Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity – Year A
Deacon Tom Vert
Preached: May 31, 2026
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.
We hear this at the beginning of every mass and many liturgies, and we many wonder why?
Why do we start with this refrain about the Trinity?
You may ask “Why does the theology of the Trinity even matter to me as a Catholic Christian?”
Well, if we want to love a person more in life, we need to know them and understand them, so understanding our God is critical.
I would say that if we know who God is and how he is active, then we know how to interact with Him, have a relationship with Him, abide in Him, and love Him, and in turn then love others as He loves us!
We see in the first reading that Moses has gone up the mountain to receive the ten commandments from God and we hear that God stood with Moses and proclaimed his name, Yahweh, or “I Am”, the same name he disclosed to Moses when they first met face to face at the burning bush.
He goes on to remind Moses of his attributes, of mercy, grace, slow to anger, kind, and always present.
These reminders are God showing us who He is so that we can love Him more.
This is the God who loved the Israelites and loves us even though sometimes they, and I would argue, we, are a stiff-necked stubborn people who like to do our own thing, but our God is a patient God and always waits for us to return.
In the Bible, we also see that God reveals himself as one God in three persons, the Trinity.
We see God the creator in the Old Testament, we see Jesus give up his life for us on the cross, and we see the Holy Spirit at Pentecost like “tongues of fire” coming down upon the disciples.
We may think sometimes that the three are separate when we pick out these examples, but divine works are not the separate or individual acts of one person alone but are the unified acts of the three persons working together.
The Father initiates the action – “for God so loved the world that He sent his only Son”, Jesus mediates this as “Christ emptied himself and took the form of a slave” coming down to us, and the Spirit actualizes this in the world in the incarnation with Mary.
The Trinity is always working together in unison as three persons as one God.
The Trinity is a person and not a concept, a personal God in whom we can have a relationship of love between created and Creator.
We acknowledge this person in many ways:
- In the sign of the cross – “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”
- And we recognize Him by how we baptize with the words “I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”, where we are brought to share in the life of the Blessed Trinity, here on earth.
So, Deacon Tom, how does this affect my spiritual life? What does it mean in practice?
I think St. Paul tells us the answer to this in the second reading.
This reading is the final 3 lines of the 2nd Letter to the Corinthians where he is guiding them on how to live the daily Christian life.
And he gives them and us, five key lessons:
- Brothers and sisters – rejoice – praise God as a community of faith with our responses and our joyful singing and coming forward in unity to receive the Eucharist.
- Put things in order and forgive, mend fences, build walls and knock down resentment, animosity and hurt.
- Encourage one another – build others up! “pump up each other’s tires” as they say and give positive support to the people in your life.
- Agree with one another – find ways to build common bonds and not critiquing others.
- Live in peace – Pope Leo has made this a cornerstone of his ministry in a world fixated by war and competition, and he asks us to be people of peace in our own families, workplaces and the places we are planted.
On this Trinity Sunday, let us interact with others as God does with us as:
“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God
and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.”
