Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity 2024

Most Reverend José H. Gomez
Archbishop of Los Angeles

Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels
May 26, 2024

My brothers and sisters in Christ,¹

So today we join the Church all over the world today in celebrating our faith in the Most Holy Trinity, which is the great truth and the great mystery of the identity of God.

What we believe is that God is not a concept or an idea.

We believe in a personal God! We believe that the one true God is the living God in three Divine Persons — the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. 

St. John Paul II used to say: “Our God, in his deepest mystery, is not a solitude but a family, since he has in himself fatherhood, sonship, and the essence of the family, which is love.”²

Our God is a family, a family of love!

The apostle St. John said simply: “God is love.” And in those three words we have the mystery of the whole universe.

In the heart of God, there is what the Catechism calls “an eternal exchange of love”— the Father eternally loving the Son, and the Son eternally loving the Father, and the Holy Spirit uniting them eternally in the bond of love.³

In today’s first reading, Moses says: “Lord is God in the heavens above and on earth below, and … there is no other.”

God is One! And God is love. And the love of the Father, Son, and Spirit created everything: the sun and moon, the stars and the seas, all the mountains and deserts! The love of the Father, Son, and Spirit created every living creature, including each one of us.

And the God who is Love wants to share his life of love with each one of us. The God,  who in his deepest mystery is a family, wants to make us a part of his family of love.

And our lives are a part of this great mystery of divine love. Love is why God made the universe. And love is why God made you and me.

Jesus came down to show us how much God loves us. And he did that by suffering and dying for us on the cross and rising from the dead. Each one of us is precious to him, each one of us is worth the price of his own Blood.

So God created us to be his own, to share in his divine life of love, to be a part of his family here on earth and to live with him forever in heaven, which the saints call “the love that never ends.”

We enter into this divine life in baptism. As St. Paul tells us today, in baptism the love of God is poured into our hearts, making a place for God inside each one of us and making a place for each one of us in the family of God.

St. Paul in today’s second reading: “You received a Spirit of adoption, through whom we cry, ‘Abba, Father!’ … We are children of God!”

And it is something so special to be a child of God. Sometimes we don’t think too much about it. But I think we have to be more aware of that and we should remind ourselves many times every day, “I am a child of God.”

We should remind ourselves: God is my Father, and he loves me! God made me because he loves me and he wants me to be happy, to know joy and love!

So to be a child of God means we can call on God as our Father! And it means we can walk in this world with his Son, Jesus, who is our brother.

Jesus tells us today in the Gospel: “Behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age.”

This is an amazing promise. Jesus is by our side, he will never leave us. He will lead us in the right path, if we follow him in faith.

So like a good Father, God wants us to help us to grow up as his children, to become the people that he made us to be. So how do we do that? How do we become the people that God made us to be?

I think practically thinking, we can do that if we live by love. If we love God and we especially love the people around us.

So we need to be good spouses, and good parents, good sons and daughters, good friends and good neighbors. We need to share in people’s pain and in their happiness. We need to show mercy and compassion, we need to help confront the injustices that we see in our society.

Just as we see God, who is always there for us and loves us no matter what. So as disciples, as children of the Trinity, we need to show the world a new way.

That’s a beautiful resolution, to really reflect on how important it is to the fact that we are children of God and that we are bringing that beautiful truth to the people of our time. We are bringing people together. We need to help them to understand that we are all brothers and sisters with a Father who loves us.

So today, as we celebrate the great truth of the Holy Trinity, let us ask for that grace — to truly live as children of God, truly living as the image of the God who is love.

And let us entrust our hearts to the Blessed Virgin Mary, who is the Mother of Hope and the glory of the Holy Trinity.

May she help us to know the love of God — who is the Father who created us in love, the Son, who out of love gave his life for us, and the Spirit of love who walks with us now in the newness of life.

It is a beautiful moment for all of us, especially to reflect on the extraordinary love of God for each one of us.