We bless the God of heaven. And before all living, we will praise him because he has acted with us according to his mercy. That is the jubilant hymn of the church, the tomorrow Trinity song. This Trinity Sunday, which is like a great today, at the end of that series of feasts in which we celebrate our redemption. On Pentecost, the plenitude of the Holy Ghost has been poured out upon. the Holy Ghost who alone plumbs the depth of divinity.

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And on Trinity Sunday, the same Holy Spirit urges us, preaches us, to praise God and praise him as he has revealed himself in the history of our redemption. That means as the Triune God. But you realize immediately entering upon this celebration that the Church does not approach the mystery of the Triune God In an abstract way, as a treatise about the three persons and their equality and their differences, the Church does not approach this mystery as an object of scientific research

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or as an object of intellectual analysis. That would mean approaching it from the outside. But the Church lives right within that plenitude of the blessing with the Triune God pours out over mankind in the course of the history of our salvation. The Church sees or comprehends the tribe of God as life and as abundance of life. and as a life which abounds into us.

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And therefore the church does not speak about the triune God as one would speak about the weather or about art. But the church speaks speaks out of the living experience of the fullness of the blessings that she receives from the Triune God and exhorts him in praise. Nothing is more alive, white, than praise. Because praise is something in which the whole man actively participates.

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Praise is a personal confession rising out of a grateful heart. Nobody is able to praise God who does not love him. And nobody is able to love God who has not experienced his mercy. Therefore, that we may be able to join with a full heart this song of praise to the triune God, which the church sings on this Trinity Sunday, let us for a moment wonder again on the way which the divine mercy has wandered, on which the divine blessing of the Father of the Son

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and of the Holy Ghost has been poured out over us in the course of sacred history, the history of our salvation. It is so wonderful to think that our life as individual persons, and also that the whole history of mankind does not take place and is not directed, in quotation marks, directed by a blind, impersonal faith. But that the whole heavens of the Triune God is open, open and directs our humanness.

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First, in the Old Testament, God has manifested himself as the omnipotent Lord of creation. That is the predominant note, I say the predominant note, the basic revelation of the Old Testament, not the full revelation. But that certainly we learn from the Old Testament that God, the God of heaven and earth, whom the great majority of mankind in one form or the other adhere to, that this God, if that is the message of the Old Testament, is not the product

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of Allah only human thoughts and desires. But that he is truly the one who is infinitely above men and above this world. That is the reason why he manifested himself in the Old Testament on the top of Mount Sinai as the law, written by God's finger into the tablets of stone. Hence that while this law was being promulgated, The fence was around the mountain to keep the people, the crowd, away.

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Because this here taking place was a manifestation of an absolute sovereign will. When the God of hosts has made a decision, who will ever defeat it? And when his hand is stretched out, then who will ever be able to force it back? as Isaiah says. So in the Old Testament, God manifests himself as the absolute Lord over heaven and earth and as the foundation, the force and power

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which carries and preserves and guides all things and all human events. And therefore, the first sentence of the Old Testament is, in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. But this word, this message of the omnipotent will of the Creator who lords it over man through his law is not the last word of divine revelation. Because we are predestined not to be only the servants or slaves before God, of God, but to be his children.

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We have been chosen to be God's children and Jesus Christ is so. Nobody has ever seen God But the Son, who was in the Father's bosom, he has revealed it to us, says St. John in the first chapter of his Gospel in the 18th verse. Indeed, no man had seen God. He had remained It does. Far from us. And certainly he will again become far from us as long as we do not look into the face of Jesus Christ in this face in which alone

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The kindness of God our Savior is mirrored. That is the great light that Christ has kindled in this world. That he has manifested to men the name of the Father. God the that the almighty Lord of heaven and earth is our Father. That, I think, we have first known during that most quiet and hidden of all nights, that holy night of Christmas, When God, who had revealed himself for such a long time in thunder and storm, as the God of wrath, had revealed himself without redeeming us, now he is there before us in the cradle as a babe

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and Christ and redeems us. The Father of heaven and earth, we also have seen him and recognize him in the preaching of the song. And beautiful just to take one example, parable of the prodigal son. The father going out to meet the son who returns in repentance, celebrates a feast for him, gives him a festive garland, the ring of his love. because there's more joy in heaven over one sinner than over a hundred just ones who are not in need of redemption.

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But certainly the whole depth of the love of God of the Father for us has been manifested to us when we were standing by the cross and when we knew and saw that the Father has sent his beloved Son into this world that he may die for us while we were still God's enemies. Saints Christ, hanging on the cross between heaven and earth, between God and man, exclaimed, Father, forgive them because they do not know what they are doing.

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Since that moment we know that there is no human aversion evil enough, no human suffering deep enough that God's loving, saving hand may not be able to reach it. You are blessed because you are sitting upon the cherubim and you behold the death. That is that beautiful gradual of tomorrow's mass. The God who is enthralled upon the cherubim

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that is the Lord of the Old Testament, the God who beholds the dead, that is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who beheld our lowliness and had mercy on our lost conditions. in and through the cross of Esau. This is the cross. It is the visible, unmistakable, eternal pledge that God is more than the omnipotent Creator, that he is more than the stern jerk and certainly, certainly more than an impersonal fate, but that he is the living Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who in incarnation and crucifixion

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became our brother, and who, through his glorious resurrection, made us to newborn children of his heavenly Father. Crucifixion and resurrection evidently are more that mere forgiveness of human guilt. There is no comparison between crucifixion and resurrection as the life-giving mysteries of divine love. No comparison to that act of paternal forgiveness in which a father may forgive the disobedience of his child, the son.

