The Nazareth Page  - A gospel meditation for your home

May 31, 2026 – Trinity Sunday - John 3:16-18

REFLECTION QUESTIONS:
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To affirm that God is a mystery is a huge understatement. God is by far the biggest mystery of our lives, so any attempt to fully describe what God is like will always be incomplete. Yet we can know with some certainty a few aspects of God and this Sunday, Trinity Sunday we are given the opportunity to reflect and get some idea of who God is and what God is like. Of course, we face a limit as we are not issued much information about God.

To build a foundation for an understanding of God begins on a basic belief that we are created by God. Our existence is not rooted in a random process that “just happened” without any outside cause. Rather, the creator of all that exists in the universe, and the universe itself, is not part of creation, but exists as its “maker.”

St. Thomas Aquinas described who we call ‘God” is an uncaused cause. That may sound like doubletalk and in a sense it is. That also explains who any denial of God by science or other attempt to prove God’s existence, is not possible because God truly exists outside all that is.

Let’s now reflect on today’s feast of God as trinity. This belief about God affirms that  there is multiplicity within God. Not that there are three Gods but that within the one God, there is plurality. Within Christianity “they” are called Father, Son and Holy Spirit. What I take from that belief is that the life of God is itself communal or relational. And that “life” of relating in God always was and always will be. We affirm this in the Sign of the Cross. And the relational life within God is one of love, a reality that is at the heart of the life of God.

It is also the basic explanation of our own existence. We exist, and are alive, because God loved us. This affirmation is the answer to one of the deepest questions any of us ever asked: Why is there something and not nothing? Creation (the something that that exists outside God in our universe and any others that might exist, is based on God loving and wanting to share existence with others. God loves and we are given life.

I know this is all a huge challenge to understand. One the apostles of Jesus asked him after the apostle expressed his own belief in Jesus to help his unbelief. To help us in understanding the deepest truths of our lives. I would ask much the same.

David M. Thomas, PhD