Jesus Christ Part 1
In the next few blogs, we will explore why the identity of Jesus Christ matters for Christian faith, worship and everyday life. These reflections are not intended to say everything that could be said about him, but rather to offer a starting point for thinking about his life, ministry and ongoing significance.
WHO IS JESUS AND WHY DOES HE MATTER FOR OUR LIVES
Jesus Christ is the incarnate Son of God. In Christian faith, this means that he is the Second Person of the Trinity, born as a human being: fully human and fully divine. The word incarnate means ‘made flesh’, and it points to the central Christian belief that God has entered human life as one of us.
The incarnation did not happen ‘out of the blue’. From the beginning, human beings have asked who they are, where they belong and what gives life its deepest meaning. We live in particular places and moments, yet through desire, imagination and intellect we reach beyond our daily experience into something ‘more’. In different ways, the world’s major religious traditions explore this relationship between ordinary experience and ultimate reality, between what is close at hand and what lies beyond.
Against this backdrop, the Christian faith makes a distinctive claim: in Jesus, the human and the divine come together. God is beyond us, yet God is also accessible. We do not need to escape our lives or leave the world behind in order to know God. Rather, we come to God through the concrete realities of life itself. God is here, and God is one of us.
Jesus makes this possible. By bringing the human and the divine together in himself, he shows that human life is not an obstacle to God but the very place where God is to be encountered. We meet God in the ups and downs of life as we turn our hearts to God in prayer. We express our faith in the way we treat one another and the world of which we are a part, and into which God was born. We find God in the interplay of the physical and the spiritual at the heart of our sacraments and liturgy. We show our love for God in the way we live lives of compassion and justice.
Nothing that belongs to your life and experience is outside your relationship with God. Because God became one of us, every human life can become a place of encounter with the divine.