“Every time that we participate in Holy Mass and we are nourished by the Body of Christ, the presence of Jesus and of the Holy Spirit acts in us, shaping our hearts, communicating an interior disposition to us that translates into conduct according to the Gospel."  Pope Francis, Angelus, June 22, 2014

Holy Trinity Sunday: this is an important solemnity of the Church.  The ‘Trinity’ will always remain a ‘mystery’ in the sense that it is difficult to explain or perhaps better to say it is unexplainable!  What we can understand comes through faith, a faith that is alive and living.  There would be no Trinity Sunday without the Incarnation of God’s beloved Son.  This is the main motif for the mystery of the Trinity: through the incarnation of Christ, we come to know the Source of all Life: God, Jesus’ Abba and our Abba.  Then, through Jesus’ obedience to God, his suffering, death and Resurrection, we are given the gift of the Spirit.  We have not been left orphaned…the Incarnate One lives on through the Holy Spirit.

My sisters and brother as we celebrate our Sunday Eucharist on this Solemnity of Pentecost let us acknowledge, and give thanks for the presence of God’s Holy Spirit, here and now: in our very midst, within and among us. For what our readings today are conveying to us are not merely three discrete instances of the presence and action of the Spirit of God in the history of the early Church, although they do indeed arise out of specific experiences of the Spirit forming the nascent Church, for its mission of universal incarnation of the Life of God.

The solemnity of the Ascension: now there is no more separation between heaven and earth, they are one…now there is no separation between our earthly lives and the heavenly life….all creation and humanity are now contained within the total mystery of God. The sending of the Spirit, of Christ’s Spirit will confirm this profound unity and will be our link to this profound communion and unity of God’s life. In Pope Francis’ words: “Jesus declares that there is a power ‘in heaven and on earth’. It is, first and foremost, the power to connect heaven and earth. Today we celebrate this mystery because when Jesus ascended to the Father, our human flesh crossed the threshold of heaven: our humanity is there, in God, forever. Therein lies our trust, because God will never distance himself from mankind” (Homily, May 27, 2017).

“Anybody who receives my commandments and keeps them will be one who loves me; and anybody who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I shall love him and reveal myself to him” (Jn14:21). Christ is made visible when we ‘receive and keep’ the commandments that he has given. And at the heart of Jesus’ commandments is love. He tells us this is the greatest commandment: to love God with the whole of our lives and the ‘second’ which is not separate from the first, ‘to love our neighbor as our self’. To love Christ is to keep his commandments and in keeping his commandments we will know more deeply God’s love and with this Christ will be revealed, meaning he will be more known to us…more known to us in an incarnate way.