Dear Sisters, dear brethren in Christ, exactly seventeen hundred years ago and just over two thousand miles away there took place a meeting of over two hundred bishops that, despite distance of time and space, still has enormous significance for us today. For it was in June and July of the year 325 A.D. that those bishops met to discuss the faith of the Catholic Church which we hold firmly. In only a few minutes’ time we will proclaim our faith using, at least in good part, the same words that were discussed and then approved at that meeting which we call the ‘Council of Nicea’, and it was the very first of the ecumenical councils, of which there have been twenty one in all, the latest being the Second Vatican Council which met in Rome between 1963 and 1965. These twenty-one Councils are all known as ‘ecumenical’, from a Greek word meaning ‘the whole inhabited world’. Hence, an ecumenical Council is one in which bishops from all over the Catholic Church take part, and it has significance for the entire Catholic world. Such is the first Council of Nicaea whose anniversary we are now celebrating.
That council, important as it was, lasted only two months, yet it discussed and decided upon many important issues, some of which I will speak about in the coming weeks, because they still have a bearing on our life and our faith. But the most important fruit of that first Council of Nicaea of the year 325 was the promulgation or declaration of the Creed, that is the statement of belief, concerning above all the Church’s faith in Jesus as the only-begotten Son of God. Now the Creed which we will proclaim soon is, as I said, partly the same as that which the Council Fathers decreed at Nicaea, and partly as it was further developed at the next Church Council of Constantinople in 381 A.D. Now the Council of Nicaea was concerned mainly with the divine state of Jesus as the Son of God, while the first Council of Constantinople over fifty years later not only restated the faith of the Nicene Creed, but added to it an important declaration of faith in the divinity of the Holy Spirit. That Creed, the one taught by the Council of Constantinople and based on the Creed of the Council of Nicaea, is the very one in which we will proclaim our faith in God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit in a few minutes’ time. Hence it is properly called the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed.
Why was it necessary for so many bishops to be summoned to Nicaea in 325 to discuss the Catholic faith? It was because the Christian faith in God had been questioned in a most serious way by a theologian called Arius. He thought that since there is only one God, then God can only be one person – and that person is the One whom we call ‘The Father’. For Arius, then, the Son, whom we know as Jesus, was not and could not be God. Only the Father could be truly God. So what was Jesus? Was He anything more than just a man – the son of Mary? Arius thought that Jesus was indeed more than just a man, because the Church had always taught that Jesus was more than a man: He was described in the Gospels and in the New Testament as ‘Lord’, as the ‘Word of God’, and as the ‘Son of God’. But what exactly did these titles mean? All right, Jesus is of a far higher status than any man, but how high exactly? Arius had an idea. Jesus is the ‘Wisdom of God’ as we heard in today’s first reading. This Wisdom is a special person below God. Now God has no beginning. He is eternal and without change. But what happens when creation takes place? Doesn’t God change when He created the world? At the beginning of the first reading we heard something which Arius took to mean that Jesus Himself was the Wisdom of God, and that He came into existence when God the Father ‘made’ Him. So the reading said: The Lord (that is God) possessed me (that is, Wisdom) at the beginning of his work (that is, creation)…Ages ago I was set up, the first, before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth…’ Now, if Wisdom, who later became Mary’s Son whom we call Jesus, was a creature, then He could not be God like the Father. He could only be at the best the greatest of all creatures – but not true God. It was this that Catholics could not accept. Our Lord’s own words showed that He was ‘one with the Father.’
Just to take an example from today’s Gospel reading from St John, where our Lord told the Apostles: ‘all that the Father has is mine.’ What He meant by these words was made clearer in the words He spoke about the Holy Spirit: [the Spirit] ‘will glorify me, for He will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that He will take what is mine and declare it to you.’ In these and other words spoken by our Lord in the Gospels, we understand that Jesus Himself knew that He was one being with the Father by nature, and also that the Holy Spirit was the divine Spirit of God who shared in the being of God and of the knowledge of God with the Father and Jesus.
Now this understanding of Jesus’s words was not new. The Apostles had taught that Jesus was the Son of God, the Word of God, that is the expression of everything that God the Father is. They had also taught that, as we heard St Paul say in the second reading this morning: ‘God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.’ This is what we celebrated a week ago on Pentecost Sunday, and which fulfilled our Lord’s promise in the Gospel: ‘When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for He will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and he will declare it to you.’
So when the Bishops met at Nicaea they discussed Arius’s theory that Jesus was not God, but only the greatest of all creatures, and that only the Father was God. They knew that this was not what Jesus had taught the Apostles, and not what the Apostles had written about Jesus. Nor was this only in the readings we have heard today. Our Lord had told the Apostles at His Ascension: ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit…’ So it was that from the very beginning of the era of the Church after Pentecost Sunday, the Apostles obeyed the Lord’s command to preach and baptize in the name of the Father and Son and Holy Spirit who are One God. It is that faith which the Fathers of Nicaea professeed when they proclaimed that Jesus is ‘the only begotten Son of God’ not born in time, but eternally, for there never was any moment before He existed, but He always has been, as we say: ‘God from God, light from light, true God from true God;’ then we acknowledge that although He is Son, this does not mean that He comes into being after His Father, as a human son does, but that the Father is never without His only-begotten Son. Then, contrary to Arius, we state that when we call Jesus ‘only-begotten Son’ we mean that He is not made, He is not created. There was no time when He did not already exist totally as God. Again, against Arius, who said that Jesus was a creature and made out of some substance other than the Father’s, the Council Fathers proclaimed that Jesus as God is of the same substance as the Father, which is in Latin ‘consubstantial’ with the Father.
But of course, the Church did not believe that only the Father and the Son shared the same substance, the same divine nature, but so does the Holy Spirit, which is why we say that the Spirit is adored and glorified with the Father and the Son. It would after all be idolatry to worship as God any being that is not God. So, for instance, we honour Mary with unequalled honour among all the angels and saints, but we do not worship her as God. However, this we most certainly do regarding the Holy Spirit. He is ‘the Lord and giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, meaning that He exists in the identical divine nature as the Father and the Son. And so it is that we believe, not in three gods, but in One God, and that this One God has made Himself known to us both in one infinite divine nature or substance, and in three co-equal persons sharing this divine nature – none of them being any more divine than the others.
From this faith, the faith of the Fathers of Nicea and Constantinople, we have a wonderful statement in the Mass of Trinity Sunday, in the Preface which we will hear shortly: ‘It is truly right and just…always and everywhere to give you thanks, Lord, holy Father, almighty and eternal God. For with your only Begotten Son and the Holy Spirit you are one God, one Lord: not in the unity of a single person, but in a Trinity of one substance. For what you have revealed to us of your glory we believe equally of your Son and of the Holy Spirit, so that, in the confessing of the true and eternal Godhead, , you might be adored in what is proper to each Person, their unity in substance, and their equality in majesty.’
This is the wonderful and adorable mystery of faith which we both proclaim and worship on this joyful feast. We rejoice that God has so loved us as to share with us the inner mystery of his love and of His essence. May He grant that we all come to know, love and rejoice in this glorious mystery together with our Lady and all the angels and saints for all eternity to come. Amen.
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