Holy Trinity

Pr 8:22-31; Rom 5:1-5; Jn 16:12-15 (year C)

The children's identity card is faith in a God who creates, makes Covenant, is close, redeems, allows flourishing in any event or age.

Thus on the journey we take we no longer rely on the outside, and we stop underestimating ourselves.

In fact, Scripture testifies that the Lord proceeds with his people and manifests himself in history, but he is not bound to a particular territory or heights, but to woman and man.

The Eternal One is "God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob" (Mt 22:32; Mk 12:26; Lk 20:37; cf. Ex 3:6).

He is "the One who will be" [Ex 3:14 Hebrew text] i.e.: in the unfolding of events people have an essential experience of the Living One as Deliverer, and Bridegroom [cf. Hosea's fluctuating affective story].

But in the fullness of his heart, only Jesus manifests this - still in the First Covenant confused with a sullen lawgiver, notary, judge who intervenes to cut or distinguish, then waits for the reckoning.

The Almighty dreams of imparting life and creating Family, not dividing pristine friends from impure enemies, or capable and incapable.

Such becomes the intimate expression of the authentic woman and man; a cipher of the identity of the Church, which is not pronounced in the least.

In short, specific to sons and daughters is adherence to a Living One who transmits and brightens life, compromises and saves, enables all growth, recovers - creates a harmonious dynamism of opposites.

The First Reading highlights the Father's Project, which unfolds its being while being assisted by the delightful figure of Wisdom.

Creation reflects the purpose of divine love, which manifests itself in the enchantment of a joyful walk with us. He desires to remain on earth, unconditionally.

The joy of the Creator Father is just this: delighting like an Artist bursting with joy over his work. He is happy to be on the globe, especially among the sons of man (vv. 30-31).

His Bliss? Our own; of every creature, who loves to flourish despite conflict.

This is precisely - if the son, though unsteady, does not feel himself to be the fruit of chance, rather he seizes the moments of confusion in life as if they were those of a building site [because the Designer knows where to go].

Disorder, piled-up materials, havoc, unseen at every turn; but we are not lost: within the soul there remains a guiding image, the Dream and prototype of an unfolding intimate and cosmic harmony.

It evolves in our wandering. He allows trial and error, indeed He makes use of them.

It is a Design that recovers all scattered things and interrupted paths, creating understandings, unthinkable varieties; hence diverse essences.

Not only with skill, but by Ideal Wisdom. And at the same time incomparable Novelty: of one who does not repeat, but rather brings into being.

It is the miracle of life, always new - indeed, riding on our attempts and mistakes!

The Father is exuberant, not a totem that does not accept decomposed energies. He does not express himself by enacting laws like a sovereign.

He creates unprecedented symphonic polychromes, other essences - multifaceted - as would a parent who rejoices in his rich offspring, in the different works of his intimates (in the most diverse fields) manifested in a thousand facets.

The key to everything - the accompanying Horizon, correlating stages and redefining itself - is the Creator's. His is the guiding Project.

The 'unique' summit and exemplary Action - the Work - is a historically configured event: the Word-event and Person of the Son.

The Second Reading makes it clear that the Eternal Father did not consider his activity concluded, granting mere input to being and essences - then abandoning reality and men, and retiring up there into heaven.

By Grace, in Faith we are partakers of God, we have direct access to His independent action, to Himself (Rom 5:2).

Not even our radical incompleteness is cause for rancour, for He who did not create us angelic - but dreamy, yes.

Nor would we be able to scratch it and make it impure, as if it were someone at hand whom we can pollute by reaching out to him of our own accord - pulling ourselves up with our genius, by dint of muscle or scaffolding.

The Person, Word and Event of Jesus tell of a Kingdom in which there is no fear of holiness being endangered by the incompleteness of creatures and contact with the world.

There is only one problem that cuts through the Dialogue with the Most High (v.3): believing [devoutly] that our boasting is of the 'obvious' kind.

