MOST HOLY TRINITY (A) 15 June 2014

Fr Gerard Kelly
Catholic Institute of Sydney

I once heard a story of a Year 2 class of school children who were asked by their teacher to draw a picture of God.  It seems a rather strange request because we would all say that God is invisible.  Anyway, one girl drew a picture of a swan floating peacefully along a river, weaving in and out of the rushes.  The teacher wasn’t happy.  But if we think about it for a minute the young girl may have had more wisdom and imagination than the teacher.  The girl obviously did not think that God was a swan, but the swan did seem to represent for her what God was like.  The image of a swan must have connected with her experience of God.  The image suggested a God who was beautiful and majestic; a God who communicated peace; and a God who was immersed in creation.  The teacher may have been upset, but I think it is a wonderful image of God.

Of course, all images are weak and only convey a small part of the real picture.  They presume some intellectual understanding, but what this child showed was that her understanding of God was connected to her experience of God.  I think this is always the case.  To truly know God we must have an experience of God.  People could study God as an academic exercise, but they might not know God.

In our readings today we encounter people who had a real experience of God.  Moses went up a mountain to meet God.  And even though he did not see God face-to-face, he encountered God and could come back to the people and tell them that God was inviting them into a special relationship.  In fact, much of the Old Testament in the Bible tells us about that relationship – its high points and its low points.  From all of their experience the people came to speak of God the way we heard in our first reading: a God who is tender and compassionate, rich in mercy and slow to anger, and always faithful.  If you use that sort of language to speak about God, then you have clearly had a profound experience of a loving God.  This wasn’t just a theory about God; it was how they experienced God.

This experience of God reaches its highpoint in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.  The language of today’s Gospel speaks of God sending his Son.  I think there are a few things to note about this.  The first is that God sends the Son as a sign of love for the world.  There is a real sense in which this is the ultimate sign of love: that God will send his own Son into the world.  But we also need to recognise that the Son responds generously to the Father and loves the Father.  The gospel tells us even more: God’s love for the world has a specific purpose, namely that God wants what is best for everyone.  God promises eternal life to those who believe.  All of this points to how God loves, and what God is like.  Our God is a God of relationships.  The inner life of God is one of relationship as the Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father.  More than this: God invites us into that relationship by giving us his Spirit.

So where do we experience God?  Where do we come to know God?  I think that the first place we come to know God is when we come to worship God, because in worshipping God, we engage in communication with God.  We encounter God’s love in Holy Communion, and we also join ourselves with Jesus in his love for his Father. We worship God through the gift of the Holy Spirit.

But there are also other places where we experience God every day as we go about our daily tasks, and engage with the people we meet and love.  I believe it is important to make some time each day to step aside and take note of where God has touched our lives during the day.  These don’t have to be great events; they can be things that seem very ordinary.  But unless we take time to identify our experience of God we will never truly know God.  Once we recognise our experience of God we will probably find that it is as varied as it was for the people we meet in the Bible.  We will also no doubt eventually recognise that our experience has much in common with theirs.  We will be in relationship with a God of tenderness and compassion, a God who is rich in mercy and slow to anger, and above all a God who is faithful to that special relationship with us.  We might also know and be in relationship with the God who was drawn as a swan by that Year 2 girl, a God who is beautiful and offers peace.

It is important to know this God.  The more we know and experience God the more we will be helping other people to experience the love and mercy of God.  We all have a special role because we are the people who show the image of God to the world.  We are the people who show others that God so loved the world that he sent his only Son so that everyone may have eternal life.  After all, we are made in the image of God.