St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney, 31 May 2026
By now I trust that many of you will already have seen and the rest of you will have booked to see the Sistine Chapel Revelations immersive exhibition in our Cathedral Square. Everyone delights in Michelangelo’s mesmerising ceiling, including his famous Creation of Adam. Likewise, his sprawling Last Judgement that covers the entire altar wall of the chapel. It’s no wonder many people think Michelangelo painted the whole Sistine Chapel!
Yet there are other great paintings on the side walls of the Sistina that too often go unnoticed or underappreciated. Twenty years before Michelangelo painted his ceiling and almost sixty before his altar wall, an all-star team of Tuscan and Umbrian artists—Perugino, Botticelli, Rosselli, Ghirlandaio and Signorelli—painted the walls with parallel cycles of the lives of Moses and Jesus.
On the south wall nearest the altar is Perugino’s Moses Departing for Egypt, complete with an angelic guide, an entourage and a well-laden camel and, in the same fresco, his wife Zipporah Circumcising their Son (Ex 4:24-26). It was painted in 1482 at the request of Pope Sixtus IV for whom the chapel is named.
On the opposite wall we see the Baptism of Christ, also by Perugino and intended as its pair. One fresco marks the beginning Moses’ mission, the other that of Christ; one the origins of the Jewish Rite of Circumcision by which males were incorporated into old Israel, the other the origins of the Christian Rite of Baptism by which all are incorporated into the new People of God. We all know the baptism scene well from the Gospels (Mt 3:13-17 et par.): Christ stands in the waters of Jordan while John the Baptist pours water over His head. In Perugino’s fresco the City of Rome is in the background, a crowd of contemporary Romans are divesting themselves of their sumptuous attire in readiness for baptism, and the Jordan is the River Tiber. For Perugino the holy scenes are not just historical snapshots but mysteries into which people of every age are invited.
Above Jesus’ head a white dove of the Holy Spirit descends from heaven. To render in paint the voice heard from heaven, Perugino displays God the Father within a luminous roundel surrounded by angels and blessing His Son. Thus the work depicts each member of the Trinity gathered in one frame: the Son in the river below, the Spirit in flight above Him, and the Father presiding from the heavens.
In John’s Gospel today, we hear arguably the key verse of the entire New Testament: “God so loved the world he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him may not be lost but have eternal life.” (Jn 3:16-18) It’s a beautiful verse encapsulating the heart of the Christian faith. But where is the Holy Spirit in all this? Here, as in Perugino’s two paintings, context is critical. Jesus speaks these words privately to Nicodemus, a Pharisee and member of the Sanhedrin who has come to Him under cover of darkness, curious but cautious. Jesus has just told him he must be born again through water and the Holy Spirit (Jn 3:3-5), and must believe that He (Jesus) is the Son come down from heaven who will be lifted up like Moses lifted up the snake in the desert (Jn 3:13-15). Nicodemus wondered what on earth Jesus was talking about. How can a grown man be born again? How can he be reborn of water and the Spirit? How can God come to earth and be crucified like the snake on Moses’ pole?
Nicodemus didn’t know it yet, but Christ was inviting Him into the very life of the Trinity. To believe in the Son and be reborn in the Spirit is to be drawn into the movement of God’s own life: the Spirit who descends, the Son who is given, the Father whose love sets the whole thing in motion. All are God, equally and inseparably so, yet all are distinct. If God is Trinity, then the divine persons have never been alone, even before creation. Relationship, self-giving, communion have always been at the heart of the divine reality, so that John could say so simply yet profoundly: “God is love” (1Jn 4:8). A solitary God might be powerful, wise, just, but He could not be loving. Only a God who is communion within Himself can be love in the fullest sense.
That love then expresses itself in love for other persons, in the creation of the cosmos and especially of Adam and Eve, made for each other. Which brings us to the human person, created God-like (Gen 1:27), made for love. We are invited to share in the communion between the divine persons and the communion between those earthly ones created by Him. We are invited to share in what St Paul describes in our epistle as “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit” and then to “help one another, be united, and live in peace” (2Cor 13:11-13).
We are capable of such Godlike love. Yet so much of the human story, rather than being about caring, friendship, harmony, has been indifference, rivalry, strife. If the Sistine Chapel is ultimately the story of salvation, still we see the disobedience of the Fall, the far-from-original sins that followed and provoked the deluge, the subsequent debauchery even in Noah’s family, the apostasy of Israel, the efforts of Satan to tempt Christ, and the Last Supper with a premonition of the crucifixion through the window. How does God respond to all these failures of love among His creatures? In our first reading today we heard God proclaim His name to Moses, “I am the Lord, a God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in mercy and faithfulness” (Ex 34:4-9). He says this even after Israel has done the unthinkable, abandoning him only days after He had led them out of slavery through the Red Sea.
Further along the south wall of the Sistine Chapel is Roselli’s image of the Descent from Mount Sinai (1482). Moses returns to find the Jews worshipping a golden calf and in his fury he smashes the tablets of the Ten Commandments. But God’s response in our first reading today is to offer His hand in friendship yet again. He makes new tablets of the Law to replace those that were shattered. To speak His name is to be reminded that He is a God of mercy, compassion, love.
And so, like Perugino’s Baptism of Christ on the north wall, like Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam on the ceiling, the Descent from Sinai is ultimately a story of God closing the distance between Himself and His people, reaching out in love. The God revealed to Moses as tenderness and compassion is the same God reveals at Creation as the Lord the giver of life and the same God revealed at Jordan as Father, Son, and Spirit. What Adam and Moses only glimpsed is unveiled at Christ’s baptism: a God whose very being is communion, and whose first instinct is to extend that communion to us in His unfathomable love.
Friends, there is much about the Blessed Trinity we do not yet grasp. But God has revealed to us that He is a God of life and love, Himself in relationship and calling us into relationship too. Today, as we stand before this mystery, as Adam awoke to his Creator and Moses knelt at Sinai, we recognise that we have been baptised into that great mystery, that great glory—drawn into the life of the God who was and is and always will be… love.
INTRODUCTION TO MASS FOR THE SOLEMNITY OF THE MOST HOLY TRINITY (YEAR A)
St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney, 31 May 2026
Welcome brothers and sisters to St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney for today’s Mass for the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity.
Today I was to have been in Uganda, to consecrate a church in Hoima Diocese and to join the celebrations this week of the Ugandan Martyrs in Kampala. But the Ebola Epidemic in Uganda and neighbouring Congo has closed the borders and blocked all public gatherings. We pray today for all those suffering from epidemics, war or civil unrest: that they may know peace and good health.
Our feast today celebrates the central mystery of our Christian faith: that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit; three persons yet one God. In the names of the Most Holy Trinity we are baptised, absolved, blessed, offer Mass and all our prayers. Although it’s a mystery of infinite richness, we ask God today to illuminate our minds so we might better know and love Him. But first we repent of our sins…
