Hey folks! Our current unit in the kids curriculum is about the Apostle's Creed. We'll be in this unit until the beginning of Advent!
The Apostles Creed forms one of the three main catechetical tools of the Church from its earliest days. For hundreds of years, persons were taught the faith through the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments. This Fall we’ll be walking through the articles of the Creed to get our kids oriented to the “faith once for all delivered to the saints”!
Traditionally, the Church has used the Apostle’s Creed as the bedrock of what ought to be believed about God, the story the Bible tells and our future hope.
This week we’re going to talk about the second article of the Creed, “[I believe in] Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.”
The whole of “Christianity,” its story, history, scriptures, traditions, practices, ethics—all of it—hangs on the truthfulness of the profession of Jesus of Nazareth as 1) the Christ, 2) the Divine Son of God, 3) the Lord of our life.
This is another way of saying that Christianity is differentiated from all other myths and religions on the basis of “Christology,” or what it is we believe about the historical person, Jesus of Nazareth, who lived a short life and died in a backwater province of the Roman Empire around 2000 years ago.
Christianity depends, therefore, on the truthfulness of Jesus as the Christ:
Jesus is the fulfillment of the restorative hope of Israel, God’s chosen people, to bring about the promised and unending Kingdom of the House of David.
Christianity also depends, therefore, on the truthfulness of Jesus as the Son of God, the “second” person of the Holy Trinity:
Jesus of Nazareth is God himself in the flesh. This “incarnation” of God establishes a metaphysical union of God and man that is indissoluble. In Jesus God takes on all that it is to be human, heals it, and takes it up into heaven in his ascension. Without it, Christianity offers no “salvation” as such.
Finally, Christianity depends on the truthfulness of Jesus as the Lord of all of God’s people:
Simple belief, or intellectual assent to a set of doctrinal propositions, is not the fullness of what God intends for his people—it is more than that. The invitation of the Gospel is to follow the way of Jesus into authentic and full Christian living. This is what it means to be followers of “The Way”: learning to love God and love our neighbors in greater and greater measure.
Scripture to consider:
John 3:1-16
Mark 9:14-27
Matthew 16:13-20
Questions for your kids
Who do you think Jesus is?
What do you think it says about God that he would want to become a man?
What do you think it says about human beings that God would become one of us?
Holy Imagination
Learning the faith isn't just about memorizing facts. It's about seeing the world as it really is: "charged with the grandeur of God."
It's pretty hard to explain something like the unity of divinity and humanity affected by the incarnation of God in Christ to your kids...or anybody for that matter (it took a few hundred years and councils to hammer out the best language for what we mean!).
Since something like "the hypostatic union of divine and human natures" isn't likely to land, try this: take a cloth napkin, lay it flat on a table. Pick the napkin up by the pinching the center, and as you raise it, note how the rest of the napkin gathers directly under where your fingers hold it.
This is something of what we mean when we say the Son of God gathers up (or "recapitulates") humanity into himself by virtue of the incarnation.
Peace,
Danny+