The Great Feast of Intimacy

Homily: Trinity Sunday 2023

This great feast of the Most Holy Trinity can too easily and too often get weighed down by technical, even exotic, sounding theological language like hypostatic union and homoousios, or it can get easily run over by people picking clovers and quite anxious to explain the meaning of 3 in 1. And so we too can easily forget that the Feast of the Holy Trinity is, first and foremost, our Great Feast of Intimacy. It reminds us that our God exists as a life-giving force of relational love and we are being drawn daily into that love and intimacy as we are called to allow it to transform and nurture our own relationships and our own honest need for love.

Today, in our first reading from Exodus, we pick up in the middle of a long scene of ever-intensifying intimacy between God and Moses. Prior to our passage today, in chapter 33, we hear Moses articulate the longing at the core of every human heart, the longing that brings each of us fully alive and at the same time scares us to death. Moses pleads with God saying: Please, Lord, I want to see your face. This cry is an expression of the most simple as well as the most primal and fundamental human desire in all of us. A desire that enlivens us as it scares us because we know in articulating the depth of that desire in our own hearts, we touch fire and we fear getting burned. Moses knew in speaking the words: Please, Lord, I want to see your face, he was putting himself at risk, putting his life at stake. But he also knew, whatever the cost, there was nothing more worth risking his life for.

Have you ever noticed that there is no Transfiguration story in the Gospel of John? Except that there is! It just appears in a very unique form. It is when the first disciples follow Jesus and he turns and looks at them and they see his face and he says to them: What do you seek? And they know right in that moment they are seeing exactly what they seek, but in the rush to give some kind of answer they say: “Rabbi, where do you dwell?” And Jesus says: “Come and See.”

I think its important to remember, one of the great moments in the traditional Transfiguration story is when Elijah, representing the Prophets, and Moses, representing the Law, both men who “longed to see God’s face,” finally are granted their heart’s deepest desire and in the transfigured face of Christ they receive that most satisfying, eternal intimacy for which the human heart longs but only the Divine can provide.

Now maybe you are saying to yourself: What’s this got to to with the Trinity? Well, a lot, I think. There are great and often obtuse theological renderings of the Trinity that have their proper place but they don’t exactly make one’s heart go pitter-pat! For me, it was St. Augustine, I believe, who described the Trinity best. He described it as the Lover, the Beloved, and the Love that binds them. The Father is the Lover, the Son, the Beloved (In whose place we are also being invited to stand) and the Spirit is the Love that binds them together and then overflows and draws us up into the Great Feast of Intimacy, because that love, by its nature, is excessive.

So what then is the experiential meaning of the Holy Trinity? It is simply this, it is the moment, it is every moment, when the Lover turns his face and we see him and we are utterly convicted in the truth that we are Beloved, we are utterly loved and we have only one mission to fulfill: to let that love shine on our faces for others to see; for others to know.

After Moses’ intense, intimate encounter with God on Sinai, he descends the mountain and when he appears before the people, his face shines with the Love that, as Dante once wrote, “moves the sun and the other stars.” But the people beg him to veil his face because they are afraid, they know such love only comes at a cost and they fear that cost to themselves.

But as St. Paul would later write, in Christ, we see God’s face, so we must live with our faces unveiled so others can witness and receive that same transformative force of being transfigured from glory into glory.

Today, the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity, is our Great Feast of Intimacy. We are reminded who God is and who we are called to be. We are encouraged to take the risk of making Moses’ cry our own: Please, Lord, I want to see your face. As we are called to put ourselves at risk, our lives at stake, in letting others see how that love is transforming us.

So, as God turns his face once again today toward each of us in Christ, let us be convicted by that love and convinced that we are beloved and let us then turn our faces, shining with the cost of love, toward others so they might be reminded that they too are invited to this Great Feast of Intimacy, this Great Feast of Love!