May 28, 2015
Thanks to our being connected to everyone all around the world, we are also vulnerable to those who can exploit those same connections. So we live in fear of being hacked. Target, Home Depot, MGM, various banks, our pin numbers and accounts. We feel helpless, just waiting for the inevitable to happen to us someday.
But a really compromising hack happened last week: Adult FriendFinder, a people-matching website with 64 million claimed users, was hacked. And along with the hack, the kind of secrets of preference and love life that no one would want publicized – and shouldn’t have been put online in the first place. I can imagine 64 million users wondering when their information will be revealed, or how much it will cost them in extortion money to keep it secret.
Hacking shows that there are parts of us that we don’t want known. And, in fact, we feel funny about knowing people in general. What do I want you to know about me? What do I not want to know about you? Can people even be known, even to themselves? We can come up with descriptors, but they never capture the person. What did we know about John F. Kennedy? Or Michael Jackson? Or the pilot who flew a plane-full of people into a mountain? What do we know about ourselves?
And if we are mysteries to ourselves at some level, then we begin to see the mystery that God is and has to be. Today we bring together the sweep of our celebration from Lent to Pentecost, the Paschal Mystery through which we have come to know God in Jesus Christ and in the Holy Spirit. We can never know God in the sense of comprehending God as if God were a theory or philosophy. As we ourselves exceed understanding, all the more God. But we can see how God is, how God acts, and how interrelates with us. The teaching about the Trinity is a way to point to all that has been revealed of God to us.
We would not have the Trinity without the experience of Jesus. Coming in the flesh, he could not just be flesh. Coming as a human, he could not just be human. Bringing us God, he must himself be God. Sending us the Spirit, he must be God with the Father and the Spirit. Those religions that cannot accept Jesus as divine see no need for the Trinity. We, who have come to experience God through Jesus in such a powerful way, cannot do without the Trinity.
The Trinity shows us that God is not some amorphous force, or some infinite and arbitrary lawgiver, or some “man up there,” as people sometimes say. The Trinity shows God as pure, self-giving love. “The Good has to share itself” – so went a saying that goes back 1,700 years. God, in God’s very being, shares: Father with Son, Son with Father, Father and Son in Spirit. And, as we see in Jesus, Father-Son-Spirit sharing divine life and love even with us. Bringing us into God’s inner life. Uniting us to Father through Jesus in the power of the Spirit.
We don’t want to be hacked, but God doesn’t mind being hacked. “I’ll show you my inner life,” God says in showing us Jesus and giving us the Spirit. “I unveil myself to you as much as possible,” God says, “so that you can know the depth and glory of your own lives.” By definition, God gives God’s self in love; as a result, our greatest glory is to replicate this divine dynamic in our own lives.
How privileged we are to make the Sign of the Cross, combining those two central truths that define us as believers and as God’s beloved: the gift of Jesus on the Cross which shows us the self-gift of God – Father, Son, Spirit – for our eternal life.