Period of Inquiry

Jesus is the Solution

God is the only one who has the solution. He has already provided the solution! His is the only true, radical, definitive, and integral solution. Through Jesus and in Jesus, the Father has already given us salvation. "There is no other name under heaven given to the human race by which we are to be saved" Acts 4:12. His very name signifies salvation from God: Yahweh Saves. "You are to name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins" Mt. 1:21.

"For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. For God did not send his Son to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him" Jn 3:16-17.

"In Him we have redemption by his blood, the forgiveness of transgressions, in accord with the riches of His grace" Eph 1:7.

He has saved us by His cross and by His resurrection He has won a new life for us. His death on the cross and His blood shed for us are the price paid for our redemption, justification and salvation. "I came so that they may have life and have it more abundantly" Jn 10:10. "God proves His love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us... Indeed, if, while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son." Rm 5:8,10.

A door has been opened in the wall that separates us from God. A bridge has been placed to transcend the abyss between heaven and earth. It is JESUS on the tree of the cross. He is the true ark of salvation.

We cannot penetrate the wall nor can we build our own bridges. Justification comes only through faith in the saving sacrifice consummated by Jesus. He is the fulfilled promise of redemption, salvation and reconciliation. By His incarnation Jesus unites heaven and earth, God and humanity. All His life and everything He did had salvific value. During His public ministry. He proclaimed and announced the Good News of the Kingdom of God. He initiated and established the Kingdom, and demonstrated it with signs and wonders.

THE APOSTOLIC KERYGMA
Jesus, the Messiah we waited for, the Lord arid Savior, has died on the cross for you. He canceled the account you owed. He shed His blood to cleanse your sins; this was the wage of your redemption. Jesus offered Himself as an immaculate lamb, as an atonement for you. You also have been nailed to His cross, and with Him your old person, your sin and flesh, have died. Through His cross, Jesus has reconciled you with God, and sealed the New Covenant. He rose from the dead so that you may have life. He rescued ail humanity and all creation. The blood of salvation and water of the Spirit spilled from. His side, the fruit of His glorification and lordship."If then we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him... Consequently, you too must think of yourselves as [being] dead to sin and living for God in Christ Jesus" Rom 6:8,11.

Salvation is a fate already accomplished and consummated by Jesus. We must believe this with our hearts, confess it with our lips, giving thanks and making it our own. "...for if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that He rose from the dead, you will be saved" Rm 10:9.

This is not simply the retelling of past events. Instead, it is the proclamation of our salvation now. It is the "Paschal Mystery"; death on the cross, resurrection and the Gift of the Spirit.

He died on the cross for you! He shed his blood for you! He rose again that you may be a new creation and have abundant life!

Jesus offers His salvation to each and every person and His salvation reaches man's entire being: Spirit, soul and body. Jesus saves every area of our lives. He saves our families, society, our structures and systems, and all creation. He does it so that we may be new men and women; so that we may live in a new world and a new creation. Mary, the Mother of our Lord was the bearer of the Redeemer and thus most intimately associated with Him and His saving work. She is the neck of the body of Christ and is the model and prototype of a disciple of Jesus Christ.

SUPPLEMENTARY

Read  8.  How was the Father's friendship restored?

God's work of restoring creation was a very gradual process. It was achieved through the Jewish people and was recorded in the writings of the Old Testament. The Exodus, in which the Jews escaped from the Egyptians through the Red Sea to be given the Ten Commandments by God on Mount Sinai, always remained the formative event in their lives and memories. Each year every Jewish family relived the event in the Passover meal.

The various stages of Jewish history are reflected in the preaching of the prophets such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos. Sometimes they condemn. Sometimes they coax. But always they speak in God's name, leading his people to love the one living and true God.

This love reaches its highest point in the Old Testament in the poetic literature, especially the Psalms. These hymns of worship reflected the Jewish longing for God and prepared them for the coming of Christ.

  "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me!" Not very many of us can say this of ourselves and really mean it. We know from experience that the spoken word is very powerful indeed.

  Words can bring us happiness or extreme dejection. Try for a moment to recall just one occasion in your life when you perhaps overheard someone criticize you or were on the receiving end of a verbal lashing. The effect was probably devastating, and it is an experience we all dread. On the other hand, just one word of encouragement or praise is all most of us need to face and overcome any amount of hardship in our lives.

