Believing in Love

It is a pleasure to be here with you all on Trinity Sunday. Today’s feast happens to fall this year on the first Sunday of June, a month which in recent years has become associated with cultural dialogues about love, identity, and the authentic nature of self. There’s a lot that could and should be said about those cultural dialogues and about how they relate to our lives and our Catholic faith. But for the moment, perhaps it’s enough to say that these themes of love and identity are at the heart of today’s feast – not only in terms of how we understand ourselves but in how we understand God. Allow me to explain what I mean.

The reading we just heard was short – only three lines taken from the Gospel of John, the first of which was: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.” This passage, John 3:16, is maybe the most famous in all of the Bible, and rightly so: it sums up perfectly, in his own words, Jesus’s identity. He speaks these words to the Pharisee Nicodemus, who has come to him at night in search of answers about who he is. And Jesus gives them to him: he is the Son of God, sent so that we might believe in him and thus receive salvation rather than the condemnation we deserve by virtue of our sins. Jesus’s presence among us, the whole reason for his coming, is due to love: the love of God for human beings.

How important it is for us to return to this idea again and again! So often our understanding of God, and our ideas about religion and faith generally, can become sidetracked into other things. We might even wonder, “Does God love me? Does he care about what I am going through?” And the answer is YES – God himself, in the person of Christ, tells us today that his love is at the root of everything. The foundation of God’s entire focus toward us human beings is saving love. And the reason for that is because God himself *is* love, as we know from the First Letter of John. That’s what we celebrate today in the Solemnity of the Holy Trinity. Who God is, is Love – a communion of Love, between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And as God reveals his own identity to us, he also invites us, amazingly, to participate in that identity: we as mere human being can come to know the divine love of the holy Trinity, be caught up in it even now, and even share in it forever in eternal life.

But if all of that sounds great, here’s the challenging part: where do we see God’s love most clearly and visibly? In the Cross. In the history of Christian art, some of the most frequent depictions of the Holy Trinity are with Jesus on the Cross, with the Father and the Holy Spirit above him, showing him to the viewer. That’s because more than any of Jesus’s sermons, more than any of his miracles, more than anything else he does, it is his suffering and death that reveal the depth and totality of God’s love. Jesus makes reference to this in the same dialogue with Nicodemus that our Gospel passage comes from. He says that we human beings are asked to believe in the love that is revealed when the Son of Man is lifted up – in other words, when he Jesus will be raised up on the Cross. It’s in the Cross of Christ that we come to know and believe in the saving love of God, the love he has for sinful humanity.

The Most Holy Trinity (1625) by Guido Reni 

And this is important for us, too, because if it’s true that we sometimes lose sight of love as being at the heart of who we are and what we believe, it’s also true that we too often think of love in some way other than how God reveals it – the love of the Cross. You and I experience love in all kinds of ways. We know it through our families, through our friends, through love of the world and what is in it, even through a proper love of ourselves and our own identities, unique among creation. But all of these loves, good as they may be in some way, also must be purified. Because we exist in a fallen world, and because we are ourselves are fallen, our loves can be distorted – they can distract us from or even lead us away from true Love itself, Love with a capital L, which is the love that Jesus has revealed on the Cross. This is the love that God has for us, but it’s also the love that he calls us to have – to imitate, to strive for, and to be purified in our own manner of loving, so that our love may be ever more fashioned in the love of the Cross.

Perhaps we might think today about how we think of love: love as an abstract idea, as a cultural touchstone, and above all love as it is lived out in our lives and the lives of those we know. And perhaps we might each ask ourselves: How are my notions and experiences of love rooted in the love of God? Are my loves self-serving, or do they try to imitate and be purified by the sacrificial love that God has revealed for me in the Cross? How can my ways of loving myself and others be directed not toward earthly ends but toward sharing one day in the eternal love of the Holy Trinity?

To answer these questions, my friends, surely all of us, in some way or another, must seek out Jesus, like Nicodemus did, and find in him again the authentic identity of what it means to love. This month of June that we have begun has for centuries been the month dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus – the devotion which sums up everything I’ve said. The love of God, the love that is his very identity as Holy Trinity, is revealed to us in the Cross of Christ. He continues to love us now, and with the continuing love of his Sacred Heart, he calls us to encounter the love of the Cross, to believe in it, and to conform our own ways of loving to it. 

May the Eucharist that we celebrate this day help us to experience anew the saving love of the Holy Trinity, so that by our own sacrificial, Christlike love we may be led to eternal life.