Welcome Back, Class!
I hope you enjoyed the first lesson and got something out of it! The Nicene Creed is a good part to begin teaching about the faith because it is a short summary of what we believe. It covers and/or connects to every aspect of our faith, and is important to meditate on and to try to understand.
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God: Three Persons, One Divine Nature
Upon reading the Nicene Creed, we now understand that when we talk about God, we are talking about God the Father, Jesus Christ the son of God, and the Holy Spirit. This is the Trinity: three persons, three aspects, of one single divine nature that is God. The trinity is the central mystery of our faith as Catholics. It is central in that everything we do in our faith life, be they sacraments, be it Mass, be it prayer—everything relies on the Trinity. It is a mystery because it is very, very hard to understand.
The important thing you need to know is what each of these three persons are, and what they mean to you. The Nicene Creed once again is our guide. Let’s see what the Creed has to say about each one.
God the Father
God the Father is first and foremost in the Nicene Creed for a reason. He is “maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.” God the Father is kind of analogous to a King—we can think of everything that exists, everything we have, coming from God the Father. The Father creates which we can see in Genesis, and the Father also approves—which we also see in Genesis as well as in the Gospel: “And God saw all the things that he had made, and they were very good. And the evening and morning were the sixth day.”1
Jesus Christ, the Son of God
Jesus is the Son of God. As I mentioned in the previous lesson, most of the Nicene Creed is about Jesus, and understanding Him is most immediately important to our faith; understanding Him is enhanced by understanding the Father and the Holy Spirit. So what does the Nicene Creed tell us about Jesus?
First, it tells us he was begotten. Begotten means born; Christ was born from God. When we are born, we retain some of the characteristics of our parents. We look like them, we behave like them. We find we share interests with our parents. Jesus was Begotten of God, which means He is perfectly like God—He shares His Fathers divinity as God.
The Creed says Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, was born of the Father before all ages. This means that the second person of the Trinity has always existed, through all time, along with God the Father. In fact, the Nicene Creed emphasizes this point: God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father. This means that Christ is God and shares all the attributes with God, he is even “consubstantial” with the Father—which means “with one substance”, that is, the Divine substance as God.
There’s another important thing to note about Jesus though: not only was he the same substance as God, but he “came down from heaven (…) and became man”. He didn’t just appear in the form of Jesus that we know; he was incarnate of the Virgin Mary—incarnate means to take flesh, he took on his bodily form through the Virgin Mary His Mother. We will talk about Mary in more depth later, but remember her: the fact that she is mentioned in the Nicene Creed means that she is really important to our Faith and to understanding Jesus. Back to the incarnation: Jesus was fully God and fully human through the incarnation. This duality is known as hypostatic union.
So Jesus, fully God (God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God) was incarnate and became man, and then something extraordinary happened: “For our sake He was crucified under Pontius Pilate, He suffered death and was buried, and rose again on the third day.” Each of these facts bears individual importance, but for right now it’s important to meditate on the fact that Christ, the second person of the trinity, who shares substance with God the Father, was killed—he suffered death!—but He also rose again. He did all of these things for us. Not just collectively, as human beings, as humanity—but He did these things for us individually. For me, Scoot; for you, reading this. Christ did all of these things so that we could Conquer death through Him.
Finally, the creed says that Christ “ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his Kingdom will have no end.” This means that Christ ascended—under his own power—into Heaven, and is seated next to God the Father, whom we can think of as a kind of King. Jesus will come back to Earth in glory—not in humility as when he was incarnate of the Virgin Mary—and He will judge the living and the dead, and reign over the glorified earth forever. This speaks to what you may already know as the “second coming” or the “end times”. This is an important thing for us to know about Christ too—that He will return, and we need to be ready with some urgency. He could return before you finish reading the end of this sentence—are you ready for Him?
The Holy Spirit
The Holy Spirit cooperates with both Father and Son. The Holy Spirit is the giver of life, according to the Creed, and proceeds from the Father and the Son—the Spirit is generated by both the Father and the Son, as a third distinct person of the Trinity. The Holy Spirit is adored and glorified equally with the Father and the Son, and it is the Spirit who spoke through the prophets. The Holy Spirit is active in our lives today, and gives us not just our life but our spiritual life as well. When we think about our conscience, we can think of it as movements of the Holy Spirit in our lives, calling us to do the right thing always.
The Trinity
You can see how the Nicene Creed establishes each person of the Trinity—the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; tells us important things about them and what they do; and establishes that each person of the trinity has existed for all time “before all ages” and is co-equal with every other person of the Trinity, sharing as they do in the oneness of their divine Nature. Remember, even though we talked about the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as if they are distinct, they are aspects of the one living God. Where one goes, all three go with Him. When we feel the Holy Spirit in our lives, it is the Father, Son, and Spirit all at once. Yet we feel the Holy Spirit because it is a spiritual movement. When we read the scriptures about Jesus Christ, it is Christ Incarnate yet the Father and the Spirit are with Him always, as the Trinity is indivisible.
Teaching Activity
Have the students contemplate their self understanding. Have them think about what they look like, how others might see them (in a positive way). Have them think about how they see themselves, and what skills they have, what they are good at.
Have the students meditate on this in silence for a time, and then allow them to write a list of attributes about themselves based on these thoughts. See what things the students wrote in common, and what things were different.
This exercise gets at their understanding of themselves. The Trinity can be said to be an expression of God’s understanding of himself—but his understanding is perfect. Where the students might write their height, their hair color, their favorite food—God could explain every minute detail down to the Atom of Jesus. Because Jesus is begotten of the Father, God would love Him with perfect love, and Jesus would love the Father with perfect love: the Holy Spirit which proceeds mutually from Father and Son.
The goal is to help students understand the trinity by analogy of understanding themselves.
Homework
Your homework for the next lesson is to contemplate your relationship with the Holy Trinity. When you think of the Father, what comes to mind? What about the Son? What do you think about the Holy Spirit? Do you relate to one better than the others? Does one come to mind when you close your eyes and pray?
Your homework then is to spend 15 minutes in prayer: Spend 5 minutes praying with the Father in mind; spend 5 minutes praying with the Son in mind; spend 5 minutes praying with the Holy Spirit in mind. Come and share in the comments the fruit of that prayer. How did you feel? What did you think about?
Do you have any questions about the Trinity? Leave them in the comments as well, and we will discuss them in the next lesson!
Thank you for reading!
Ad Jesum Per Mariam
Edit: 27 February 2023 to include the Teaching Activity section