Skip to main content

Readings from Trinity Sunday

I am always interested in how the readings at Mass come together to form a cohesive teaching and theme. All though most of the time I try to find it on my own by reading them before Mass the connection is more often than not lost on me. That is when I rely on either the Missal (or some form of it) or the priests homily to point it out. I always get it, I just sometimes need some help. After all, I am not a biblical scholar and let's be honest there is a whole lot of background, cultural anomalies and "you had to be there"'s going on most of the time to make the connections. So when I do make that connection, when I can see the cohesiveness on my own, I get kind of excited. 


That happened  this Sunday and because this last Sunday was the Feast of the Holy Trinity the homily focused on the mystery of the Trinity. Almost any commentary to be found on Sunday's Mass was focused on that as well.  There was also an underlying connection in the readings that really points to the joy of the Christian life. 


It begins with Dt 4:32-34, 39-40. Moses poses questions and gives examples pointing out how God choose the Israelite people to be His people and all of the things that God did for them. This begins setting up how wonderful it is to be a people of God. It moves from there to the Psalm (from Psalm 33) and the response "Blessed the people the Lord has chosen to be his own." Again, showing what a wonderful thing it is to be a people of God. 


The readings move on to the New Testament and point out what is possibly the greatest message of the Gospel. The best of the Good News if you will. In the Gospel reading (Mt 28:16-20) Jesus gives the Great Commission to his Apostles to go and make people from every nation a people of God through the Sacrament of Baptism. Now anyone who wants to be counted among the people of God can be. It is no longer just the nation of Israel. But it gets even better, because as the Paul teaches in the reading from Romans (8:14-17) in this baptism we are not just a people of God but children of God. If it was great and blessed and awesome to be a people of God, how much more to be children of God!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Running Goals or Running Goal; What is it That I Want?

The other day I got all caught up in setting running goals for myself for the rest of the year. After the goals were set, I found myself starting to worry about how I was going to reach them. Wondering if there would be time to sufficiently prepare for them all. My goals were to run a 5k in under 20 minutes, to run a half marathon in 1:25 minutes and qualify for and run in the Boston marathon in 2014. At first, I thought that setting and meeting these goals would make me a more serious runner. In fact, I thought that to be the "serious" runner I want to be that I needed these goals. However, while I was running the other morning I realized that first of all, I was thinking about how to shift my training to meet my 5k goal. Then I began thinking about the right approach to a 1:25 half while training to qualify for Boston in a full marathon a month later. That is when I realized that the ancillary goals were starting to consume my focus and quite possibly i...

The Rosary: Staying Focused

There are several obstacles that someone who has committed to pray the Rosary will face. Since the Rosary is a long prayer one of the biggest challenges I face is staying focused. If you have read my other posts or if you are just familiar with the prayer, you know that the mental contemplation of the Mysteries is the main focus of the prayer. So getting distracted really detracts from the prayer. Even if I am only praying 1 chaplet of the Rosary, it still takes about 20 minutes. In that amount of time your mind is bound to wander some. I have found several different things to help me when my mind begins to drift off to the worries of everyday life. The first is to understand that this is going to happen and be watching for it. If I am not vigilant I can get through a whole decade and realize I have not thought one single time about the Mystery that I should have been contemplating. So before I begin the prayer I make a conscious determination to be watchful of my wandering mind. O...

My AMDG Run: An Answered Prayer.

I have never been a person to pray for specific favors. It never felt right to me. My prayers generally are for strength, guidance, an acceptance of what comes my way. That is always how I "felt" right praying. To pray for a specific favor like a good grade, to do well in some competition and things like that just always felt a little wrong and to pray for physical healing was something I never would have considered. I am not saying this was any kind of selflessness. I am not sure exactly what it was. A fear of seeming childish or perhaps it was out of fear that my faith would be shaken if the prayer wasn't answered. Regardless, this is how I generally pray. And that is not to say that I don't or didn't think that God doesn't concretely answer prayers. I believe that He does. For instance I have always prayed when overwhelmed something like "God, I cannot do this all alone, please help me" and I will somehow, someway find my way through whatever it...