In front of our peers we glory in achievements, roles, titles and successes. It also happens in the path of religious perfection.

But the Lord is not like an athletic trainer who delights in the quickest of his players - while he inflicts humiliation, travails, benches and punishments on the unfit and unwieldy.

The Son proclaims the authentic Face of the Father: only unreserved understanding - undeserved, because the perfect Work is solely of Christ the man; our 'accomplice'.

He thus removes dishonour and the sense of inadequacy.

In this way, the exclusive prominence of woman and man, and the motor of solid growth, is His unreserved Love. The only reliable reality - unambiguous of duplicity or hysterical dissociation.

Often in the face of the show society even some religious people become complacent about their achievements.

In the presence of the Eternal, they display their own merits - like a struggling merchant, who displays all the best in his shop window.

Faith-Hope (Heb 11:1; Rom 5:4), on the other hand, places one in the right position with the brethren, and before the Lord. Without alibi.

We learn transparently and finally that the obsession with being admired from the outside - and the pleasure of approval at any cost - are by no means 'the' Way.

In fact, the true Scia - the genuine Work - is solely of the Son, who, having fully corresponded to the initiative of God the Father, Justifies.

Nothing can undermine us.

The world we do not see has transmutative capabilities.

Of course, the inner Friend does not 'make us righteous' by dressing us outwardly and in a timely manner, but in an existential process, which shifts the balance (vv.3-4).

The Lord works within through experience. He also does this by besieging the "other" us-ourselves that we have cast aside.

Thus modifying the shrunken heart and improving us with its passionate Friendship, re-proposed in new life opportunities.

As Paul testified, Salvation is not a vicarious and dated mechanism.

The Mystery dwells, meets us and passes through us as protagonists, and despite our whims expresses itself in a saved life.

Faith in God the Son is to be aware that Love can register partial failures, not defeat and ultimate annihilation.

Of course there are falls - either because of precariousness or because it is not immediate to understand the logic of the Crucified One: here is the Action of the Spirit.

Today's Gospel appeals to the mysterious, unknown sense of total self-giving. 

It is reborn by yielding: it is not easy to carry that "burden" [Jn 16:12 alludes to the Cross] nor to grasp its implications and imagine its paradoxical Fruitfulness.

The Development that flows from the superabundance and intensity of the Father-Son relationship is the empathy, the bearing, the action of the Spirit.

It is an impulse and a gesture that erupts within and precisely intuits the fertility of Gratuity.

It is the Spirit that internalises this not only very strange, but absurd proposal: that of triumph in loss, and even of Life from death.

We experience it in action: in the moments when its impetus produces inexplicable recoveries that "give glory to God" (v.14) - that is, they renew relationships and put people who do not even have self-esteem back on their feet.

But the Spirit suggested that the soul is reactivated by welcoming, rather than fighting anxieties, fears, indecisions, bitterness, fears of growing.

Only in this way is the Plan of Salvation realised.

Stepping out of the shadow of others, the opportunist becomes righteous, the doubter more secure, the unhappy person resumes hope; all can live happily.

Are the old ideas and old constructions creaking? It is perhaps time to move beyond fashions or past fads and artificial horizons - which only generate common ideas, concerns, and patterns.

Unlike the listening-and-transcending aroused by the unfettered Unveiling of Faith, beliefs refractory to the Exodus need doctrinal compactness: codes, customs, fixed cultural and social locations - otherwise they crumble.

But their construct settles for adequate schemes. That distorts us from valued or comfortable ways.

In the dynamics of the adventure of Faith, that is, in the Revelation of the accepted, tender and inclusive eccentric Love, accepted Diversity becomes an impulse for enrichment and a matrix for development.

The Love that does not betray and does not abandon - the only boast (not its own production) - makes the Newness of God practicable, the impossible Dream that no philosophy can tame.

Social identification is no longer involved. In us there is more.

He himself is "He who will be": let the ballasts go, the Best is yet to come. Reason for no longer running away from great Desires.