After the homily, and in response to the proclamation of God’s Word, we profess our faith by reciting the ancient Nicene Creed. What is a creed? It is a statement of faith or belief. We confess our faith in the Triune God (One God in three Persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit), and in God’s redeeming work on our behalf.
After 300 years of persecution, the Christian Church was granted an accepted place in public life. It had emerged from persecution intact and remarkably unified in belief and practice. The Nicene Creed is a statement of Christian belief formulated by a gathering of Bishops coming from Christian communities in all parts of the world to which faith in Christ had spread. Their desire was to set in clear formula the truth taught by Christ, preached by the apostles, and consistently believed up to that time. They did this to help Christian believers identify distortions of belief and falsehoods that some groups were beginning to spread as true Christian teaching. The Nicene Creed came about in 325. Ten years ago, our American Bishops altered some of the wording to reflect the original Latin. Most Catholic churches in other nations had adapted these changes years before.
The first big change occurred right from the outset. “We believe” was changed back to “I believe.” This is how the original Latin reads “Credo.” Catholicism is a faith. Holding that faith and striving to change our lives according to that faith is what makes a person a Catholic believer. When someone joins the Catholic Church, they say publicly before the gathered Church, “I believe and profess all that the holy, Catholic Church believes, teaches and proclaims to be revealed by God.” Our personal believing is what joins us to one another. It is our gift to one another. Saying “I believe” means: “I offer this to you, to serve and strengthen your faith.” This is what makes us the Catholic Church: sharing the same faith, striving for the same holiness.
The second major changed occurred by amending the words “one in being with the Father” with “consubstantial with the Father.” Obviously, Jesus is “one in being with the Father” because we have One God in three Divine Persons. All of us are also “one in being with the Father,” but not in the same manner as Christ. “Consubstantial with the Father” means what the Father is, all of what the Father is, the Son is. All of what God is was present in Jesus when he was on earth, all of What God is, is present in Jesus as he is present to us in the Written Word (the Bible), the Sacraments and each moment of every day. There are quotations from the Gospel of John that highlight this teaching. Jesus said: “If you knew me, you would know my Father too” (John 8:19), “The Father and I are one” (John 10:30), “The Father is in me and I in Him” (John 10:38), and “All that the Father has belongs to me” (John 16:15).
My years of priestly ministry in Keyser were joyful ones. Keyser is a town of about 5,000 people, serves as the county seat of Mineral County, and is situated in the Potomac Highlands of the Eastern Panhandle. Assumption Parish has a little more than 200 families. As their pastor, I was active in the town’s ministerial association. There was a good relationship between most Protestant communities and Catholics. However, the Seventh Day Adventists were not one of them. Their store-front church sat in the center of town next to the largest bank. Every Saturday in the Mineral Daily News Tribune their minister took out a full page or a half-page ad excoriating other faiths, especially Catholics, because we did not follow the traditional Sabbath and we did now kowtow to their interpretation of the Bible. In fact, at the 10:30 AM Easter Sunday Mass in 2014, one of their church members disrupted our service.
Yet, an odd thing happened--rather than hurting the parish, we got people to come who were curious about the Faith. They wondered if the nasty comments in the ads were true. As a result of their learning and attending Mass, every year we got six to ten new members in the Catholic Church. Parishioners would harp at me for not publicly rebutting his mean-spirited ads. “Why would I?” I responded. “He is the biggest recruiter for the Catholic Church we’ve got. Let him keep it up!
Today’s selections from the Book of Numbers and the Gospel of Mark remind us that although Christian denominations may not always share the same doctrinal teachings and we may differ in our interpretations of the Scriptures, if we preach Christ crucified and resurrected, we must support one another rather than tear each other apart. Jesus tells us in no uncertain terms what will happen if we detour the faithful, especially young ones, from good moral behavior.
We will now continue our study of the Nicene Creed.
“We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen” was replaced with “visible and invisible.” What is the significance of this wording change? Some elements of creation we can see, but there are elements that are not apparent to the eye, such as air and wind. We can sense them with all physical senses but sight. We can see the effect of these elements on the things around us, like the grass, trees, and the water. Sight, taste, hearing, feeling, and smelling are senses proper to our physicality (our body). Religious faith teaches us that we have rational senses that belong our mind and senses that belong to our soul. These senses must be attended to, exercised, and nurtured if we are to develop into whole human beings. The senses that belong to our mind and spirit enable us to live in relationship: in relationship with other human beings, with the fundamental physical and rational forces that move the universe, and with the Divine.
“Amen, amen, I say to you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of flesh is flesh and what is born of spirit is spirit. Do not be amazed that I told you, ‘You must be born from above.’ The wind blows where it wills, and you can hear the sound it makes, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes; so, it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” (John 3:5-8)
The words “By the power of the Holy Spirit he was born of the Virgin Mary and became man” were changed to “By the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary and became man.” Why remove the word “born” and replace it with “incarnate?” “Incarnate” means the eternal Word that is God, the Second Person of the Trinity, took on human nature: everything that we were created to be as human beings. He did this to draw close to us, to express God’s unconditional love for us, and to extend to the offer to heal us. In the process we heaped upon God everything broken and bruised in our sin-infected human nature (the effect of our rebellion against God). This he endured from us, bore in his human nature with great suffering, and carried unto death for our salvation. The diseased human nature we heaped upon him, died with him. Its power was broken in him and by him. A new human nature for us rose with him. All who cling to him in faith find the power to die with him to our old human nature and rise with him to experience the regeneration of our human nature into a new self. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians 4:17-24 recounts this regeneration of our human nature in Christ.
When we recite the Creed at Mass, we bow at these words. However, twice a year we genuflect when stating these words. One is a major feast, a Holy Day of Obligation, and the other is a feast that is not a Holy Day of Obligation. Christmas and the Annunciation (March 25) are these two days.