Homily for the Most Holy Trinity

Deuteronomy 4:32-34

Romans 8:14-17

Matthew 28:16-20

The mystery of the Holy Trinity is one that many preachers and many theologians have tried to explain through the centuries, many well-intentioned and fine teachers of the faith have attempted to explain to us this mystery of the nature of God, and when a great many of them attempt to do this, a good number of them of them through the centuries (perhaps the majority) have lapsed into heresy. This is usually because when people try to explain the Trinity, a reality which is the very nature of God himself, they often try to explain in a way that is simple to understand, and they are explaining something that is not to be fully explained on this side of Eternity.

The bishop Arius tried to explain the nature of God by explaining away the Divinity of Christ. He got a wide following, too. Indeed, so wide was the following that Arius had that years after the Arian controversy, St Jerome commented that "the whole world groaned, waking up one morning to find itself Arian." It took the persistence of Saint Athanasius, who actually held the minority view in those days that our Lord Jesus is one in being with the Father, to ensure that the orthodox position as we know it today remained the teaching of the Church. 

Nestorius, who was the Patriarch of Constantinople, attempted to explain the complex nature of God in the person of Christ by trying to say that Christ had two persons, one human and one divine. Of course the Church holds that Christ is the second person of the Trinity and that he is both human and divine, and that he is only one person, and The Trinity is made up of three persons with one divine nature.

A lot of people know the old story that Saint Patrick evangelized the people of Ireland by explaining the Trinity with a shamrock. Truth be told, that's kind of an apocryphal story. We don't know if Saint Patrick used a shamrock to explain the Trinity, but the story became so widely circulated and accepted that the shamrock became one of the national symbols of Ireland, and one of the best known Christian symbols of the Trinity. We have to be careful, however, when using the shamrock or any other such symbol to try and explain the Trinity because very often people lapse into another heresy called sabelianism or "modalism" when they do so. This is the idea, widely circulated even in some Protestant sects today, that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, are merely three modes or aspects of the Divine Revelation, rather than three distinct persons which coexist in the Divine Nature.

An Arabian tribesman called Muhammed in the 7th century couldn't explain this critical understanding of God's nature at a time when much of the known world had become Christian. His solution was to reject this teaching, to deny that Christ was divine or even that Christ was sacrificed for our sins, but merely to say that Jesus was the greatest of all the prophets… until Muhammad came along, of course. A lot of people followed Muhammad's teaching, many of them willingly, some of them by force.

All of these attempts to explain- or to explain away- the Trinitarian understanding of God's nature forget the reality that Sacred Scripture is clear… Jesus himself said that the Father and he were one. He told the Pharisees "before Abraham was, I AM." That declaration caused many of the Pharisees to take up stones to stone Jesus, because if he wasn't God, he had just committed blasphemy. 

Jesus used the Divine Name to identify himself. He even did it in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night he was betrayed, this was why the Gospel accounts tell us that the soldiers- members of the Temple guard- who came to arrest Jesus fell back when after asking for Jesus of Nazareth, he replied "I AM." Jesus makes it clear that he is one with the Father, that He is equal to God and He is God, something no mere human could ever say.

The nature of God is unchanging, God says Himself in the Scriptures that "I am the LORD, I change not." (cf. Malachi 3:6) This means that God has always been one Divine Nature, but Three Persons in one Divine Nature. The unchanging nature of God also means that God has always been all merciful, all loving, but also all holy, and all just. If anyone ever tells you that the God of the Old Testament was vengeful and full of wrath but the God of the New Testament is loving and merciful, you should know immediately that that kind of teaching is complete and utter nonsense. God was not any less loving or merciful in the Old Testament. We know this because just as soon as Adam and Eve committed the first sin, God promised them a Savior for the human race (cf. Genesis 3:15), and that meant that immediately God was letting humanity know that even though we had to live with the consequences of our sin, He loves us enough that he will never give up on us as long as this world tarries. 

Conversely, there are lots of people who want to preach the love and compassion of Jesus and the apostles, but they are not interested in the moral pronouncements of Jesus and the apostles because the merciful and loving Jesus was also the perfectly just Jesus. The Jesus who loved us enough to save us and make himself a slave so that we could be free loved us enough not to keep us in our sin. Jesus and his earliest followers gave us a clear picture of the moral life that we are supposed to live as followers of Jesus Christ. This was so important to the earliest followers of Jesus that it was made repeatedly clear that those who did not repent from sin could be and should be cut off from God's people.  Today we call that excommunication… Are we supposed to believe that Jesus and the apostles were unloving people? No, Jesus was the most compassionate person who ever lived and the apostles certainly followed in his footsteps. But God is both merciful and just. 

