Trinity Sunday: Bringing back Love
Exodus 34:4b-6, 8-9; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13; John 3:16-18
A father was once pissed by the misbehavior of his son that he asked his son to pack and leave his house. His son laughed and said: “nobody can chase me out of my father’s house”. If anyone is to pack and leave, he said to his father, it is you: you need to pack out of my father’s house and go to your father’s house. His father collapsed!
Ironically, the use and misuse of the concept of “love” today has largely hijacked its meaning from what God revealed to us in Jesus Christ. It is not only human children who attempt to supplant and challenge the disciplines of their parents, we also do that against God’s commandments—Jesus was obedient until death, but not ourselves. For example, the meaning of love God taught us in Jesus Christ is largely threatened and bastardized. Otherwise, how does one explain cases of rape, adultery, grooming, prostitution, sexual and domestic violence, a near collapse of the marriage institution, non-commitments or gross infidelity, etc.?
On this solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, our gospel reading sets the stage for the re-appropriation of the meaning of love (agapē). Love is defined as salvific — “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life”. Therefore, human understanding and practice of love must take its cue from God’s for it to be Christian.
The Christian experience of Charity is that love is salvfic; that is, it must be sacrificial. This implies that neither love nor the giver of love is the beneficiary of love, but a third party. God is the giver of love. Jesus is the love God gave. Salvation is the love we have received in the form of the Holy Spirit—“calling God Abba-Father”.
Another way of describing love is that it is triangular—lover, beloved and love. The Lover of the world is God (“God so love the world”), and he sent his beloved Son (“He gave his only begotten Son”) as salvation of the world. We are those whom God loves so much! The triangular relationship that love implicates and creates proves the power of love as creator of union, unity and communion, but not without sacrifice and selflessness.
Come to think of it, love is an invitation to enjoy salvation at the price of “faith”: “Whoever believes in him will not be condemned”, says our gospel. In other words, when we believe in love, God introduces us into it, and sends us the way he sent his Son to recreate love through our own sacrifices for the salvation of others—“when I was hungry you gave me to eat . . .” When God sends us out into the world as his beloveds, our second reading describes our tasks to be to “encourage one another, agree with one another, live in peace, and the God of love and peace will be with you. Greet one another with a holy kiss”.
We need to “encourage one another” because God was there every inch of the way when Jesus suffered and died. We must “agree with one another” because Jesus carried out exclusively the will of his Father and not his own will. We must “live in peace” because peace is in the nature of God. And, we must “greet one another with a HOLY KISS” (not cultural kiss) because love must become concrete and Christ-like for it to count as Christian.
Christian love has its origins in the Old Testament. The nature of love/charity we have seen and learned from God and Jesus Christ is that God is “slow to anger and rich in kindness and fidelity”, as our first reading puts it. In Jesus Christ, we see God’s fidelity and kindness in concrete terms—Jesus died to save us from our sins. It follows that love is self-immolation for the salvation of others. It also means that dying on account of fidelity to God’s commandments is the supreme sacrifice the Trinity invites us to.
Trinity Sunday as the invitation to love has its challenges. The language of legal rights dominates our secular discourses today, especially where the judiciary is powerful; like the boy in our story who reminded his father about his right to live in his father house, even when he does not behave properly. But what happened to love/charity, loving as Jesus loved to the point of dying for you and me on the cross? Trinity Sunday challenges us to bring back love as the power of union, communion and unity.
It is the mutual sacrifice of love that brings back love; the presence of love is what establishes communion; and, our celebration of Trinity Sunday schools us in the imitation of the Trinitarian unity. Trinity Sunday teaches that it is not enough to know that three persons make one God, but an invitation to imitate the Trinitarian love that Jesus Christ has shown us. The unity in the actions of the Trinity commands that everyone’s actions and activities must aim at unity, communion and union, and never at division.
The wars and divisions that plague our world will not come to an end up until we practice love as sacrifice. Sacrifice does not waste time asking whether the other person will do his/her share in the mission of peace and unity. Sacrificial love goes ahead to discharge its imperatives to create communion trusting that others will do the same.
On this Trinity Sunday, division of labor must be cherished and promoted. Indeed, it is the role of Jesus Christ, who experienced our earthly sufferings of hatred, betrayals, rejections and ultimate death like a criminal on the cross that should be our focus. The desire to be like the Father and the Holy Spirit, who never suffered physically and never experienced bodily life, because we want to live painless and crossless lives on earth will, be a huge waste of time.
Trinity Sunday as bringing love back is a predisposition to opt for the most difficult part of working for peace, to wish to suffer more or Sacrifice more than others for unity, and to be determined to embark on a life of love with no anticipation of any earthly reward.
Assignment for the Week:
Do something for unity and peace this week; it could be saying only positive things about people all week long!