His only Son Our Lord

God’s only Son

It is very important always to remember that Jesus Christ is God the Son who became one of us.  St Joseph was only his foster-father and guardian.  In the Creed Jesus is called God’s only Son, that is, Son in a way that no one else can be because as God he has always shared Heaven with God the Father and God the Holy Spirit.  We call him Lord because he is the Lord God.

Truly God and truly Man

So the Nicene Creed, which we sing or say at the Eucharist, states this truth several times over by saying that he was “begotten of his Father before all worlds.  God of God…”.  In the original Greek that word ‘of’ means out of or from.  So the Creed declares that Our Lord is “God from God, Light from Light, Very God from Very God (that is, True God from True God) begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father”.  That means that Our Lord Jesus Christ is as truly God as is God the Father.  And the Creed then adds that by Our Lord all things were made.

Our Lord is God the Son who became one of us.  But he did more than that.  He became not just a man, but Man.  He took human nature itself and made it his own.  That means that everything that is best in us, as human beings, is to be found in him.  So, however different we may be from one another, we can all see our best selves in him, and in becoming like him we become the kind of people God meant us to be.  Our Lord is perfect God and perfect Man and has taken our nature upon him.  Therefore he can make each one of us perfect simply by uniting himself with us.  He does this in Holy Communion when in the Blessed Sacrament he fills our souls, he in us and we in him.

So the Nicene Creed goes on, “And was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made Man…”.  Incarnate means ‘in the flesh’, God in human flesh.  We bow our heads at these words in the Creed in order to show our reverence and love and humble adoration to Our Lord for bringing himself down to the level of people like us.