Sunday, May 31, 2026 — The Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity (Year A)
Ex 34:4b-6, 8-9; Dan 3:52-56; 2Cor 13:11-13; Jn 3:16-18
A few years ago, a doctor named Vivek Murthy was treating a patient he calls James. James had high blood pressure and diabetes. His body was beginning to fail him. During one appointment, almost in passing, he said something the doctor never forgot. Winning the lottery, James said, was one of the worst things that had ever happened to him.
Before the lottery, James had been a baker. He knew the customers. The other bakers knew him. He didn’t have much money, but he had a place in the world. After winning the lottery, he quit the bakery and moved into a large secluded house. He became isolated, gained weight, got sick. When he ended up in the hospital, hardly anyone came to visit him.
Murthy later became Surgeon General and began speaking publicly about loneliness as a health crisis. But it was that story that stayed with him. We assume the good life means more privacy, more independence, fewer obligations, more distance from other people. And then we wonder why so many people feel alone.
In the first reading, Moses climbs Sinai carrying two blank stone tablets. Israel has just fallen into the disaster of the golden calf. And Moses asks for one thing above all else. “Lord, come with us.”
Not: give us victory. Not: make us powerful. Come with us.
And the Lord answers by revealing his name. “The Lord, the Lord, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in kindness and fidelity.”
In Hebrew, the two key words are hesed and emet. Hesed means covenant love. Faithful love that doesn’t walk away. Emet means reliability, firmness, truth you can stand on. The God of Israel remains faithful to a stiff-necked people because fidelity isn’t something he occasionally does. It is who he is.
Saint Augustine spent half his life chasing the wrong things. When he finally settled into the Christian faith, he kept coming back to one line from the first letter of John. Scripture says something stronger than “God has love.” It says God is love. And Augustine writes that every act of love involves three realities: the one who loves, the one who is loved and the love shared between them.
That is the mystery Christians name as the Trinity.
When Moses says, “Lord, come with us,” he isn’t asking God to become relational for the first time. God has never been solitary. Before there was a creation, before there was a world, God was already communion. The Father giving himself to the Son. The Son receiving and returning that love. The Holy Spirit as the eternal bond of love between them.
Love is what God has been from before there was anything else.
So the God who came down to Israel is the same God who comes to the Church. He’s the God who comes to you. He isn’t distant by nature.
The God of hesed draws near because drawing near is who he is.
That is why Saint Paul ends the second reading the way he does.
“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.”
That is one of the earliest Trinitarian blessings in the New Testament. Paul writes it to a difficult and divided church. And his goodbye is the inner life of God offered as a parting gift.
Every parish, in its own imperfect way, is supposed to become a sign of that life.
People arrive carrying loneliness we can’t see. A widow who eats every meal alone. A teenager who thinks nobody notices him. A family exhausted from caring for someone sick. A man who hasn’t spoken honestly to another person in months.
And into that loneliness, Christ gathers people around one altar. Not just to pray near one another. But to become a communion. Strangers, family members who haven’t spoken in months, the widow and the teenager and the exhausted father, all walking up the same aisle to receive the same bread.
That is the deepest meaning of the Trinity. The center of reality is not isolation. It is relationship. The universe does not come from loneliness. It comes from love.
And every Mass is an invitation to enter that love more deeply.
The Joy of the Gospel 