Trinity Sunday 2026
Exodus 34: 4-6, 8-9; 2 Corinthians 13:11-14; John 3: 16-18
When I have attended ecumenical gatherings, I have generally found that they ended with that final verse of today’s Second Reading: “the grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all”. Non-Catholic Christians tend to refer to it as “the grace” and it is as familiar to them as the Sign of the Cross is to us—though many Anglicans and others now use the Sign of the Cross also, as do, invariably, the Eastern Orthodox.
The “grace” is also available to us as an alternative to “The Lord be with you” though the Missal translates koinonia as “communion” rather than “fellowship”. Both translations are correct: “fellowship” is a hallmark word among Methodists, whilst “communion” brings perhaps a more spiritual element. You pays your money, and you takes your choice.
Both the grace and the Sign of the Cross to begin or end prayer remind us that our faith is always Trinitarian, that as Christians we believe that God is three persons in one Godhead, or, to put it the other way round, one God in three persons. Each person of the Trinity—Father, Son, and Hoy Spirit—is God, yet they are not three gods, but three aspects, disseminations, if you like, of the one God; three unique and distinct ways in which God IS, and reveals God’s self.
In speaking of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit we are using human terms, the only terms we have, to describe a mystery which is beyond description. Whatever we say will always fall short of the reality.
To simplify things, we can say that, in general, we pray TO the Father, THROUGH the Son, IN THE POWER OF the Holy Spirit; yet we also pray to the persons of the Trinity individually. Jesus—God the Son become man—taught us to say “Our Father”, yet we also pray “Jesus have mercy on us” and “Come Holy Spirit”. Our liturgical (official) prayer is addressed to the Father “through Our Lord Jesus Christ your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God for ever and ever”.
Rather than agonise over the nature of the Trinity, it is best that we continue our Trinitarian prayer, always remembering those words in today’s Gospel, that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son—begotten, that is, by the power of the Holy Spirit. God is infinitely loving, the overflowing love within the Godhead being huge enough to be conveyed to us by the Father’s sending of the Son, who was made one of us by the power of the Holy Spirit. That love we need to show to God in return, and to share with God’s people and God’s creation.
