Christian theology does not begin with the Most Holy Trinity. Christian theology begins with Jesus Christ. It is Christ who reveals God as Father. It is Christ who sends the Holy Spirit to remain present in, among, and through us.
Perhaps the best way to conceive of the Holy Spirit is as the love between the Father and the Son personified. When we contemplate the phrase that occurs twice in the span of eight verses in the fourth chapter of the First Letter of John, “God is love,” we come to see that love requires a lover and beloved.1 Since love is profuse, that is, outward-looking, it bears fruit.
At its deepest level, love constitutes the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity. It is love that enables us to make sense of our profession of one God in three divine persons. Because love is fruitful, when someone has experienced the love of God through Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, which experience is what makes someone a Christian, s/he is impelled to share this Good News.
What else is our Gospel today about than this? What is important when considering the final passage of the Gospel According to Saint Matthew is the making of disciples. Faith is the precondition of baptism. And faith is not merely belief, as we often suppose. This is even true when it comes to baptizing infants. The Rite of Baptism for Infants and Small Children makes this clear by the questions posed to the parents and godparents. All of these questions are aimed at ensuring that parents and godparents are committed to making the child being baptized a disciple of Jesus Christ.
Just like you can’t teach someone algebra unless you know it yourself, you cannot make disciples of Christ if you are not first his disciple. This is something that Pope Francis mentions often, usually addressing it to the clergy and especially to bishops. In a nutshell, disciple-making is really the work in which each parish, each Christian community, is called to engage.
Sacraments are not magic spells. While in and through the grace infused by the sacrament baptism you were reborn as a child of God through Jesus Christ by the Spirit’s power, you need to live the new life of faith, hope, and love with which God infuses you. Stated succinctly, you must be a disciple, a follower, an apprentice of Jesus Christ. This is intentional, not accidental.
Saint Paul, in our reading from Romans, mentions an important aspect of being Jesus’s disciple: “if we only suffer with him.”2 The kind of suffering we endure are things like suffering wrongs patiently, forgiving, praying for, and doing good to our enemies, and the like. In other words, being Jesus’s disciple means obeying even his hardest teachings, which very much go against our fallen grain.
Being Jesus’s disciple also means not making a big show of your discipleship. There is a huge difference between righteousness and self-righteousness. Being a Christian means grasping that you have no righteousness of your own. There is probably no greater self-deception than to think, “I am a good person,” even when one can tick off a long list of rules he keeps. If you don’t understand that Christianity is not first and foremost a matter of rule-keeping then you have not appropriated the teaching of Jesus.
On Trinity Sunday 1925, a non-descript man was making his way up Granby Lane in Dublin, Ireland to attend Mass at Saint Savior’s church. While walking he suddenly collapsed. In the next day’s edition, the Irish Independent newspaper reported: “An elderly man collapsed in Granby Lane yesterday and, on being taken to Jervis Street Hospital, was found to be dead. He was wearing a tweed suit, but there was nothing to indicate who he was.”
Once at the hospital, in the course of treating him, the doctors discovered that he had wound a chain around his waist and more chains around an arm and a leg, as well as cords around the other arm and leg. The chains found on his body at death were not some extreme penitential regime but a symbol of his devotion to Mary, Mother of God that he wished to give himself to her totally: Totus tuus. The name of this man is Matt Talbot.
Talbot was born into a relatively poor working-class family in Dublin. Like a lot of young men of that time and place, Matt started working full-time to help support his family at the age of twelve. His first job was with a wine merchant. To make a long story short, by the age of thirteen, he was considered a hopeless alcoholic.
Fifteen years later, broke and unable to drink on credit, Matt waited outside a pub he frequented hoping a friend would invite him in for a drink. After several friends walked past him into the pub without inviting him along, he went home. Upon arriving home, Matt told his mother he was going “to take the pledge” not to drink.
Matt followed through on his promise, pledging not to drink for three months. “The pledge” also consisted of making a general confession and attending Mass daily. At the end of three months, he took the pledge for another six months and then for life. Through an austere, prayerful, penitential manner of life, he remained sober right up until that Trinity Sunday when he collapsed on Granby Lane.
The first several years of his sobriety were very difficult for Matt. But he prayed, attended Mass, went to confession, read and learned about his faith, supported the missions and charities from his modest means. In other words, he made use of the means of grace that Mother Church provides for all her children. During two general strikes, being single and living a very austere life, Matt gave money to fellow strikers who were married with children.
After his recovery, Matt scrupulously sought to repay all his debts. Once, while in the throes of alcoholism, Talbot stole a fiddler’s fiddle and sold it for money to buy booze. Once in his right mind, he searched for the fiddler whose instrument he stole to pay him back. He failed to find him and so he gave the money to have a Mass said for the man whose livelihood he took.
Venerable Matt Talbot became a disciple of Jesus Christ, a very devoted disciple, an exemplary disciple. But apart from knowing that he was “religious” and went to Mass a lot, his fellow workers, neighbors and even his siblings did not really understand the depth of his sanctity until after his death. He was quiet, soft-spoken, unremarkable, unassuming, someone whose yes meant yes and no meant no.3
Of course, not every Christian (or the vast majority of Christians) is called to live a life of extreme penance like the one Matt Talbot lived post-conversion. We are, however, called to follow Jesus with the same love and devotion as Venerable Matt Talbot, to have the same commitment he had. In baptism, you died with Christ. A truly devout life is one that “is hidden with Christ in God.”4
My dear friends, do not look for the Trinity up in the sky, or in some abstract philosophical construct, but right in front of your face. Being a Christian is an existential commitment, one you live out every day in the concrete circumstances of your life.
In baptism, you were immersed into the very life of God- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which is to be immersed in the great mystery of divine love. As we sing in the opening line of the sublime hymn: Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est. “Where charity and love are, God is there.” To love as God loves us in and through Christ and, hence, as Christ loves, is what it means to be his disciple. It is how the Deus absconditus, the hidden God, is made manifest.
1 1 John 4:8.16.↩
2 Romans 8:17.↩
3 Matthew 5:37.↩
4 Colossians 3:3.↩
Thanks Scott for the description of Matt Talbot. His life story is truly remarkable and an example of the work of grace in a man who did his best to cooperate with that grace. I have recommended his biography to many men who struggle with alcoholism.
ReplyDeleteI always have a copy or two of Eddy Doherty's book and a some Matt Talbot medals, one of which I wear.
DeleteThank you, Deacon, for exposing the example of living penance. -Kathleen
ReplyDeleteMatt Talbot is an inspiring figure. He was just an ordinary person who strove mightily and, by God's grace, lived most of his life as a Christian. Too often saints are priests, religious, bishops, abbots, abbesses, people to whom most of us faithful can't really relate. We can admire them, etc. But people like Matt Talbot, Gianni Molla, etc., give us a model, a pattern.
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