Part 11: God Became Man – The Space After the Period

One final point is worth noting about this part of the Creed:  There is a whole lifetime crammed into the space after “and became man.”  That’s because the Creed contains nothing explicit about Jesus’ earthly ministry.  Those three words encompass not merely the conception and birth of Jesus, but the entirety of his life.  The Creed, being a summary of the highlights, simply leapfrogs over three quarters of all the text of all the gospels to get to the nugget of what those gospels are about: Jesus’ Passion, Death, and Resurrection. 

But here’s the critical thing: That’s not because the Church thinks the baptism and temptation of Jesus, the Sermon on the Mount, the parables, the miracles, and the sayings and deeds of Jesus are unimportant.  It’s because a gospel is, in the words of Martin Kähler, a “passion narrative with an extended introduction.”[1] Fully one-quarter of all four gospels is about a roughly 72-hour period in the life of Jesus running from the evening of Holy Thursday to Easter Sunday.  It is this interval of time that is very clearly what each gospel is about.  Everything before those 72 hours is included for one purpose only: to illustrate the meaning, power, and effect of the event which occurred over those three days—and what our obedient response to that crucified and risen Christ must be. 

I mention this because a bizarre and (for the serious disciple of Jesus) unthinkable schism has arisen in our time that pits right belief about Jesus’ deity, death, and resurrection and right obedience to what Jesus commands against each other rather than relating them to one another.  So, on the one hand, we find some Christians declaring that it doesn’t matter what you believe about Jesus’ deity, death and resurrection is just so long as you do what he says:

Consider this remarkable fact: In the Sermon on the Mount, there is not a single word about what to believe, only words about what to do and how to be. By the time the Nicene Creed is written, only three centuries later, there is not a single word in it about what to do and how to be—only words about what to believe.[2]

On the other hand, we find Christians heaping scorn on obedience to Christ as “woke nonsense” and imagining that just so long as you correctly mouth “Jesus is Lord and God raised him from the dead”, you can ignore the rest. So, for instance, here is Jesus:

“Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
“Blessed are you that hunger now, for you shall be satisfied.
“Blessed are you that weep now, for you shall laugh.
“Blessed are you when men hate you, and when they exclude you and revile you, and cast out your name as evil, on account of the Son of man! Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers did to the prophets.
“But woe to you that are rich, for you have received your consolation.
“Woe to you that are full now, for you shall hunger.
“Woe to you that laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep. “Woe to you, when all men speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets. (Luke 6:20-26)

And here is Pope Leo XIV obviously repeating exactly the same themes when he teaches that, “in a world where the poor are increasingly numerous, we paradoxically see the growth of a wealthy elite, living in a bubble of comfort and luxury, almost in another world compared to ordinary people” and “God has a special place in his heart for those who are discriminated against and oppressed, and he asks us, his church, to make a decisive and radical choice in favor of the weakest.”[3]

But the response of many “orthodox” Christians to Leo’s repetition of Christ’s call to love the poor and reject of Mammon worship is this outburst of contempt:

“It is simply another Woke-Liberal-Socialist manifesto that will continue to lead the Faithful astray!” 

“Shut up and sprinkle incense.” 

“Stand with whomever you like, Woke Pope Leo.”[4]

The myth that we may choose between right belief and right action is now a very popular schism in the mental life of many Christians.

Now, to be sure, correct opinions about Jesus are worthless if not accompanied by obedience to Jesus. After all, Jesus himself warns the emptily pious:

“Not every one who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you evildoers.’ (Mt 7:21–23)

But exalting right belief above right action is not healed by pitting right action against right belief. They are not enemies but are intended to reinforce each other.

The thing that goes unnoticed about the passage from Jesus above is that it points directly to what the Church will eventually have to work out in the Creed.

Again and again, Jesus implicitly and explicitly makes claims to be nothing less than the God of Israel. That is why he not only takes for granted—in the Sermon on the Mount—the right to be addressed as “Lord, Lord” but to call God his Father and to act as the Judge of the entire world. It is why he declares that he came to fulfill the Law (Matthew 5:17). And it is why he repeatedly assumes the divine perogative to edit, augment, and expand on the Law of Moses with the repeated formula, “You have heard that it was said… but I say to you” (Matthew 5:21, 27, 33, 38, 43).