  The Jews believed that a word was far more than just a sound emitted by the mouth. "The spoken word to the Hebrew," writes Professor John Paterson, "was fear fully alive....It was a unit of energy charged with power." To the Jew a word was so alive that it actually did things. Now just think again about those critical words that were aimed in your direction and you will begin to understand the Jewish mind. Were they not like viruses which slowly wormed their way into you and really upset you?

  When we remember this Jewish idea that words can actually do things, a new way of looking at the Bible opens up before us. We begin to see the Bible as a conversation between the Father and humankind. It is God who begins the conversation, and at his word creation springs into being. "God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light.... God said, 'Let us make man in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves' . . . and so it was" (Genesis 1).

  Perhaps we can see now what we mean when we say that God's word is creative. And every page of the Bible adds to the splendor of this teaching by reminding us that God is love. His words are the very opposite to those virus-type words which gradually destroy us. They are words of love in which he gives himself, shares his secrets, and reveals himself to those who listen.

  As the Bible story unfolds, however, we see people turning a deaf ear to God's word. There is no reply of thanksgiving, no worship. But the Father keeps on talking, keeps on offering his love. It is his creative word which gradually forms the Jewish people into a worship community, a community fit to receive into its midst the One who alone can make an adequate reply to God's words of love: Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, the true worshiper.

  How, then, was creation restored? In the same way in which it came into being—by God's word. "At various times in the past and in various different ways, God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets; but in our own time, the last days, he has spoken to us through his Son" (Hebrews 1:1-3)

Now do the self-correcting quiz #8: 


9 Is Jesus Christ the Son of God?

The words and miracles of Jesus confirm that Jesus is truly the Son of God. The crowning sign was his exaltation when Father lifted up Jesus to himself. Our friendship with God was restored. All people, when united with
Christ, could now worship the Father perfectly.

Jesus Christ fulfills the promise of the Old Testament. The history, the prophecies, and the worship of the Jewish people are explained in the life and teaching of Jesus Christ. "He cured all who were sick. This was to fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah: 'He took our sicknesses away and carried our diseases for us"' (Matthew 8:17).

At first in the Church the truth that Jesus was God was never denied. In the Arian heresy, however, many Christians—including bishops—maintained that Jesus was half human, half divine. The true teaching was expressed in the Council of Nicaea (A.D. 325)~ believe in one Lord Jesus Christ . . . of one being with the Father." The Arians failed largely through the efforts of Saint Athanasius.

  "Truly this man was the Son of God." This confession of faith by the Roman centurion as he watched Jesus die was the last of several similar expressions repeated during the life of Jesus. It is certain that many people who met Jesus, including the centurion, recognized him as being very close to God. But it is equally certain that until Jesus had risen from the dead no one recognized him as God himself.

  When we say that Jesus is the Son of God, we mean that Jesus is God. This is the central claim of Jesus' life and our belief. It is the truth which underlies every word written in this Catechism. Perhaps we may be drawn only rarely to confess: "Truly, Jesus is the Son of God." But the fact remains that in every single expression of our faith, that is the truth which, if not explicitly uttered, is nonetheless taken for granted.

  And here, perhaps, we are faced with a problem —just as the Church was faced with a problem in her early days. When we begin to take something for granted there is a danger that we will eventually forget about it altogether. In Lesson 4 we saw how Jesus claimed to be the Son of God. Although Jesus' claim is really the subject of every question in this Catechism, we will briefly look now at how the Church came to the explicit understanding of this truth.

  For it is undoubtedly true that the Church did begin to take the truth for granted— with disastrous consequences! For a time, the greater number of bishops in the Church "forgot" that Jesus was God. More, they denied it!

  This was not, of course, while the apostles were still alive nor immediately after their death, when the full impact of Christ's words was still felt. The trouble came when the Christian faith began to make itself respectable" and efforts were made to make it "reasonable."

  The man immediately responsible for what was probably the most dangerous heresy in the Church's history was Arius (256-336), a priest of Alexandria. He taught that because the Godhead is unique it cannot be shared or communicated, so that the Son cannot be God. When Jesus was called God, in other words, he was being given only a courtesy title. So widespread did this heresy become that the Emperor Constantine's son, Constantius, confronted Pope Liberius with the question: "Who are you to stand up against the whole world?"

