1:8 INTRODUCTION:
Wow today we are trying to understand the truth about our One, eternal God being born
over 2022 years ago as a man whose name was Jesus. As we dive deeper and deeper into the
mystery of our faith, let’s ask God.
Abba Father, we offer this time into your hands, we ask you to send forth your Holy
Spirit so that we may be able to learn and understand more about you, and experience
Jesus’s love. Dear Holy Spirit, open our minds to grasp
the knowledge of your truth, baptise us with your fire, and strengthen us with your power,
to do all things for the glory of God. Amen
If you’re like most people, you probably like to think of your favorite celebrity as
one of us. Sure there’s a certain attraction to the glamor or fame or accomplishment of
a celebrity which most of us don’t experience. But usually we want the celebrities we admire
to share something with us, to be people we can on some level relate to.
Whether they really are, or only appear to be, ‘one of us’ is another matter. Not
exactly right to think of God as a celebrity because the gap between God and us is infinite.
Still God loves us so much that he overcame the distance between him and us, the author
of the history entered into history as one of the characters. In the incarnation, God
became one of us so that we could share in his life and his love. He too suffered and
died as we do on this earth and he resurrected from the dead so that one day we too may do
so. In other words, he became one of us so that we could become like him – children
of God.
Let’s answer some of these questions with the help of Youcat.
Many people think of Christ as Jesus’s last name, but the word is really a title.
What does it mean and how does it apply to Jesus?
Both the Greek word “Christos” and the Hebrew word “messiah” meant the “Anointed
One”. Jesus, the simple carpenter’s son from Nazareth, is the long-awaited Messiah
and Saviour. So that is why his name was Jesus Christ.
Why did God become man? In Jesus Christ God became man and reconciled
the world to himself and redeemed mankind from the imprisonment of sin. John 3:16 ‘For
God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son’.
In Jesus God took on our mortal human flesh (Incarnation), shared our earthly suffering
and our death and became one like us in all things but sin.
What does it mean to say that Jesus Christ is true God and true man?
This is an intense question so let’s carefully listen and try to understand why we believe
Jesus to be true God and true man. In Jesus God really became one of us, our brother,
but he did not cease to be God and our Lord.
There are a couple of heresies that we need to discuss to understand what goes against
the true teachings of the church.
Heresy means beliefs that are opposed to truthful church doctrines.
We have,
Docetism – the doctrine says that Christ’s body was not human but either a delusion or
of real but celestial substance and that therefore his sufferings were only apparent.
Nestorianism – From the 5th Century, this heresy taught Mary only gave birth to Jesus’s
human nature. The founder of the heresy, Nestorius did not even want Mary to be called, ‘the
mother of God’ but instead wanted her to be called “mother of Christ”. According
to this heresy Jesus was really two separate persons, and only the human Jesus was in Mary’s
womb. Monophysitism – A heresy that originated in the 5th Century AD that in the
person of Jesus Christ the human nature was absorbed into the divine nature like a cube
of sugar dissolves in a cup of water. Therefore, Christ was left with only one nature, the
divine.
The council of Chalcedon called by Emperor Marcian in 45 CE, finally settled the issue
of the natures of Christ and to word the doctrine of incarnation. The divinity and humanity
in the one-person Jesus Christ are united together without division or confusion. This
does not attempt to explain something that is too sublime for human understanding but
indicates the boundaries along which the mystery of the person of Jesus can be investigated.
3. What does it mean to say that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary what is the significance
of his conception in this way? This means that he was born of a woman but
had no human father. In the Gospel of Luke, Mary asks the angel, “How can this be, since
I have no husband? (Lk 1:35) God willed that Jesus Christ should have a
true human mother but only God himself as his father, because he wanted to make a new
beginning that could be credited to him alone and not to earthly forces.
4. Explain the significance of Jesus’s death on the cross? Why crucifixion?
God could not show his love more forcibly than by allowing himself in the person of
the son to be nailed to the cross for us. Crucifixion was the most shameful and most
horrible method of Roman execution in antiquity. It was forbidden to crucify Roman citizens.,
whatever crimes there were guilty of. Thereby God entered the most abysmal sufferings of
mankind. Since then no one can say ‘God does not know what I’m suffering.’
5. Explain the case for the Resurrection of Jesus?
Firstly, there are no proofs for the resurrection of Jesus in the scientific sense.
There are however very strong individual and collective testimonies by a large number of
contemporaries of those events in Jerusalem. The oldest written testimony to the Resurrection
is a letter that St. Paul, wrote to the Church in Corinth around twenty years after Christ’s
death: “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ
died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on
the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the
Twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom
are still alive, though some have fallen asleep (2 Cor 25:3-6).
Paul is recording here a living tradition that was present in the original Christian
community two or three years after Jesus’s death and Resurrection, when he himself became
a Christian after his own stunning encounter with the risen Lord. The disciples took the
fact of the empty tomb as the first indication of the reality of the Resurrection.
