Category Archives: Adult Faith Formation

Belief in Jesus is crucial to Christianity. Christians call themselves “Christians” because of their shared belief that Jesus was the Christ, the Messiah. So what are some of the things that Christians believe about this Jesus Christ?

Son of God: Christians believe that Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, is the Son of God. As we say in the Nicene Creed every Sunday, we believe that Jesus is the Son of God, created by God but always having existed with God, in one being with God. We cannot always completely understand what all of this means, but, since the very beginning of the church, we have believed it to be true.

Incarnation: Because we believe that Jesus is the Son of God, we also believe that he is the incarnation of God. The word incarnation comes from the Latin word for flesh or meat; so incarnation literally means to make something out of flesh. In Jesus, God is made flesh or human. It is not just that Jesus, the Son of God, came to earth in some “spiritual” or angelic sort of way. Jesus was a human being just like everyone else of earth. We believe that Jesus suffered all of the trials and tribulations of being human: he got sick, angry, and sad, and he died. But we also believe that he celebrated all of the wonderful things about being a human being: he loved his family and his friends, he had fun and went to parties, he told stories and ate good meals. Because God became human in Jesus, we know that God loves us and that God shares our joys and sorrows and we know that we can always turn to God who is intimately connected to the human lives we lead.

Fully human and fully divine: By combining these two beliefs about Jesus, we come up with one of the central tenets of Christianity: that Jesus was fully human and fully God. This is not a belief that Jesus was God since the beginning, then a human for a while, and now God again. Jesus was not a half-human, half-God being who walked the earth. We believe that Jesus is completely human at all times and completely God at all times. Again, this is not a belief that makes sense to our rational minds, but it is one that was formulated very early in the history of the church and it is one that the church has insisted on since then.

Sacrament of God: A sacrament is an outward sign or source of God’s grace (God’s unconditional love for us). When we think of sacraments, however, we tend to only think of the seven ritual sacraments that make up such an important part of the worship life of the Church today. But anything that is for us a source of God’s grace is a sacrament and Jesus is the best example of that. God loves us so much that God came to dwell among us in the person of Jesus, the Son of God. God’s grace comes to us through the life, teachings, and death of Jesus. Jesus is the supreme example of what God’s grace means to us.

Resurrection and Ascension: Central to our understanding of our Christian faith is our belief that Jesus not only died, but he conquered death by rising from the dead on the third day and, after appearing to his disciples, ascended into heaven. It is Jesus’ power over death that gives us the assurance that we will live with him forever. The Resurrection is the event in the life of Jesus that sets Christianity apart from all the other religions of the world. In fact, it is the Resurrection that sets Christianity apart from its roots in Judaism. And the Ascension gives us the confidence to believe that we will be with Jesus in heaven when we die.

The Second Coming: One of the most often misunderstood and least often discussed of the beliefs about Jesus is his promised second coming. The early Christian church believed that Jesus would return to finish establishing God’s Reign within their lifetimes. However, as the first disciples began to die without witnessing this second coming, the early believers began to realize not only that Jesus’ return was to be some time into the future but that it was entirely unpredictable. This lead to a great deal of speculation about what happens to people who die before the second coming as well as about the nature and timing of this return. Eventually, this developed into our beliefs about Heaven and Hell as well as our belief that Jesus will come again at the end of time to judge all souls.

Again, these are only some of the things that Christians believe about Jesus. And it took us almost 2000 years to figure them out as well as we have, which is obviously nowhere near a perfect understanding. The person of Jesus is a mystery as is his saving work, but we trust in him anyway. Unlike Doubting Thomas, we have not seen and still believe; and God blesses us for it.

The Passion Story refers to the stories in the Gospels that describe Jesus’ final days. They are a description of the arrest, trial, torture, and death of Jesus at the hands of the Jewish and Roman authorities. Because Christians believe that Jesus died for our sins and that he rose from the dead, this Passion story, along with the Resurrection story, form the centerpiece of the Christian religion.

All four of the Gospels tell the same basic story. Jesus, even though he knew that the Jewish authorities were looking for a reason to arrest him, decided to go to Jerusalem with his disciples to celebrate the Jewish feast of Passover. After celebrating this ritual holiday meal with his closest friends, Jesus went out to pray. While he was praying, the Temple guards who had been tipped off as to Jesus’ whereabouts by Judas, one of Jesus’ closest followers, arrested him. When he was arrested, he was charged by the Jewish authorities with the crime of blasphemy, claiming for oneself characteristics that can only belong to God. The very night of his arrest, Jesus was taken before the Sanhedrin, the Jewish ruling council. The Sanhedrin called witnesses to prove Jesus’ blasphemy and, although the witnesses and their testimony were somewhat weak, they convicted Jesus of the crime. According to Jewish law, the punishment for the crime of blasphemy was death. However, the Jews were no longer able to sentence people to death; only the Romans can do that. The Sanhedrin, therefore, sent Jesus to the Roman governor under the charge of treason, threatening to take over the power that belongs to the government. After a series of interviews, the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, agreed to sentence Jesus to death for treason, claiming to be the king of the Jews. The form of execution was to be crucifixion.

