For our sake…
(… pro nobis …)

After establishing who Jesus Christ is and spending a lot of time explaining his relationship to the Father, the Creed moves rapidly through his life on this earth. He becomes incarnate by the Holy Spirit and from the flesh of our Blessed Mother; He is born; and now He is crucified. We must never forget all of the things Jesus did and taught on this earth; however, the most essential and important of these actions were those that saved us. The Creed reminds us of this. We can summarize the basic tenets of our faith with four statements:

  1. God created the universe and all that is in it.
  2. After undergoing temptation from the evil one, man sinned, and all creation fell with him.
  3. God the Son entered creation, and He has saved us.
  4. In justice, we must respond generously to the saving action of God.

At this point in the Creed, we look at what Christ did to save us. First, that he did all of this “for our sake” (pro nobis). I mentioned this initially a few Sundays ago. It is incredible if you think about it. God needs nothing: He is perfectly content and fulfilled with himself. He does not need us. Still, when we turned away from him and rejected him, preferring evil things and the temptations of this world and of demons, his response was not, “good riddance!” his response was, “I will go to them, suffer for them, and die for them so that their sin might be forgiven.”

What humility! What generosity! Words cannot describe the profound depths of how amazing this love is: God has done this all for our sake, his creatures. Compared to Him, we are less than the smallest ant would be to us, but yet he loves us so deeply that he did all of this for our sake.

…he was crucified under Pontius Pilate,
(Crucifíxus étiam … sub Póntio Piláto;)

How did Christ accomplish our salvation? Unimaginable suffering. Crucifixion remains one of the most painful forms of torture ever devised. In addition to the physical pain, he also suffered the psychological and mental pain both of abandonment in the hour of his suffering and of knowing what the world could have been. In his suffering, he answered the strongest objections to God and his existence: If God is good and loves us, why does he permit suffering? The other objections to God all lead here. Even the problem of evil (Basically: If God is all good, how is there evil in the world? Did God create evil?) usually ends here, because the reason we recognize evil and despise that which is evil is because of the suffering it inflicts on its victims.

Next week, we will look at how the suffering of Christ in his Crucifixion and Death answered this objection to faith in God.