Today we celebrate the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity. It is a celebration of our God as we have come to know him. God, of course, is ‘wholly other,’ and so, unknowable—whatever we say about God, God is not that. Or as St John puts it in the Prologue to his Gospel: “No one has ever seen God.” (John 1:18) So, what we know of God is the result of Revelation; God has revealed it to us.

Our First Reading tells us of God self-revelation on Mt Sinai to Moses, his great prophet: “The LORD descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the LORD. The LORD passed before him and proclaimed, ‘The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness’.” (Exodus 34:5-6) Our God is a God of faithful love. This may be news to some who think of God as some kind of stern judge who is just waiting to pounce on any misdoing on our part. And so, we might begin to wonder about this love of God.

Our Gospel today begins: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son.” (John 3:16)Here we learn that God has a Son, an only Son. From this we know that God is a Father. And here we note that gender in the Godhead may not be as we use its terms. (Cf: Genesis 1:27; Colossians 3:11; Galatians 3:28) So, in God, it may be better to think more in terms of roles only; what we know about God tells us more what God does, than about who God is. So, in Jesus’ day, a “son” was one who obeyed his “father;” in what he did he shows himself to be a son. (Cf: Matthew 21:31)“Father,” then, becomes a term for the one whom he obeys. (Cf: John 5:19) And with neither necessarily being gendered as male. God can be both father and mother as well. (Pope John Paul I. Cf: Isaiah 49:15)

So, “God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son so that everyone who believes in him may not be lost but may have eternal life.” (John 3:16) That is, God gave his only Son a mission that would demonstrate the depth of God’s love for the World, and in what his Son does in carrying out his mission we can see just how much God loved the world. To do this, the Son became human, became one just like us. As St Paul put it: “Though he was in the form of God, he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in human likeness.” (Philippians 2:6-7) God’s love is a humble love, with no thought for itself; its care is fixed wholly on the other, and here, on “the world.” (Cf: Rule of St Benedict [RB] 72:7)

This “world,” as it is called here, is made up of all who are “lost.” And when we look around at our world, we can see “how great human wickedness is on the earth” (Genesis 6:5), with it wars and violence, its greed and poverty, its isolation and its unwillingness to lend a helping hand, and all things that make life hard … even climate change, which threatens to destroy us, is the result of what we do. Left to our own devices, our future looks pretty bleak; we are already “lost.” God does not need to do anything to condemn our wickedness (John 3:17); we’ve already done that!

The Son’s mission is that “through him the world might be saved.” (John 3:17) The prophet Ezekiel put it this way: “As I live, declares the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live.” (Ezekiel 33:11) God wants us to live—this is the opposite of being “lost.” So, God’s great love drives Jesus to “save” us. (Cf: Mark 1:12)Our experience of God as Son is as “one who saves.” (Matthew 1:21)

Just before the passage in today’s Gospel we were told: “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” (John 3:14-15) The way Jesus was to complete his mission and “save” us, that we “may have life,” was through his being “lifted up,” a term which refers to his crucifixion. This is what it means for God to “give his only Son”. It is as St Paul put it: “While we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Now almost no one will die on behalf of a righteous person—though perhaps someone may dare to die for a good person— but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died on our behalf.” (Romans 5:6-8)Or as Jesus would later put it: “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13) In “becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross,” Jesus showed the truly great depth of God’s love for the world. (Philippians 2:8) In “giving his Son,” God showed that there is nothing he would not do for us; this is how much God loves the world. (Cf: Genesis 22:12)

The context of today’s Gospel is a conversation between Jesus and a the Pharisee, Nicodemus, about entering into life in the Kingdom, into eternal life. (John 3:3) Jesus tells him of our need to be “born of the Spirit.” This Spirit is the bond of love between the Father and the Son, not just the Father’s love for the Son, but the Son’s love for the Father, which enables him to love as much as the Father loves. This Spirit of God hovered over the chaos at the dawn of Creation and called forth Life. (Genesis 1:2ff; John 1:3-4) It was this Spirit that God breathed into the humus of the earth and gave Life to humankind. (Genesis 2:7) This Jesus said to his disciples, “It is to your advantage that I go away (his passing to the Father, his death (John 13:1)), for if I do not go away, the Helper (the Holy Spirit (John 14:26)) will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you.” (John 16:7) When Jesus died and “gave up his Spirit/breathed his last” (John 19:30; Luke 23:46), the Father raised him up and he appeared to his disciples, to those who believed in him (John 17:8), and he said to them, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” (John 20:21-22) The Life that drove Jesus has now been breathed into us, that we might truly live; the Son’s mission is complete, and we can now share fully in the Life that is the Trinity. (John 3:16; 14:21, 23; Psalm 104:29-30)

In his breathing his Spirit into us, he enabled us to love as Jesus loved us, to love with greatness of God’s love for us. (John 3:16; 13:34) We are now like him, a “son/daughter” of one whom we can call “Father.” (1 John 3:2; Romans 8:14-16, 29. Cf: Mark 1:10-11) With the return of Jesus to his Father, God’s great love has not reached its limit, has not come to an end. For he still greatly loves the world, though it is still full of wickedness. But it is we who are now sent as Jesus was sent, that the world may not be lost but might have eternal life; we are mandated to carry on the mission of the Son; we are to continue to show the depth of God’s love for the world, though this may seem like an impossible task to us. Yet, in receiving his Spirit, we are assured of the help we need to do it. (RB 7:70; 68:5. Cf: Luke 1:35)

In celebrating this Feast of the Trinity, we affirm our faith in a God who can give us the life he promised in sending his Son, in a God for whom nothing is impossible, in a God who can save all who are “lost,” even ones like me. (Luke 1:37; Romans 4:21; 7:24) As St Paul puts it: “For this hope we are saved.” (Romans 8:24-25. Cf: John 3:18)