TO KNOW GOD IS TO LOVE HIM

A SERMON FOR TRINITY SUNDAY

 “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!  How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!  For who hath known the mind of the Lord?”

Today is Trinity Sunday, and I’m sure you’re all anxiously waiting for me to explain everything there is to know about the Blessed Trinity.  However, I’m not.  I’ll say this much: the Holy Trinity, the whole idea of three Persons in one God, is that it’s a mystery.  And there’s not much I can do to explain a mystery.  Our faith has several mysteries that we can never fully understand, and of all these mysteries, that of the Trinity is by far the most profound and basic.  The greatest theologians of all time have been unable to explain successfully the Holy Trinity, and have had to resort to almost childlike analogies.  Take St. Patrick and his shamrock, for example—a single plant with three separate leaves was enough to give the people of Ireland a small insight into what the Trinity is, but of course, it comes nowhere close to providing them or us with anything like a complete understanding of this mystery.

Having established that it’s impossible for us to know the Trinity, we may be tempted to throw up our arms in despair and just give up.  We can never understand it anyway, so why bother trying?.  That’s the lazy man’s answer to everything when you get right down to it.  People tend to be quite content, thank you very much, with their state of complete ignorance of almost everything.  We have no idea where Sri Lanka is, we don’t know how to make eggs benedict, or how to spell pterodactyl, or what’s the name of Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical condemning socialism.  Some people can’t even tell you who composed Brahms’ Lullaby.  And for the most part we couldn’t car less.

Sometimes, that’s okay.  We can’t be expected to know everything, so we focus on the things we need to know.  If I need to fly to Sri Lanka on business, for example, I’ll need to find out where it is and how to get there.  Otherwise, who cares?  As I said, we focus on the things we need to know.  So what exactly do we need to know?

Let’s not go through all the different things we absolutely must know in order to basically survive.  They range from knowing how to find the peanut butter aisle in Kroger’s to knowing who to vote for in an election.  We assimilate an amazing amount of knowledge during the course of our lives.  But as we lie on our death bed and look back at all the knowledge we’ve acquired, are we only then going to realize how little we know about what really counts, about God?  Will the sudden realization that it’s now too late to fulfill our chief purpose in life and truly know God as best we can?  And does it even matter?

The answer to that last question is that yes, it does matter.  It matters a lot.  In fact, it’s the very reason God created us.  Catechism: Why did God make me?  Answer: God made me to know him, love him and serve him in this world.  If we don’t know him, we can’t love him.  And if we don’t love him, we won’t serve him.  So it’s essential—essential beyond all else that we may think essential—that we know God first.  Without sufficient knowledge, we will be hopelessly floating on this ocean of mishaps which is life, with no sense of what we’re doing or why we’re doing it, and certainly, no idea of where we’re going.

So our mission today is to at least realize that it is our primary duty in life to get to know God as best we can.  True, the full knowledge of the Blessed Trinity may be beyond the rational powers of even the most intelligent of men, but that must not inhibit us from learning as much as we can, not only about the Trinity, but about the whole story of Redemption, and all the things pertaining to God and his holy religion.  The more we know, the more we’ll love God and the better we’ll serve him.

What we know is sometimes based on reason and sometimes on faith.  By reason, we can acquire knowledge about church history, the liturgy, the sacraments, and so on.  But it will take the virtue of faith to fully accept everything the Church teaches about these things.  Take the sacraments for example: we can know that Christ is truly present in the Holy Eucharist under the appearance of bread and wine.  We can know that this miracle is called Transubstantiation.  But it takes our faith to believe it.  Faith then, is an essential part of truly knowing God.  And the first way we can sin against faith, again according to the catechism, is by not trying to know what God has taught.  If we do not, at some point or other, endeavor to hear sermons or instructions, to keep up to date with what’s happening in our religion, to learn about the saints, or read good books, then we sin against the faith.  That’s a sin against the First Commandment, and we would be neglecting that primary duty of Catholic, every human being, which is to continually increase our knowledge about God and the things of God.

I’ll say it again: the more we know God, the more we’ll love him.  But that knowledge also equips us to serve him.  We serve God best by saving our own soul and then the souls of our neighbors, as many of our neighbors as we can.  Obviously, the more we know God and the things of God, the more easily we can persuade our neighbors of the truths of the faith, of the necessity of being members of the true Church which teaches that true faith infallibly. 

I’ll give you just one example, one that we can apply to every interaction with our neighbor… Suppose you’re asked, “Why don’t you eat meat on Friday?” “What makes it wrong to eat flesh-meat on this particular day of the week?”  Of course, you all know the basic answer, “Because Christ died on Friday.”  But will that glib response be enough to convert anyone?  Of course not.  If we knew our faith a little better, maybe we could answer in this way: “I don’t eat flesh meat on Friday because I am a Christian and wish to keep always before my mind how our Blessed Lord suffered for me in his holy flesh on that day; and anyone who claims to be a Christian, ought, I think, to be glad to do what reminds him so regularly and well of our Lord’s Passion.”  Such an answer, if given kindly and mildly would silence and instruct your adversary; it might make him reflect, and might, in time, bring him to the true religion.  That example was taken from the reflections on the Baltimore Catechism by Fr. Thomas Kinkead, which I would highly recommend as a good way to start deepening our knowledge of God.

If we neglect to learn the Christian doctrine, we will never appreciate God enough to save our souls.  Sure, we may never fully understand the deep truths of the Holy Trinity, but our efforts to get closer to such understanding will be duly noted by the Almighty, who will give us the corresponding graces to increase our love for him.  There will come a time when we will be struck, as though by lightning, by how much there is to learn about God, and this very realization that we can never reach those depths of knowledge will cause us to exclaim, in the words of St. Paul, “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!  How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!  For who hath known the mind of the Lord?”