The Holy Trinity is something that we were not meant to completely understand in this life, but it is a reality because the persons of the Trinity are real, we can really experience them, and they are really God, and really one God. Rather than trying too hard to explain something we will only fully understand when - by God's grace and mercy- we are with God for Eternity, it might do us all well to remember God's Word to the prophet Isaiah, that God's ways are so far above our ways as the Heavens are above the Earth. (cf. Isaiah 55:8-9)

Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Easter

 

Acts 9:26-31

1 John 3:18-24

John 15:1-8

Jesus uses the analogy of grapes on a vine to describe the relationship between the believer and Christ, and indeed the believer and Christ's body. Anyone who may grow any kind of fruit on a vine knows that the branches or parts of the vine, if cut off from the vine, will not continue to bear fruit or be part of the vine. The vine may continue to be productive, it may grow new branches that produce new fruit to replace the branches that are cut off.

"A branch cannot bear fruit unless it remains on the vine," Jesus tells us, "neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me." Following Jesus Christ is, for each and every one of us, a choice. It is a choice that we make daily, but increasingly in our society following Jesus Christ is being openly rejected by people, including those who should know better. Several times in the New Testament Jesus uses the agricultural understanding that his listeners would have known in his own time, since he lived in an overwhelmingly agricultural society. Jesus uses this understanding as a way to explain to his listeners and to his followers and to his apostles the reality of Heaven and Hell.

This is the reality that Jesus deals with in the parable of the wheat and the tares (cf. Matthew 13:24-30) and we see it again here in the parable of the vine and the branches, the branches that are cut off from the vine will be thrown into a fire and burned, just as in the parable of the wheat and the tares, Jesus explains that the tares and the wheat grow together until the harvest when the tares are separated out and burned while the wheat is gathered in to the Master's barn.

The reality of Hell is not something that we often choose to talk about, but Jesus talked about it a whole lot. Considering how much Jesus discussed the matter, I have to admit that I don't quite understand why it is that some theologians come up with the notion that everyone is going to be saved (something that none of us can possibly know). Jesus made it pretty clear that few people would choose to follow him of their own accord. (cf. Matthew 7:13-14) The reason is because the way of Christ isn't always easy, and we know that it often isn't easy at all. The benefits, however, are truly out of this world.

We also learn something else that's key in this parable of the vine and the branches. The Father is the vine grower and he will take away every branch that does not bear fruit, and he will prune the branches that do bear fruit so that they bear more fruit. This can be particularly critical, because pruning sometimes involves cutting away a non-productive part of the vine, it might even mean that we have to cut off some part of a plant that we might otherwise choose not to, so that the rest of the plant might be productive and bear the best fruit. Pruning isn't always an easy process. But God's way of pruning the vine often means exposing what is wrong with the vine so that it can be cut away from the productive part of the vine of the Church.

In recent days, months, and years, we have seen a series of scandals involving the sinfulness of high ranking clergy and the abuse of children and young adults. This is an addition to other scandals which have often exposed the willingness of many in the clergy to tolerate and even promote social, political, and moral ideas which are completely contrary to the teachings of Holy Mother Church. Many of these public clergy who have promoted or continue to engage in promoting things which are contrary to what the Church teaches in matters of faith and morals have been allowed to continue to pedal their confusion to the masses in the Catholic press, in social media, and in society at large. These realities have led some people to judge that orthodoxy- that is Catholic belief that is right and correct- is often seen as outdated and old fashioned, while those who follow the latest modern ideas about what is morally acceptable are given pride of place in the public square, with some of these folks being promoted by the mainstream media as authentic Catholic voices.

Let us not be deceived. God is not mocked. (cf. Galatians 6:7) The moral teachings of the Church have not changed, and the seven deadly sins are still deadly. If something was wrong a hundred years ago or 70 years ago or 50 years ago, it is still wrong today, it will be wrong next week, next month, next year, and next century. Conversely, if something was good and holy 100 years ago or 70 years ago or 50 years ago, be assured that it remains good and holy today, it'll be good and holy tomorrow, good and holy next week, next month, next year, and next century. The Lord changes not… now there is a difference between dogma, doctrine and discipline. We don't have time to get into all of those differences this morning, but disciplines of the church can change because these disciplines are here to help us carry out the dogmas and the doctrines we believe in, they are not those dogmas and doctrines themselves.

These are important reminders because we are living in an age when many people look at our Church, and it appears that the bad parts of the branches and being allowed to run rampant and the plant has not been pruned. But I would humbly submit to anyone who feels discouraged about the state of the Church that when you hear things which are discouraging about the situation in the Catholic world today, know and understand that God is working his purpose out. So much of what we see and hear in our Church today is really a part of this pruning process which God has set forth to purify His people. As Saint Paul reminds us, the Lord seeks "a glorious Church without spot or wrinkle or any such thing." (cf. Ephesians 5:25-27) We don't have the ability to make the Church that way, but the Lord does. We need to allow the Lord the opportunity to prune the branches so that we can all bear the very best fruit, and the Church can do what the Lord ordained her to do, preach the Gospel and work for the salvation of many souls.