There is an interesting aspect of today’s Gospel, it is the presence of the Holy Spirit. Now, let us step out of our faith for a second and ask the question: why do we need to see two persons of the Trinity in one scene in the Gospel? I don’t have the answer to that question, but I do have a reflection on it.
When a political movement tried to alter church teachings to be more in line with secular morality entered the church, there was a document written by a theologian in the movement that taught a bad understanding of Jesus. It said that Jesus was the way, the truth and the life. I asked my parishioners if any of them saw anything wrong with those words. One woman a real pillar in the Church and the community, someone whom we recognized then as a living saint, whom today we consider a saint, said “Jesus is the way, the truth and the life.”
One person recognized the error. That one word makes all the difference.
In true Catholicism, we do not follow a system, but we follow a person, that person is Jesus Christ. This is part of the meaning of his resurrection. It is not that Jesus resurrected from the dead, went to Heaven and wished us all a nice day until we meet again. It is that Jesus is alive and we, through our prayer lives, develop a personal relationship with Christ and through Christ to the Father.
Everything we do is rooted in this relationship. We need also to note that the relationship with God comes first and then we develop the relationship with each other. This becomes more powerful because as a community we have a mission to have a relationship with Christ first and then with each other, so our common point with each other is our relationship with Christ.
This is why our we need to have a relationship with Christ first before we come to communion. If we do not have a relationship with Christ we should not come to communion because the common point among others would not exist.
However, I began this homily asking: why do we see two persons of the Trinity? Why do we also see Jesus and the Holy Spirit or even looking at the same question from a different angle. Why do we see the Holy Spirit and Jesus?
Jesus came to be with us and ultimately to save us. He is led by the Holy Spirit and through his action we too are led by the Holy Spirit. We enjoy a status as Christian and through our prayer and worship we go out into the world led by the Holy Spirit.
Jesus was led by the Holy Spirit and we are led by the Holy Spirit when we deepen our relationship with Christ. But again, why were both Jesus and the Holy Spirit in this scene.
Jesus came to save us as a human. He is fully human and fully divine. He had to become fully human in order for us to be saved. The Holy Spirit on his own could not save us because what needed to sacrifice himself for us in obedience to the Father was indeed he who is fully human. If he was not fully human but only partially human and partially divine or the image of the human but fully divine then we could not have been saved by Him. Just as we could not have been saved by the Holy Spirit.
Why is this so important?
It is to communicate this: We do not follow a God who is an amorphous being that makes us a celestial pizza—one with everything.
We are following Jesus who through the action of the Holy Spirit leads us to eternal life and guides us to be salt of the Earth and light of the world. So, we follow the person of Jesus through the inspiration of Holy Spirit. We do not follow an amorphous being. We follow a specific person led by the Holy Spirit.
Why is all this important. You engage in the news lately? It does not matter when but when we read the news we read of all kind of things going on in the world and in our world specifically. Why does this happen? Original sin. However, the effects of original sin are not just personal in our lives, they are also communal, they are international and throughout time.
One of my favorite quotes comes from a protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr who said that the only empirically provable doctrine of Christianity is that of Original Sin.
But we need Jesus to show us the way, we need to be in relationship with Jesus as our brother, we cannot live our faith attached to an amorphous being, because we cannot identify with such.
The Holy Spirit leads us through Jesus because he became human that we could be saved but also that we are in relationship with Him as human and divine in ways that we could not be in
relationship with the Holy Spirit except in Christ. The same with the Father.
You’d be surprised how many parables there are in the Star Trek series, ironically. You may remember the famous story of Charlie X. Played by Robert Walker Jr. He plays a psychic destructive seventeen-year-old who wreaks havoc on the Enterprise. When his overlords take him back to their planet he begs to stay on the Enterprise, which obviously was not possible. He laments how the beings on this other planet are not like him. He cannot touch them, they are amorphous.
We cannot relate to amorphous beings. Jesus comes to us as literally the embodiment of the word of God. We relate to Jesus and through Him we find the fullness of God. This is why our faith is unique. We seek Christ the living God who is fully human and fully divine with whom we have a relationship.
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