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Jesus is the message of God

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  • Jesus is the message of God

    Providence Journal , RI
    March 27 2004

    Jesus is the message of God

    by Stephen Lynch:

    Dan Brown's novel, The Da Vinci Code, on The New York Times'
    hardcover fiction bestseller list for months, points up our culture's
    continuing fascination with Jesus Christ. Brown's novel challenges
    Christianity's roots in terms of Christ's divinity. I would like to
    look at the faith of Christians from the first to the fourth
    centuries from the Roman Catholic perspective. What we believe about
    Jesus Christ is one thing; what we know about Jesus is something
    else. St. Hilary, a fourth-century doctor of the Church, writes that
    while God's existence can be known by reason, God's nature can never
    be comprehended.

    Some early Christians questioned Christ's divinity, but the majority
    accepted Jesus as the Word of God in human form, because they
    believed in the mystery of Christ's resurrection. Brown never really
    faces up to the most critical theological issue of all, which is the
    validity of the Resurrection.

    In her book Beyond Belief, Elaine Pagels, a historian of religion at
    Princeton University, writes that around the end of the second
    century, Christian leaders like Polycarp and Irenaeus developed a set
    of instructional summaries of belief, termed the Rule of Faith, which
    clearly affirmed the Christian belief in the divinity of Jesus
    Christ.

    The fourth-century Council of Nicaea did not invent faith in Christ's
    divinity, because the New Testament already attested to that fact.
    The integration of the Jesus of history with the Christ of faith
    means that Jesus is not only the messenger of the kingdom, but he
    himself is the message of God. Jesuit Karl Ralmer summed up Christ's
    identity this way: "Christ not only redeems humanity from sin, but
    brings to perfection the divine plan of creation." Israel plays a
    pivotal role in God's plan. The Roman centurion standing at the foot
    of the cross publicly proclaimed his own faith-transformation when he
    testified, "Clearly, this was the Son of God."

    Besides the historical evidence for Christ's divinity, there is very
    moving liturgical evidence. Professor Pagels points out that in the
    second century, Pliny, a Roman governor in Asia Minor, said that two
    female Christian slaves confessed under torture that Christians met
    before dawn on a certain day of the week to sing a hymn to Christ as
    to a god. Pliny had the slaves executed, because he said their
    worship of Jesus Christ was an insult to the Roman gods.

    The following century, Origen writes that John's Gospel insists that
    Jesus is not merely God's servant, but God's own light in human form.
    The most ancient vesper evening prayer of Christianity is called the
    Office of Light, or the Lucernarium. Christians sang it as a
    liturgical witness to their belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ.
    >From the late fourth century, this Vesper hymn was celebrated in the
    Church of the Holy Sepulcher. All the lamps and torches of the church
    were lighted, and the Lucernarium hymn was chanted. An even earlier
    tradition says that at the end of the third century, in the Armenian
    town of Sebaste, St. Athenogenes and 10 disciples were burned at the
    stake for confessing Jesus Christ as Son of God in human flesh. As
    the fires were ignited, the martyrs sang this Lucernarium canticle
    Phos Hilarion: "O gracious Light, pure brightness of the ever living
    Father in heaven, holy and blessed Jesus Christ."

    Jesus calls all to go back to the beginning, to that luminous state
    of creation before the fall, where, as Messiah and Light of the World
    revealed in human form, the Incarnate Word of God is divinely
    appointed to rule the kingdom of God forever and forever.

    The Rev. Stephen Lynch is the director of evangelization at St.
    Francis Chapel and City Ministry Center in Providence.
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