Secondly, women, of all people discovered it and according to the law of that time they
are not able to testify. Although we read about the Apostle John that we saw and believed
09John 20:8) the empty tomb, full assurance that Jesus was alive came about only after
a series of appearances. After the encounter with the risen lord they witnessed his ascension
into heaven, Nevertheless, there were afterward and there are even today encounters with the
living Lord Jesus Christ who lives. You can search up Eucharistic miracles to get a glimpse
of this reality.
The Infographics show presents an interesting episode about the resurrection of Christ.
I will leave the link down in the description below.
Let’s look to the scriptures to see what the Bible says about Jesus being God.
John 1:1-3 ‘In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the Word was
God, He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without
him not one thing came into being. John 1:13 ‘And the word became flesh and
dwelt among us.’
Mark 2: 1- 12, is an incident that occurred which gives us the understanding that Jesus
can forgive sins because he is God. When he returned to Capernaum after some days,
it was reported that he was at home. 2So many gathered around that there was no longer
room for them, not even in front of the door; and he was speaking the word to them. 3Then
some people came, bringing to him a paralyzed man, carried by four of them. 4And when they
could not bring him to Jesus because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him; and
after having dug through it, they let down the mat on which the paralytic lay. 5When
Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” 6Now some
of the scribes were sitting there, questioning in their hearts, 7“Why does this fellow
speak in this way? It is blasphemy! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” 8At once Jesus
perceived in his spirit that they were discussing these questions among themselves; and he said
to them, “Why do you raise such questions in your hearts? 9Which is easier, to say
to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and take your mat and
walk’? 10But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive
sins”—he said to the paralytic— 11“I say to you, stand up, take your mat and go
to your home.” 12And he stood up, and immediately took the mat and went out before all of them;
so that they were all amazed and glorified God, saying, “We have never seen anything
like this!”
Galatians 4:4-6, ‘But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his son, born of
a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might
receive adoption as children and because you are children, God has sent the spirit of his
son into our hearts, crying, “Abba father!” So you are no longer a slave but a child,
and if a child then also an heir through God.
1 Corinthian 15:3-9, ‘For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn
had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, 4and that
he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, 5and
that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. 6Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers
and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. 7Then
he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. 8Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared
also to me. 9For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted
the church of God.’
1 Corinthians 15:14-19 and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been
in vain and your faith has been in vain. 15We are even found to be misrepresenting God,
because we testified of God that he raised Christ—whom he did not raise if it is true
that the dead are not raised. 16For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been
raised. 17If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in
your sins. 18Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. 19If for this life
only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.
Our whole faith as Christians makes sense only if Jesus resurrected and if he did rise
from the dead everything he said was and is the truth.
After exploring some of these teachings and holy scriptures we can say Jesus is God. He
is consubstantial with the Father, meaning they are both the one God. And yet our faith
tells us that Jesus was truly ‘one of us – a man. Some people find it hard to believe
that God came among us. Others find it difficult to think of Jesus as truly human, with the
kind of human limitation other men have, only without sin. Thinking of Jesus as having a
divine way of acting and a human way of acting can be difficult. Jesus’ situation at the
Garden of Gethsemane comes to my mind. He was sweating drops of blood which is a condition
called hematohidrosis which occurs when a person is under extreme levels of stress.
Jesus was so much in pain thinking about all the torture he will have to go through in
a couple of hours. He was fully human and chose to be human and chose to feel the pain
and fear that we feel in our minds. When we keep both truths about Christ together, the
truth about his divinity and truth about his humanity, we learn something about God and
about ourselves. We see how much God loves us despite the bad things we do to him and
one another. He loves us so much he became one of us. And we see that by turning away
from sin and turning to God’s love, we can become children of God through our relationship
with Jesus. We can become like Jesus and therefore like God.
If you are watching this video with someone, feel free to pause and answer this question.
1. Jesus’s closest disciples and friends saw him brutally executed at the hands of
Israel’s enemies. That is not what they expected to happen to the Messiah. How likely
would it have been for Jesus’s disciples to continue to proclaim him the Messiah and
the Son of God if they had not seem him after he was raised from the dead?
Let’s look at the YOU CHALLENGE for today.
Pray: Ask Jesus to be a part of every aspect of your life. Whatever it may be Jesus can
relate with your situation because he is fully human and he is able to lift you up to be
a child of God because he is God.
Learn: Memorize John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and
the Word was God This is the word that we believe became human
and lived among us.
Visit: Make time this week to spend in prayer and reflection before the Blessed Sacrament.
As always thank you for watching this video, feel free to answer the reflection questions
in the description box, comment away your thoughts and questions and stay tuned for
the next topic where we talk about Holy Spirit – the third person of the Holy Trinity.
We are living in the age of the Holy Spirit where his presence is keeping our church alive.
God Bless