Homily for the 24th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the
24th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Sept. 15, 2024
Creed
St. Francis Xavier, Bronx
Our Lady of the Assumption, Bronx

This is the 2d part of a presentation on the Nicene Creed.  The 1st was given on the 22d Sunday of O.T.

“I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ” (Nicene Creed).

Two weeks ago, we began an exposition of the Creed, the statement of our most basic beliefs as Christians.  We considered 4 lines pertaining to God the Father.  (If you missed that homily, you can find it and 13 years of my Sunday preaching at sdbnews.blogspot.com.)

The longest part of the Creed, 20 lines, concerns God the Son.  This part has 2 sections, one considering the Son in himself as God (7 lines), the other considering his relationship with us as a human being.

In the 1st line of this part, we acknowledge Jesus Christ as our “one Lord.”  The Roman emperors claimed the title “Lord”; it was a claim to be divine and a demand of absolute sovereignty over lands and peoples, which all their subjects except the Jews were obliged to honor by burning incense to the emperor’s image, i.e., by worshiping him.

The baptism of Christ (Perugino)

As regards the sacred Scriptures, Lord is the term which the Jewish people used for God, as in today’s 1st reading (Is 50:4-9):  Adonai in Hebrew, Dominus in Latin, Kyrios in Greek, as in our Mass rite, Kyrie, eleison, “Lord, have mercy.”  (Yes, that’s Greek, not Latin, a remnant of the ancient Roman liturgy that was celebrated in Greek before Latin became a Christian language.)  So, we Christians are professing that Jesus Christ is our lord and master, not the emperor or any other ruler.  We’re saying that he is God, like his Father, the Kyrios of the Jewish Scriptures.

The Creed continues to emphasize the Son’s divinity, stating that belief in several ways.  Jesus Christ is the “Only Begotten Son of God … begotten, not made.”  The Father didn’t create the Son but gave birth to him; he was “born of the Father before all ages.”  The Creed is refuting the heretical belief that the Father created the Son at some point, that the Son is a creature—a creature more noble and elevated than any other creature, but not God.  It was to debate the divinity of Christ that the council of Nicea was convened in 325, and the Creed is the council’s resolution of that debate.

So the Creed states and restates that “the Only Begotten Son” is “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God.”  It’s as if the bishops at the council of Nicea are saying, “Do you get the point?”

Then they add, “consubstantial with the Father,” i.e., “of the same exact substance as the Father.”  Substance isn’t a biblical term but one from Greek philosophy adopted by the Church.  It means the essence, the core being of something, what makes a rock a rock, a tree a tree, a human being a human being.  Here, it means the divine nature.  Whatever God the Father is, the Son is exactly the same.

Finally, the Creed affirms that all of creation was made thru the Son, who is the very voice of God:  “thru him all things came to be.”  St. John says that in the 1st lines of his Gospel:  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God….  All things came to be thru him, and without him nothing came to be” (1:1,3).  Again, the Son’s not a creature but a creator.  “The Word” is God the Son, thru whom the Father made “all things visible and invisible” when he spoke in the beginning:  “When God created the heavens and the earth … and said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light” (Gen 1:1,3), and God spoke one thing after another into being, as you can read in Genesis ch. 1.

That’s the 1st part of what our faith professes about “one Lord Jesus Christ,” God the Son in himself.  Next time, the Son’s activity on our behalf.

“This is our faith.  This is the faith of the Church.  We are proud to profess it in Christ Jesus our Lord.”