God has sent his Son

God has visited his people. He has fulfilled the promise he made to Abraham and his descendants. He acted far beyond all expectation – he has sent his own ‘beloved Son’. We believe and confess that Jesus is the eternal Son of God made man. For ‘the Word became flesh and dwelt among us’, full of grace and truth.

The transmission of the Christian faith consists primarily in proclaiming Jesus Christ to lead others to faith in him. From the beginning, the first disciples burned with the desire to proclaim Christ,  It and they invite people of every era to enter the joy of their communion with Christ. To catechise is to reveal in the Person of Christ. Only he can lead us to the love of the Father in the Spirit and make us share in the life of the Holy Trinity.

The name

Jesus means in Hebrew: ‘God saves’. At the annunciation, the angel Gabriel gave him the name Jesus as his proper name, which expresses both his identity and his mission. in Jesus, God recapitulates all of his history of salvation on behalf of men. It is the divine name that alone brings salvation.

Jesus’ Resurrection glorifies the name of the Saviour God, for from that time on it is the name of Jesus that fully manifests the supreme power of the “name which is above every name” – it is at heart of Christian prayer. The evil spirits fear his name; in his name his disciples perform miracles, for the Father grants all they ask in this name.

The word ‘Christ’ comes from the Greek translation of the Hebrew Messiah, which means ‘anointed’. It became the name proper to Jesus only because he accomplished perfectly the divine mission that ‘Christ’ signifies. The name ‘Christ’ implies ‘he who anointed’, ‘he who was anointed’ and ‘the very anointing with which he was anointed’.

Son of God

In the Old Testament, ‘son of God’ is a title given to the angels, the Chosen People, the children of Israel, and their kings. It signifies an adoptive sonship that establishes a relationship of particular intimacy between God and his creature. When Jesus is called ‘son of God’, it does not necessarily imply that he was more than human.

Jesus referred to himself as ‘the Son’ who knows the Father, as distinct from the ‘servants’ God had earlier sent to his people. Jesus calls himself the ‘only Son of God’, and by this title affirms his eternal pre-existence.

After his Resurrection, Jesus’ divine sonship becomes manifest in the power of his glorified humanity. He was “designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his Resurrection from the dead”. The apostles can confess: “We have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”