40 000 mennesker var samlet på Petersplassen i dag, i pøsende regnvær – bare paven, noen få av hans medhjelpere og alteret var beskyttet under en baldakin. Det var Treenighetssøndag og kåring av fire nye hellige: Giorgio Preca, Szymon di Lipnica, Karel van Sint Andries Houben og Marie Eugénie de Jésus Milleret. Her tar jeg med deler av pave Benedikts preken:
Today we celebrate the solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity. After the Eastertime, after having relived the event of Pentecost, which renews the baptism of the Church in the Holy Spirit, we turn towards ‘the open heavens’ to enter with the eyes of faith into the depth of God’s mystery: One substance and three Persons- Father, Son and Holy Spirit. …. …
In the first Reading, taken from the Book of Proverbs, we see Wisdom, beside God as assistant, as ‘architect’ (8,30). The panorama of the cosmos observed through the eyes of Wisdom is stupendous. Wisdom confesses: «Playing on the surface of the earth, I found delight in the human race.»
Wisdom dwells among men with love, because in them she recognizes the image and likeness of the Creator. This preferential relationship of Wisdom with men recalls a celebrated passage from another Wisdom book, the Book of Wisdom itself: «For she is an aura of the might of God& And she, who is one, can do all things, and renews everything. And passing into holy souls from age to age, she produces friends of God and prophets» (Wis 7, 25-27).
This last suggestive expression invites us to consider the multiform and inexhaustible manifestations of sanctity in the people of God through the centuries. The Wisdom of God is manifested in the cosmos, in the variety and beauty of its elements, but her masterwork are the saints.
In the passage from the apostolic letter of Paul to the Romans, we find a similar image: that of the love of God ‘poured out into the hearts’ of the saints, namely, the baptized, «through the Holy Spirit» that is given to them (cfr Rm 5,5).
It is through Christ that the gift of the Holy Spirit comes. «Person-love, Person-gift», as defined by the Servant of God John Paul II (Enc Dominum et vivificantem, 10). Through Christ, the Spirit of God reaches us as the principle of new life, of ‘holy’ life.
The Spirit places the love of God in the hearts of believers in the concrete form that it took in the man Jesus of Nazareth. Thus is realized what Paul says in the Letter to the Colossians: «Christ in you, hope of glory» (1,27). ‘Tribulations’ are not a contradiction of this hope, rather, they are part of its realization, through ‘patience’ and ‘proven virtue’ (Rom 5,3-4): such was the life of Christ, the way of the Cross.
In the same perspective, from the Wisdom of God incarnate in Christ and communicated by the Holy Spirit, the Gospel suggests to us that God the Father continues to manifest his plan of love through the saints. This too shows what we have already noted about Wisdom: the Spirit of truth reveals the design of God in the multiplicity of the elements of the cosmos, above all, through human beings, and in a special way, through the saints… the creative Logos, who finds delight in dwelling among the sons of men, in the midst of whom he has pitched his tent (cfr Jn 1,14).
In fact, ‘the image of the invisible God’ (Col 1,15) is Jesus Christ alone, ‘the Holy and the Righteous’ (Acts 3,14). He is Wisdom incarnate. In Him, it was God’s pleasure to place ‘all fullness’ (cfr Col 1.19), or as He himself says in today’s Gospel: «Everything that the Father has is mine» (Jn 16,15). … …