'A Human among humans...'

 

Dear Parish Faithful,

Christ is Risen!  Indeed He is Risen!

"The classic understanding of Christian orthodoxy - formed in the early church over seven or eight centuries of preaching and controversy and expressed in a growing stream of biblical commentary, theological argument, creedal confessions, and conciliar formulas - was and continues to be that Jesus is himself the Son of God: the eternal Word "by whom all things were made" (cf. John 1:3), who in time has become a human among humans, in order to transform and liberate the humanity he has made his own, even to offer humanity a share in the life of God. Classical Christian orthodoxy confesses that the Jesus who revealed God's will and God's love in works and words of power is "one and the same" as the Jesus who slept in a boat, who wept for Lazarus, and who suffered on the cross: God the Son, humanly "personalizing" the transcendent fullness of the divine Mystery in the body and mind, the relationships and limitations, of his own fully human life."

- Brian E. Daly, SJ

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I found this helpful paragraph in an article that Brian Daly wrote, entitled: "The Word and His Flesh: Human Weakness and the Identity of Jesus in Greek Patristic Christology." So, before plunging into the heart of his article, he offers us this fine, succinct summary of the paradoxical nature of the Person of Jesus Christ - both God and man. Brian Daly is a very prominent Patristic scholar, who has many of his translations published by SVS Press. He is a Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. If we turn back many centuries to the Fifth Ecumenical Council (553), we find this already expressed in that rhetorical and polemical style that marked that era:

If anyone says that the Word of God who performed miracles was someone other than the Christ who suffered, or says that God the Word was with the Christ "born of a woman" (Gal. 4:4) or was in him as one in another, but does not confess that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Word of God made flesh and made human, is one and the same, and that both the miracles and the suffering which he voluntarily endured in the flesh belong to the same one, let that person be anathema.

This is the One who was both crucified and raised from the dead!