Truth of the Eucharist and Holy Trinity

Reading I: Exodus 34: 4b-6, 8-9 Reading II: Second Corinthians 13: 11-13 Gospel: John 3: 16-18 God revealed part of himself to Moses on top of Mount Sinai but never fully revealed himself until Jesus Christ was born and walked the earth. People now were seeing God up close and personal. They were not only seeing his face, they were able to receive healing and forgiveness and to listen to and hear his wonderful words of consolation and hope. And yet, we've taken it still a step further in the church where we are able to receive Jesus in the Eucharist. God chooses to be one with us. He allows us the opportunity to be one with him. And the real challenge for us is when we leave mass or we go outside this church, will we stay one with him? Each year after Pentecost, the Lord gives us this feast, God, the Holy Trinity. And according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, this is the most important doctrine of all the Church's teaching. Catechism, paragraph 234 says Belief in God, The Trinity is the most essential doctrine in the whole Christian faith. We have to believe that God is one and three Father, Son and Holy Spirit, that He didn't just become God. At some point He's always existed and he didn't just become the Trinity. This is how God understands Himself. This is who God is, and this is how He has chosen to reveal Himself to us. Jesus understood that He was part of something far greater than Himself. In John's gospel, he would say, "the father is greater than" I but then he would also say, "the father and I are one." How in the Trinity in John's gospel, began by reminding us that Jesus was there when the worlds were made. And the start of John's gospel. We don't hear the story of the birth of Jesus of Bethlehem. Instead, John starts with the same words as Genesis. Through Him, all things came to be, and without him, nothing came in to be. A statement of faith that Jesus was there when the words were made because a Trinitarian God was creating it. Everything out of nothing. Bringing order to chaos. Jesus. He understood that the He was there long before Moses and Abraham, that He had always been. The ascension, Jesus' Heavenly Homecoming. And as He was journeying home to have and He gave a great command to his apostles, the last verse of Matthew's Gospel, "Go make disciples. Go out to all the nations, baptizing them in the name, not the names in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit." Jesus understood the Trinity. He wanted us to be baptized into the Trinity that we might share in its rewards the love of God in Christ Jesus, and the power of the Spirit that God goes all the way back to Genesis and shows us, even in the first chapter of the Bible, he understood who he was and wants us to know him. The same as the Trinity. In chapter one, verse 26 of Genesis, God said, Let us make man after our image and likeness. God is one. But He's referring himself in the plural because He knows that He is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And the very next chapter we see the Adam has been created, but he's not animated. He's like a mannequin, a statue, lifeless on the ground until in verse seven, God breathes life into him. Adam didn't have life until God gave him his spirit, the life giving spirit he breathed in to help. This is how God wants us to know Him. And God isn't acting at times as Father, other times as Son, and sometimes as Spirit. It's always in perpetual motion because the Trinity is all about relationship and love. The love that God the Father has for His Son, the love that the son has for his father. That love generates, that spirit which gives rise to the church, to the Bible, and to our faith. And this is that same, immense and intense God that creates everything out of nothing. And yet, in the Trinity, we realize that that immensity and that intensity also has intimacy, that God is intimately connected with all of his creation. We should be intimately connected to him. And then to go and tell others about him and this world that does not know God in this world. When people don't know God, they don't know truth, they don't know life, they don't know beauty, they don't know goodness. And so that's up to us. That's up to us who know God and love God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to go out and touch others with that same truth, beauty and goodness that will lead them to happiness and fulfillment, not only here on Earth, but more importantly and especially and heaven above how we wish that our face would radiate like Moses when He saw God only from the far and only from a distance, and only for a moment, he was glowing. We're not only going to see God today, we're going to receive God today. And every time we need him, he will come to us. And one day He's going to ask all of us to come to him. And we will finally find out that he is just, as he said, a father to us. He has sent his son to save us and a spirit to be our strength.