The Mission of Unity Trinity Sunday

The Mission of Unity

Trinity Sunday

June 12, 2022

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Proverbs 8:22-31; Psalm 8; Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15

 

          This feast that commemorates the Trinity is intended to show the spiritual support of God manifested through its creative, saving, and animating actions. God can support us through a variety of ways that we can relate to divine reality. We will never be able to articulate adequately the Trinity, and yet we try to grasp the distinct roles of God without letting God be separated into Three Persons, and we do not do that well. We try to make God human so we can understand God better.

 

          A helpful exercise for us to do is to pay attention to the functions of the Trinity during our worship at Mass. Through our language, we can notice when we address God in God’s various capacities. Try it out one day and see what you discover. The Spirit does the initial part by gathering people together and calls us into worship as a community. The Spirit created the church, the community of believers in the Resurrection of Jesus and of his Father, and the spirit continues to call people to worship each day, each week. 

 

          Sometimes people ask, “To whom do you pray?” and we have various responses. In our liturgy, the answer is always, “To God, the Father of Jesus Christ, and our Father,” even if we are uncomfortable with providing God pronouns or have discomfort with the patristic term, Father. We pray to the God who creates, and we do it in the name of Jesus, through the movement of the Spirit. Every aspect of prayer is to the Father, the Creator, though we address Jesus in two places: “Lord, have mercy,” and “at the exchange of peace.” Our worship is of God, the Father, and our time together is to give praise and thanks. The Spirit’s role is to bless our offerings and to act as an intermediary through the actions of Jesus as he enacts the Last Supper, an offering to his Father. As God wants to unite us in worship and in right relations, we are given the Spirit to keep us choosing rightly.         

 

          Before we commemorate the Last Supper event of Jesus, we first pray to the Spirit to gather us, to bless the offerings of our community, to transform us and the bread and wine, to call upon the faithful from all ends of the earth and in the heavens to worship with us, and to bring our prayers to the Father. The re-enactment of the Last Supper is to remember what Jesus of Nazareth did for us in the obedience of faith, and that the Spirit makes him present whenever we gather for praise and worship. The Spirit helps us imitate the life of Jesus, who made God’s life manifest in his humanity.

 

          What does this Trinitarian God want us to know? It is that God, the Father, understands human suffering and pledges to be with us in daily life. Jesus was the unique revealer of the Father’s heart to us, and the Spirit is going to teach us how we are to care for and love one another. God gives us a wealth of resources and spiritual aid to help us in our vocation to love, for when we see an increase of love, we know God is by our side.

 

Scripture for Daily Mass

 

First Reading: 

Monday: (1 Kings 21) Naboth the Jezreelite had a vineyard in Jezreel next to the palace of Ahab, king of Samaria. Ahab said to Naboth, “Give me your vineyard to be my vegetable garden, since it is close by, next to my house. I will give you a better vineyard in exchange, or, if you prefer, I will give you its value in money.”

 Tuesday: (1 Kings 21) After the death of Naboth the LORD said to Elijah the Tishbite: “Start down to meet Ahab, king of Israel, who rules in Samaria. He will be in the vineyard of Naboth, of which he has come to take possession. This is what you shall tell him, ‘The LORD says: After murdering, do you also take possession?

 

Wednesday: (2 Kings 2) When the LORD was about to take Elijah up to heaven in a whirlwind, he and Elisha were on their way from Gilgal. Elijah said to Elisha, “Please stay here; the LORD has sent me on to the Jordan.” “As the LORD lives, and as you yourself live, I will not leave you,” Elisha replied. And so the two went on together.

 

Thursday: (Sirach 48) You brought a dead man back to life from the nether world, by the will of the LORD. You sent kings down to destruction, and easily broke their power into pieces. You brought down nobles, from their beds of sickness. You heard threats at Sinai, at Horeb avenging judgments. You anointed kings who should inflict vengeance, and a prophet as your successor. You were taken aloft in a whirlwind of fire,
in a chariot with fiery horses.

 

Friday (2 Kings 11) When Athaliah, the mother of Ahaziah, saw that her son was dead, she began to kill off the whole royal family. But Jehosheba, daughter of King Jehoram concealed him from Athaliah, and so he did not die. For six years he remained hidden in the temple of the LORD, while Athaliah ruled the land.

 

Saturday (2 Chronicles 24) After the death of Jehoiada, the princes of Judah came and paid homage to King Joash, and the king then listened to them. They forsook the temple of the LORD, the God of their fathers, and began to serve the sacred poles and the idols; and because of this crime of theirs, wrath came upon Judah and Jerusalem.

 

Gospel: 

Monday: (Matthew 5) Jesus said to his disciples: “You have heard that it was said,
An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil.

 

Tuesday: (Matthew 5) “You have heard that it was said, You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

 

Wednesday (Matthew 6) Take care not to perform righteous deeds in order that people may see them; otherwise, you will have no recompense from your heavenly Father. When you give alms, do not blow a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets to win the praise of others.

 

Thursday (Matthew 6) In praying, do not babble like the pagans, who think that they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them. Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

 

Friday (Matthew 6) Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and decay destroy, and thieves break in and steal. But store up treasures in heaven,
where neither moth nor decay destroys, nor thieves break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.

 

Saturday (Matthew 6) No one can serve two masters. He will either hate one and love the other or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.

 

Saints of the Week

 

June 13: Anthony of Padua, priest and doctor (1195-1231), became a biblical scholar who eventually joined the Franciscans. Francis sent him to preach in northern Italy, first in Bologna and then Padua. He very especially beloved because of his pastoral care, but he died at age 36.

 

This Week in Jesuit History

 

• June 12, 1928. Fr. General Ledochowski responded negatively to the idea of intercollegiate sports at Jesuit colleges because he feared the loss of study time and the amount of travel involved. 
• June 13, 1557. The death of King John III of Portugal, at whose request Francis Xavier and others were sent to India. 
• June 14, 1596. By his brief Romanus Pontifex, Pope Clement VIII forbade to members of the Society of Jesus the use or privilege of the Bulla Cruciata as to the choice of confessors and the obtaining of absolution from reserved cases. 
• June 15, 1871. P W Couzins, a female law student, graduated from Saint Louis University Law School, the first law school in the country to admit women. 
• June 16, 1675. St Margaret Mary Alacoque received her great revelation about devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. 
• June 17, 1900. The martyrdom at Wuyi, China, of Blesseds Modeste Andlauer and Remy Asore, slain during the Boxer Rebellion. 
• June 18, 1804. Fr. John Roothan, a future general of the Society, left his native Holland at the age of seventeen to join the Society in White Russia.