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Crucifixion and resurrection are infinitely more than such an act of external forgiveness. They are a rebirth. First for Christ, the God-man, but then for all those who are united to him, even for the entire world. Through the resurrection, Christ has become the beginning of a new creation, the firstborn among many brethren, the head of his body, the church, The water of a lake, quiet and still, is a beautiful mirror of the heavenly world above it.

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But when this water now is being poured out over the land around the lake, Then life rises. And so also with Christ the Lord, the Son of God, the mirror of the Father's glory. But he gives himself, pours out his blood over this earth as the good shepherd He gives his life for his sheep, not only once on the cross, but continuously. He gives his life by sending his spirit upon the church.

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Because you are our song, Therefore God sends the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, says St. Paul. So with Easter the resurrection, Pentecost is necessarily connected. Through and in the Spirit, Everything that has taken place in Christ becomes our own life. The Spirit is that breath of peace which the risen Christ communicates

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were sinners, raising us up into his own risen life. Fulfilling what has been described at the beginning, that man was created out of the dust of the earth, fashioned by the hands of God, who then in that beautiful scene in Genesis breathes his life into this that he had fashioned there himself. Because the Spirit is the life which Christ gives, surrenders, shares.

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Therefore, this Spirit is the charity, that love, which seeketh not to own. This love is poured out in our hearts through the Spirit and it becomes the living link, the living bond which overcomes human egoism and selfishness and liberates us to become all members of one body, united in the unity of the body of all the redeemed. That is the way in which the Spirit creates the Church.

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The Church is the manifestation of the Spirit. And immediately we see that is the mystery and the essence of the church. Not a human association which one may enjoy, one wants it and likes it, and which one can leave. When one thinks it doesn't have anything to give anymore, that means according to the requirement of personal advantage. But the Church is the society of divine life in the Holy Spirit. the sharing of the divine life in the Holy Spirit, which has been given to us through Christ.

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Nobody can live by the Spirit of Christ who is not a member of the body of Christ, says St. Augustine. You see, Christ who surrendered his life on the cross for us, out of this surrender of Christ on the cross, the church had to die. How could anybody accept for himself the sacrifice of Christ's life, how could he accept this sacrifice to have his sins forgiven him without abandoning his selfishness, his egoism, and without loving about everything else

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The unity of all those who have been recreated in the power of that same blood that has been shed for us. Christ died for us, as St. Paul says, that we may not live anymore for our sins. but for the one who died for us. That's absolute quiet logic. If Christ died for us, and we accept his death for us, we cannot live anymore for ourselves. We have to live for the one who died for us. So you see, in this way the triune divine life has become, shall we say, our destiny.

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First, it has revealed itself in the majesty of the Old Testament, the majesty of the Lord and the Creator. Then we saw the divine life reflected in the mirror of the Son. In his face we saw the Father. And through the surrender of his life, Christ the Son of God made man, recreated us so that we became children of our Heavenly Father.

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And now, at this moment, the Holy Spirit works in us, building us up into the temple of the church in which the praise of the glory of the Triune God is being sung. That is the history of our redemption as the living manifestation of the Triune God. Now this history recalls the destiny of every individual which is baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

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That means when we translate it into terms more easily understood at a say of human psychology, that means that our life, the life of baptized Christians, rests on three foundations. The first, most fundamental, is that of the people dying, the fear of the Lord, not the fear of the slave who does not know what his Lord may have in store for him next, what kind of punishment he is just thinking up

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in his revengeful mind, that's not the fear of God. But the fear of God is the fear of the son, of the child who knows that his whole being depends absolutely and completely not only on some act of creation that has taken place when our soul entered into being through an act of divine omnipotence, but in every, every moment in which we breathe, that we would not be that this moment God would not hold us Keep us among the living.

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Therefore, fear of God is that realization of utter dependence on God as the author, creator, and the one who at every moment preserves and keeps our life. the fear of the Lord. This dependence in which we are willing to do his will, in which we respect his commandments, in which we want to be his servants. The second foundation of the Christian life under the shadow of the Triangle God is trust.

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Faith, trusting faith. That faith in which and through which we receive and accept the glad tidings in which our Lord Jesus Christ reveals to us what is in the bosom of the Father. The divine shepherd. Deus caritas et. That is the last object of our faith. that God, through charity, is our Father, who has sent his Son to be an expiation for our sins, so that the wall of partition has been broken down and we have access through Christ

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to the throne of mercy. That is our faith, jubilant, trusting faith. And in this faith we would rather stay and hope until our last moment than to cease living before our death through the lack and loss of that faith. Then the third foundation on which our lives as baptized in the trident guard rests is the charity that love that seeketh not our own, which first of all is in the Father, but has been poured out in our hearts through the Spirit, whom the Father and the Son have sent and are sent.

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And this charity may then liberate us Liberate us from the chains that selfishness constantly holds us. And may then this charity build us up, make us a living member in the body of Christ, the Holy Church. And then in this church, United in the unity of the Holy Spirit, we rise through the song, taking into our hands as it were what he has done for us, holding it up in the Eucharist, in the hymn of thanksgiving,

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In the Sacrificium Laudis, the sacrifice of praise of holy mass, so that through him, through Christ and his sacrifice, we may enter into the presence of the Father. Pater Nostra, qui est in Cios, our Father who art in heaven. cannot be your thing. So that is the life of the Holy Trinity as it is shared with us as we can see it in the history of salvation and in the history of our own life. We can sum it all up, and we can say it's this.

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Glory be to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.

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