  The "whole world" wrestled with the problem of the Blessed Trinity; and, not surprisingly, got it wrong! The truth was crucified as it had been 300 years earlier. And only very few lone figures in the Church came forward to uphold Catholic belief.

  We recall that belief every Sunday in the Nicene Creed which was formulated to combat the Arian heresy. The Creed re mains an explicit reminder that Jesus is the Son of God. That is the truth which we can never afford to take for granted or forget.

Now do self-correcting quiz #9: 

10 Is Jesus Christ Truly Man?

Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was "born of a woman" (Galatians 4:4). His mother was Mary, a "virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph" (Luke 1:27). Mary conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit to become "Mother of God." Jesus, in other words, "is equal to the Father according to his divinity, less than the Father according to his humanity" (Credo of the People of God, Paul VI).

Very quickly some began to deny that Jesus was truly man. The Docetists (from the Greek verb, "to seem") claimed that Jesus only "seemed" like a man and was in reality only a walking spirit, like a ghost, and that he did not really suffer in the same way as we suffer.

It was partly to combat such errors that Saint John wrote his Gospel toward the end of his life (about A.D. 95). "In the beginning was the Word," he wrote, "and the Word was made flesh." John accompanies this most sublime summary of our faith with its most important instruction: from the lips of Jesus' Mother at Cana, we are told, "Do whatever he tells you."

Read the following two statements carefully:
  "I said that you are a liar, it is true, and I am sorry for it."
  "I said that you are a liar. It is true. And I am sorry for it."
  The first statement is an apology; the second is an accusation. They mean totally different things, yet the difference arises simply from the punctuation.   "What do you mean?" is a question we often ask. The same words can have quite different meanings. And this is why, over the centuries, the Church has tried to make the meaning of Christ's teaching as clear as possible. The process has always been (and continues to be) a difficult one; yet it has helped us to understand our faith more deeply.

  In Lesson 9 we saw how some tried to change the meaning of the Church's belief that Jesus is God. "Jesus is only God in name," the Arians claimed. "No," the Church replied, "Jesus is God in nature.... He is one in substance with the Father."

  That great struggle for true doctrine was hardly over before others began to question the sense in which Jesus was truly man. This, in fact, was a question which began among the first generation of Christians (see illustrations), who maintained that human flesh was evil and so God could not have assumed a human nature. By the fifth century, however, the problem had taken on quite a different and more difficult character.

  Under the Patriarch Nestorius (381-451), some Christians, while continuing to accept that "Jesus Christ is true God and true man," explained this by saying Jesus had a "dual" personality. The consequences of such a teaching are far-reaching. It meant that God and man were not actually united in Christ. The two natures were close, yes, but not united in one person.

  The truth is totally different. Jesus did not simply bring God and people close together. He actually united them. As the priest says in every Mass: "By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity." Just as the water is united with the wine, so is the divine n nature united with human nature in Jesus Christ.

  How did the Church express this vital truth? Toward A.D 100 Saint John told us: 'The Word was made flesh.' Toward A.D. 200 Saint Irenaeus told us: "In Jesus the blending and communion of God and man took place according to the good pleasure of the Father . . . in order that man, having embraced the Spirit of God, might pass into the glory of the Father."
 
  In 431, however, the Church stated the truth in a new and startling way. She simply declared Mary to be "Mother of God." The union of divine and human natures in the person of Jesus. Christ was such that because Mary was "Mother of Jesus" she was " Mother of God." The Church's meaning, at last, was clear!

Now do Self-correcting quiz #10: 

CRACKER BARREL DISCUSSION

1. Reflect and dialogue about humankind's vain solutions: Apparent, superficial, temporary and partial; men contemplate God's solution: what is true, radical, definite and integral .

FOR YOUR NOTEBOOK

Summary: In spite of God's design and desire for mankind to live in the harmonious and abundant life relationship with Himself and all creation.... the sinful choices of mankind result in separation from God as a consequence. Seeing the chaos in His creation and more directly, our lives, God offers a single, complete and radical solution — His Only Son...Jesus.

1. Jesus came to earth to "save" us from sin in our lives. Give specific situations in your life when Jesus helped you to avoid sin.

2. In what ways has Jesus' sacrifice affected the way you act? How does his love for you allow you to act differently?

(Please be reminded we do not want to encourage or allow the sharing of material appropriate for the confessional!)