Grace Notes 2024-03-27

Have you ever noticed in the Creed, both the Nicene and Apostles’, that mention is made of Jesus’ birth to the Virgin Mary, and then in the next line we are confessing Jesus’ suffering and death under Pontius Pilate? Nothing is confessed about his preaching, teaching, miracles, healings, and encounters with people. And it’s not that these things are unimportant!

As important as the three Ecumenical Creeds are, striving for some brevity, they are unable to confess everything that needs to be confessed. Lutherans accept the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds as touchstones of orthodoxy and necessary Christian beliefs. Often the articulation safeguards aspects that have been attacked or denied by heretics.

That said, one possible reason for neglecting what Jesus said and did between His incarnate birth and His atoning death and resurrection is because what He said and did was a prelude and demonstration of what He came to accomplish. For example, He on occasion healed the sick. This helped demonstrate that when He promised all who had faith to be healed, we could know that in the resurrection of the body on the last day all believers will be healed.

Face it, who Jesus is and what He came to do are the most important aspects of the Christian Faith. And the two go together. A mere man only would not have been able to atone for the sins of the human race. With our fall into sin, we ourselves cannot overcome sin, death, and the devil.

Conversely, God alone is incapable of death or standing in any way as a representative or substitute for man. But with the eternal Son of God becoming flesh in the womb of Mary, so that Jesus is both true God and true man, what He did on the cross as our representative, bearing our sins upon Himself, could atone for our sins. In His human nature He represent us, in His Divine nature He could conquer death. Both natures share in the one person’s work – for our salvation!

Since You Asked…

How are we to understand the Easter Feast?

“Easter is to be understood as the crown of the whole year, the queen of feasts, and as such it lasts not for a day, not for a week, but for a week of weeks – a week not made up of seven days but of seven weeks.

So the Sundays of this season are called the Sundays of Easter. It is one extended feast. … The Gospels for the Sundays of Easter present the themes of resurrection, ascension, and the sending of the Holy Spirit as aspects or stages of the Easter Mystery…” (from the Manual on the Liturgy a companion to the Lutheran Book of Worship, publ. by Augsburg)