like God.
This is very important, because it suggests to us that when we understand God properly – when we understand that God is love – then we will also come to see ourselves in a new light. This takes us right back to the story of creation where man and woman were made in the image of God.
Once we purify our understanding of God we need to ask ourselves what our response to God ought to be. In our first reading we saw Moses’ response: he fell to his knees and worshipped God. This can be a challenge for many people today. Worship can seem like a fairly passive response, especially as our age is so used to lots of activity. But worship is not passive, and we know that some Christians prefer to dance and shout. But there are also people who think that worship is nothing more than an effort to appease an angry God. If you have the wrong understanding of God then you might easily think this. But if God is love, then an act of worship is fundamentally an act of love.
So, how do we love? One answer to this is to say that if we are made in the image of God then we love like God loves. We love by developing those qualities that we have seen in God. This means that we are people of kindness, tenderness, compassion, and faithfulness. When we love our neighbour in this way, we are also loving God. This is our act of worship. St Paul tries to be concrete about it when he says, help one another, be united, and live in peace.
These are no doubt things that we are always trying to do. Today’s feast of the Trinity gives more meaning to these very human desires. So, let’s worship God by lives that imitate God’s fellowship with us.
Fr Gerard Kelly
