A Homily for the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity

Readings: Exodus 34:4b-6, 8-9  2 Corinthians 13:11-13  John 3:16-18

“The Jazz Singer” was the first full-length film to include synchronized music and singing, as well as isolated dialogue. Produced by Warner Bros. and premiering in New York City in October 1927, it heralded the end of silent films.

At the time, some Hollywood executives did not think so. Kenneth Turan records the reaction of two industry giants in his 2025 biography Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg: The Whole Equation. 

If MGM was late off the mark where sound was concerned, and it was, there were several reasons the studio and its executives had their minds elsewhere. Thalberg, for example, had to be tracked down on his honeymoon for a reaction…. “Novelty is always welcome, but talking pictures are just a passing fad,” he said, and Mayer was similarly circumspect: “Let them develop it if they can. Then we’ll see about it.” 

At that point, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was far outpacing its rivals, and the thought was that “talkies” would never be able to approach the artistic beauty of silent films.

It is always difficult to grasp a world in which an entirely new dimension of experience has opened. A test audience, previewing one of the first silent movies, scattered from their seats when they saw a locomotive approach them onscreen. How might we react if we encountered something like a “holodeck,” from Star Trek’s “The Next Generation,” where computers can simulate three-dimensional, seven-sense interaction with imaginary characters and situations? Would we know that we had entered a new era, or would we think that this represented no more than a 3-D spectacle? 

To know something is different than to comprehend it, to take it in and understand it. Our English idiom “to wrap one’s head around something” expresses as much. 

The Trinity falls under this category. Karl Rahner, the Jesuit giant of 20th-century theology, warned that in practice Christian faith simmers into “mere” monotheism. The magnitude of the mystery eludes us. 

Of course, so does that of the Incarnation. We say that God became man in Jesus Christ, but who can take that in, say that they really understand what it means? St. Thomas More often puzzled over the phrase, “Verbum caro factum est/ The Word became flesh.” He kept trying to wrap his head—and hands—around the mystery. 

Of course, the two enigmas, Trinity and Incarnation, are conjoined. To see how, begin with the notion of sacrifice in religious thought. It is the complete removal of the offering from human usage. The victim must die. The holocaust must be a consuming fire. 

Had Jesus not risen from the dead, his followers might well have acclaimed his death as a pleasing and acceptable sacrifice to the God of Israel, the unjust death of a righteous one, a sacrifice of human life testifying to the goodness and glory of God.

But what does it mean when the victim dies, passes over into the domain of the divine, only to return as the abrupt entrance of the sacred into the secular? A religious sacrifice has one direction, from our world into the next. Christ’s death and resurrection reverse the flow. 

No passage of sacred Scripture employs the word “Trinity.” Proclaiming the mystery, the church presents an oft-quoted verse of Scripture. 

God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,
so that everyone who believes in him might not perish
but might have eternal life (Jn 3:16).

Commenting on the passage, Hilary of Poitiers, the fourth-century saint and doctor of the church, attempts to force our awareness of an entirely new dimension of reality. Death is something we can offer to God, but how could God offer his own death to us? And what does it mean if death itself becomes life, except a new entrance, a new understanding of God’s own nature?

God, who loved the world, gave his only begotten Son as a manifest token of his love. If the evidence of his love is this, that he bestowed a creature on creatures, gave a worldly being on the world’s behalf, granted one raised up from nothing for the redemption of objects equally raised up from nothing, such a cheap and petty sacrifice is a poor assurance of his favor toward us. Gifts of price are the evidence of affection: the greatness of the surrender is evidence of the greatness of the love. God, who loved the world, gave no adopted son but his own, his only begotten [Son]. Here is personal interest, true sonship, sincerity; not creation, or adoption, or pretense. Here is proof of his love and affection, that he gave his own, his only begotten Son (On the Trinity, 6:40).

A divine sacrifice is always total. There can be nothing left to give. It makes no sense to say that God, who cannot die, can sacrifice his life for us unless there is within the unity of God some sort of communion that is itself a continual sacrifice, a constant outpouring of God toward God. 

Only a Son who is the Father’s complete gift of self, the Father’s outpouring of self—if you will—can himself become God’s sacrifice of self for us. Within the Trinity, life passes over into life. The Father’s love and life are so effusive that he begets the Son. The life and love shared by Father and Son breathe forth the Holy Spirit. 

In the Incarnation, life ultimately passes over into death. God, in the human nature the Son assumed, truly dies. This is the great work of the Trinity, the crown in its act of creation. In it, God leaves self. Life becomes death. Being enters nonbeing. 

In allowing the sacrifice of the Son, the Father also sacrifices his own self, for what is the Son but the very being of the Father? But how can love sacrifice itself and still triumph? How can this be unless the acts of love that are the Father and the Son, both consumed on Calvary, remain eternal in the Holy Spirit, the bond of love they share? 

The cross is the tree of creation under the dominion of sin. On this ungodly wood, the hearts of both Father and Son are broken, completely crushed. Here their love passes into the third person of the Trinity.

We understand life, though we cannot claim to have wrapped our heads around the wondrous mystery. And all we know of death is that human life can be negated, can be consumed by something greater than itself. 

So, how can we comprehend an entirely distinct dimension, one that stands beyond us, beneath and before us? For the most part when we speak of God, we only affirm a mystery beyond ourselves, something from which we emerge, something necessary though we are not. 

But how can the necessary pass into nothingness? How can it then return, ever more fully itself? This is the imponderable mystery revealed in the life and death of Christ. That God is Trinity, a necessary fullness that truly empties itself for us yet always remains “the ever more.”

The Rev. Terrance W. Klein is a priest of the Diocese of Dodge City and author of Vanity Faith.