Trinity Sunday

Mass Celebrated by Archbishop Denis Hart
at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne,
on Sunday, 22nd May, 2005, at 11.00am

Introduction

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Today we are invited to remember what God is like. How the Father sent Jesus as Word of God to bring us truth and poured out on us his Spirit to make us holy.

In this Mass we reach out to touch our God, who comes to us in the Eucharist, as we welcome new choristers into the Cathedral choir and remember the power of music to fill us with the wonder of God.

Let us call to mind our sins, that we may be filled with God’s life and light.

Homily

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Dorothy Day lived last century serving the poor with simple hospitality. She used words that show us what God is like when she wrote, “ We have all known the long loneliness. And we know that the answer is love, love in community.”

We know God as Father and Creator, Son and Redeemer, the Word of God giving us his truth, the Holy Spirit poured out to give us his life and breath.

The relationship between Father, Son and Holy Spirit, of love given and received between the Father and the Son and poured out to us is a reminder of a fundamental truth, written about by Leo Tolstoy. “People think that there are circumstances where one may deal with human beings without love, but no such circumstances ever exist. Inanimate objects may be dealt with without love: we may fell trees, bake bricks or hammer iron without love, but human beings cannot be handled without love, any more than bees can be handled without care. Mutual love is the fundamental law of human life.”

Today in the feast of the Trinity we are challenged not to see God as a distant reality or concept, but as a person. When Saint John records, “God loved the world so much 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 ) we are reminded that God is always the lover of each of us. He invites, calls, cajoles us to spread that love to other people, always nourished by the love of God. Jesus describes his relationship with us in two simple words, love and life.

God’s love heaped on the sinful and weak and we are the blessed recipients of his free love. To believe is to know Jesus; to love and believe in Jesus is to have eternal life. In today’s readings we remember God as a God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in kindness and faithfulness. Saint Paul exhorts us to be united and live in peace, indicating that we are to bring God’s love to others by what we are. The price is belief. The consequence for us is lasting, constant life.

In the opening prayer we see the challenge for the life of our families. “Help us to worship you, one God in three persons, by proclaiming and living our faith in you.” This is our gift to the world because God has loved us first and carries us forward.

+ Denis J. Hart,
Archbishop of Melbourne.