The question such preaching is designed to provoke, the question that would ultimately be demanded of him at his trial before Caiaphas, is “Who in the world do you think you are?” The whole Sermon is the riddle. The Creed is the eventual answer the Church arrives at. And neither makes sense without the other. When Caiaphas, prompted by such shocking talk from Jesus, asks, “Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?” Jesus’ reply is “I AM”: the name of the living God from Exodus 3:14 (Mark 14:61-62). And ultimately that is the only reason for obeying Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon.

Pitting the Sermon against the Creed or vice versa is like asking which blade on the scissors does the cutting or demanding to know if a zebra is white with black stripes or black with white stripes. The absurd demand that we choose between right belief in Christ and right obedience to Christ is nonsensical. Faith in Christ is the only thing that makes it possible to obey Christ and obedience to Christ is the only way to incarnate living faith in Christ. The Creed is not attempting to replace the Sermon on the Mount. And the Sermon on the Mount is packed with implications about what Christ demands we believe about who he is: the incarnate Son of God.

The entire attempt to set up an opposition between believing what the gospel teaches about Jesus (true God and true man, crucified and raised from the dead for our sins, coming again in glory to judge the living and the dead) and obeying Jesus is folly, as though accepting Jesus as Savior is a free ticket to ignoring his commands or, conversely, obeying what he says about caring for the least of these is a license to ignore what he says about his deity, sacrificial death, resurrection, and his call to place our faith him completely.

In short, if you claim to believe Jesus is Lord but don’t obey him, you don’t believe he is Lord.

But likewise, if you claim to obey him but don’t believe he is Lord (which is, by the way, absolutely what the Sermon on the Mount presupposes his disciples are to do), then you aren’t obeying him.

Believing the substance of the Creed about Jesus and obeying the Jesus the Creed describes are two sides of the same coin. Pitting obedience and faith against one another is utter folly. The gospel teaches and has always taught “the obedience of faith.” (Romans 1:5).

Born to Die

What it all comes down to is this simple and profound reality: Jesus is fully God and fully man.  That is what all the complex theological formulations double, triple, and quadruple underscore.  That is what all the weird consequences and paradoxes point back to.  A believer in Jesus can, if he likes, make a life’s study of all the controversies and arguments that rocked the early Church as it grappled with these mysteries.  Or you can accept in childlike simplicity that Jesus Christ is Son of God and Son of Man.  That’s up to you.  Meanwhile, the incredible and beautiful reality is summed up in these words:

The Son of God. . . worked with human hands; he thought with a human mind. He acted with a human will, and with a human heart he loved. Born of the Virgin Mary, he has truly been made one of us, like to us in all things except sin.[5]

And he did all that so that he could offer to his Father on our behalf a fully human life—body, blood, soul, and divinity—that could bear all the distortion, dysfunction, hatred, pain, and spite we could heap upon him and bear it away into the abyss of God’s love for us.  That is why the Catechism says (CCC 478):

He has loved us all with a human heart. For this reason, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, pierced by our sins and for our salvation (cf. John 19:34), “is quite rightly considered the chief sign and symbol of that. . . love with which the divine Redeemer continually loves the eternal Father and all human beings” without exception (Pius XII, encyclical, Haurietis aquas (1956): DS 3924; cf. DS 3812).

Jesus took flesh for one reason: to offer it to the Father every second of every minute of every day until, at the final consummation, he suffered death and was buried.

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[1] Martin Kähler, The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic Biblical Christ (Fortress Texts in Modern Theology) (English and German Edition), (Minneapolis: Fortress), 1988.  80, n. 11.

[2] Robin R Meyers, Saving God from Religion: A Minister’s Search for Faith in a Skeptical Age (New York: Convergent Books, 2020), p. 103.

[3] Pope Leo XIV, Dilexi Te 11, 16. October 4, 2025. Available on-line at https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2025/10/09/251009h.html as of October 9, 2025.

[4] Travis Gettys, “’Straight challenge to MAGA’: Trump’s fans rage at Pope Leo’s ‘woke manifesto’”, Raw Story, October 9, 2025. Available on-line at https://www.rawstory.com/maga-pope-leo-straight-challenge/ as of October 9, 2025.

[5] Gaudium et Spes 22 § 2