June 11, 2017
Today, on Trinity Sunday, we celebrate the wonder of relationships. Relationships exists even in God. From our vi-sion of God as Trinity - God as relational - we are reminded that we are "all connected" as a community of faith, hope and love. We want to form, we want to become a community that hopes to be one family, a community that brings rich and poor together, a community that works for justice in the world. We have been created with a desire for mutual and loving relationships. We are invited to work together in order to create healthy relationships between all of God’s people: relationships be-tween individuals and also between nations and groups, relationships of mutual respect and collaboration, relation-ships leading toward justice and peace. In some ways today's scriptures for Trinity Sunday are a story of discovery: the discovery of God, the discovery of who God is, what God is like and what God offers to us. 1st reading: [Exodus 34,4-6.8-9] On the mountain, Moses finds a God with whom he can converse in some way. Moses finds a God with whom it feels good to talk, a God with whom it feels good to walk together. Moses asks this God to journey with all the people. Again and again, in the scriptures we discover a God of relationships. God is more than “totally other”. We discover a God traveling with us and with the whole community. Our God is a social God -- a God who is concerned with our world and its people. 2nd reading [2 Corinthians 13,11-13] The second reading reminds us that the relationship that exists within God also mirrors the relationship that should exist within us as a human community. The relationship within God – we call it the “trinity” --is a relationship of mutuali-ty and support, a relationship of love and respect. And we are invited to imitate it. In the 1920s, a theologian even said that the Trinity is a model for democracy, that modern Western democracies would be impossible without the theological concept of trinity. I was impressed by this Erik Peterson (1890-1960). He also said that strict monotheism leads necessarily to dictatorship and tyranny and totalitarianism. Whereas all divine persons have the same dignity, the same love and the same power. Gospel [John 3,16-18] Jesus reminds us in the gospel that God travels with us not to condemn but to love – God travels with us to be of help to all of us. Our teaching about God and the great mystery of God is a social teaching. As God is a social be-ing, so are we. Any good theology of God has social implications. It calls us to social values. Our religious faith in-volves a community of mutual support and discovery. It involves a set of values that we share in common. Values that call us to share with each other. Therefore, we are concerned with the issues of the world and everyday life. We are concerned with justice and peace. As friends of Jesus, we focus on the common good, we do not want to ex-clude anybody. We have hope in the midst of all the problems and challenges of the world. In this way the Trinity is a model for how we live, of how we love, for how we change the world.
Fr. Wolfgang Felber, SJ