Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity: God our Father, who by sending into the world the Word of truth and the Spirit of sanctification made known to the human race your wondrous mystery, grant us, we pray, that in professing the true faith, we may acknowledge the Trinity of eternal glory and adore your Unity, powerful in majesty. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.

Commentary for the Sunday Mass Readings for the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, Cycle C:
The First Reading is from Proverbs 8:22-31. The fact that there are three Persons in the one God has been clearly revealed by Christ himself. He spoke of being equal to the Father yet a distinct Person from the Father; yet a distinct Person from the Father; then he spoke of the Holy Spirit as a Person with distinct actions of his own, whom he and the Father would send on earth, to complete the work of man’s salvation. The Church accepted this fact and this doctrine without hesitation from its very beginning, as it was given to it on Christ’s undoubted and undoubtable authority.

This doctrine was not revealed to the Jews of the Old Testament, and for a very good reason. They were surrounded by pagan nations who had many gods, and anything that even remotely looked like polytheism was anathema to their strict monotheism. But there were many hints at the possibility of more than one Person in their God—one of which we have just read in Proverbs today—but the Jews did not see the hints for their minds were closed against any such idea.

The Second Reading is from the Letter of St. Paul to the Romans 5:1-5. These verses of St. Paul’s letter to the Romans bring out very clearly the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity. Each of the three divine Persons has a part in our justification. We are at peace with God the Father through the death and resurrection of the Son, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit continually lives in us, keeping the love of God alive and active in our hearts.

The Gospel is from John 16:12-15. During his discourse at the Last Supper, Christ had promised his disciples that he would send them the Holy Spirit—-the Paraclete—(See John 14:16-26), to strengthen and console them and recall to their minds the truths he had taught them. In today’s text, he repeats the promise and tells them the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son and that the truths he will reveal to them will be those which the Father and the Son want revealed.

In St. Paul’s letter to the Romans, read at today’s Mass, we have a clear statement of the faith of the infant Church in the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity. In these verses from St. John—a part of the discourse at the Last Supper—we have St. Paul’s, and the Church’s, source of the truth of that doctrine, Christ himself, who was the second Person of the Blessed Trinity became man for our salvation. As regards this basic dogma of our Faith then, that there are three Persons in the One God, there is no room for doubt, we have it on the authority of Christ who is God. If we cannot understand how this can be, we need not be surprised—our human minds are very limited, they depend on our human senses for their images of things. A man, deaf from birth, has no image in his mind of sound, a man blind from birth has no mental idea of colour, but it would be irrational of these to deny the existence of sound and colour.

We Christians, however, have no difficulty in admitting the existence of the Blessed Trinity, and today as we honour the three divine Persons, our central thought should concentrate on gratitude to each of the three: the loving Father who planned not only our creation but our elevation to adopted sonship; the all-obedient loving Son, who carried out the Father’s plan, sharing with us our humanity so that we could share in the divinity; the Holy Spirit, fruit of the love of Father and Son, who has come to dwell in the Church and in each individual member, in order to fill our hearts with a true love of God.

We know we are unworthy of this divine generosity. The greatest saints that ever lived on earth were unworthy of such divine interest. That should not and must not stop us from availing of this divine generosity. We can show our gratitude in one way only, that is by appreciating our privilege and by striving to show our appreciation of it in our daily lives.

The Father, Son and Holy Spirit know all our human weaknesses, they knew them before they arranged to make us sharers in their own eternal happiness. They know also that it is those of us who try and try again to rise above our human weaknesses, who will finally share their heaven with them.

This possibility is open to all. The Blessed Trinity will exclude nobody from heaven. What we know of their plans for man’s sanctification makes such a thought impossible. If some fail the fault will lie completely and entirely with themselves; they did not do the little that was asked of them.

May God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit grant us the strength to overcome our human weaknesses and live and die in their love so that we may share their eternal kingdom with them.

Excerpted from The Sunday Readings, Cycle C, Fr. Kevin O’Sullivan, O.F.M.