Crucifixion was one of the many forms of execution that was used by the Romans. Usually reserved for lower class people (upper class citizens were usually given the option of committing suicide or of being beheaded), crucifixion was one of the most painful ways to die. Despite being excruciatingly painful, it was not designed to kill a person. A person who was crucified eventually died of suffocation as they weakened due to the pain and blood loss caused by the crucifixion. This slow exhaustion and suffocation could take up to three days. However, the Gospel accounts suggest that Jesus died three hours after having been nailed to the cross, which is a much shorter time than would have been usual. Since he died relatively quickly, his family was able to have his body removed from the cross and placed in a tomb before sunset. The Sabbath begins at sundown on Friday and no work can be done during this time, including the burying of the dead. If Jesus had not been put in the tomb before sunset, his body would have had to remain on the cross until the end of the Sabbath observances, probably until Sunday morning. As it was, Jesus’ family and friends did not have enough time to completely prepare his body for burial. So they had to make do with wrapping him in the burial cloths and they made plans to return after the Sabbath to anoint his body with oils and spices as was the custom.

Jesus’ Resurrection from the dead on the third day after his crucifixion is the central event of Christianity. Without the Resurrection, Jesus was just another wandering preacher-healer who was killed by the Romans. It is the Resurrection that proved to the early disciples that Jesus was the promised Messiah and the Son of God.

No one knows how Jesus rose from the dead; no one was there to witness it. However, the Gospels agree that, when the women went to the tomb to anoint his body with oils and spices, they discovered that the tomb was empty. The traditional story of the early church attributes this first discovery and explanation to the apostles to Mary Magdalene, who is often called the Apostle to the Apostles, the one who carried the good news of the resurrection to those who became responsible for the preaching of that good news.

The Gospels also tell us that Jesus appeared to various of his followers in the few weeks after his resurrection. He continued to teach them and he shared meals with them. These stories are called the Appearance Narratives. Several weeks after the Resurrection, Jesus stopped appearing to his disciples and the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles tell us that he ascended into heaven.

Because of the Resurrection, the disciples were empowered to start spreading the news that Jesus, who had been crucified by the Romans, was in fact alive again. In addition to preaching the message that Jesus himself had preached – of God’s love and the coming of God’s reign, the early church began preaching this good news of Jesus’ Resurrection. And, over time, they also came to understand that Jesus’ Resurrection and Ascension meant that Jesus was the Christ – the anointed one of God – and God’s Son. In the next posting, we will explore some of these key beliefs about Jesus.

When Jesus was, we believe, around thirty years old, he left his home and his family and began a career as a traveling rabbi. He would travel around the country, with his closest followers, and talk to people about his ideas. In addition, he acquired a reputation as a healer, which attracted even more people to hear him. Jesus’ message was a deceptively simple one. He taught that God loved each individual person and that all we had to do was to accept that love and love God in return. This message was somewhat unusual at the time because of Jesus’ personal image of God; God is a Father, a Dad, who loves us unconditionally.

Jesus used a variety of teaching tools to get his message across to the people who came to hear him. He used a straightforward didactic method in which he just explained what he wanted to teach; think of the Sermon on the Mount. He taught by example; for example, he showed his disciples how to pray by giving them a sample prayer, the Our Father, and by taking time by himself to pray. And, finally, he used parables and miracles to capture the attention of regular people.

A parable is a short, fictional story that explains some deeper idea in a way that people can understand. For example, rather than trying to explain to people that God loves them and will forgive them if they sin, Jesus told the parable of the Prodigal Son. In this parable, Jesus explained that God is like a loving father who gives his children every good thing even when they will misuse those gifts and who always forgives his children when they return to him. Most people have had the experience of being loved and forgiven by a family member and this made it a lot easier to understand Jesus point about how God loves us.

A miracle is an event that, at the time that it happens, had no logical explanation. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus performed many miracles for a variety of people in all kinds of situations. Although many modern scholars and scientists believe that some of Jesus’ miracles can be explained away, we still consider them to be miracles because they were unexplained phenomena at the time. Jesus’ miracles fall into three categories. The first type of miracle is the healings, miracles in which Jesus cures a person of a disease or physical ailment. This category would include the healing of lepers, lame people, blind people, and so on. The second category, raisings from the dead, includes the several times that Jesus brought people back to life after they had died. The third category is physical miracles; these are miracles that show Jesus’ power over the forces of nature. In many cases, when Jesus performed a miracle, it was in a private setting with only a few people witnessing it and he would often tell those witnesses to tell no one of what they had seen. Jesus did not perform miracles in order to “wow” a crowd of people; he performed them because he saw that people were suffering and he wanted to alleviate that suffering. Therefore, we believe that Jesus did not want the witnesses of his miracles to be amazed, he wanted their faith to be increased.

Jesus’ ministry has become, for Christians, both the content of much of our own preaching – that God loves us and that we are called to love our neighbors – and the example of how to engage in God’s ministries. Jesus didn’t just teach with word, but with deeds; we follow his example when our actions become our evangelization tools. As St. Francis of Assisi reminds us: “Preach the Gospel at all times; if necessary, use words.”