Significance of Jesus' Death, Resurrection, and Trinity in Christian Faith, Lecture notes of Christianity

Download Significance of Jesus' Death, Resurrection, and Trinity in Christian Faith and more Lecture notes Christianity in PDF only on Docsity! St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church Exploring Confirmation & Christianity 101 Week One 
 1 Thinking about Christian faith From the beginning, Christians have tried to explain the significance of what happened with Jesus in the language of their own place and time. For example, two thousand years ago people offered animal sacrifices all the time, and so they understood exactly what it meant when a Christian would say, “Jesus’ death is a sacrifice for your sins.” Over time, however, old ways of explaining the the gospel message become more difficult to understand, and Christians must work to understand the old explanations and seek new ones for their own day. Thus, while calling Jesus’ death a sacrifice readily made sense long ago, calling Jesus’ death a sacrifice today requires some explanation. “Theology,” which means “talk about God,” is the practice of thinking about sentences like “Jesus died for your sins,” and trying to make sense of them so we understand why they matter for our lives and for our world. The first week of Exploring Confirmation and Christianity 101 is about what it means for us each to be “theologians,” people who think and talk about God. We will discuss what it means to do Christian theology, and how the good news of Jesus’ death and resurrection sets us on our journey. A thought, a question, 
 a challenge Thought When we look over our lives, we generally remember where we have come from and how we got to where we are now. In so doing, we can tell the “story” of our lives, and explain what the “story” is about. Similarly, the gospel claims to tell us, not just the story of our individual lives, but the overarching story that we are all living together. The gospel claims that the story of all creation is that God has come to dwell with creatures, and that sin and death are passing away because love and life have the last word. The gospel says that we all live within the great mystery of Jesus’ death, resurrection, and future. Question One way to state the meaning of Jesus’ death and resurrection is to say that Jesus loved other people to the point of getting killed for it, but that because God has raised him from the dead, there is now nothing that can stop him from loving us. Therefore, Jesus’ love will have the last word on you and on every person. Can you think of any other ways to explain the significance of Jesus’ death and resurrection? Challenge Our world is dominated by forces of violence and death. However, Jesus’ resurrection says that violence and death do not have the last word. The resurrection says that the world we hope for will not be achieved by violence and killing or any other form of injustice. As you think about your community and society over the next few weeks, think about how the message that death does not have the last word might transform each situation. Think about how the message that Jesus lives can free your world to be truly different—more loving, more just, more free. Depiction by Duccio di Buoninsegna of the risen Jesus appearing to his disciples while they are at table. 
This week’s Scripture: John 1:1-18 Each week of Exploring Confirmation & Christianity 101 will have a brief look at a passage from the Gospel of John, which will be thematically related to the week’s topic. Painting of Saint John the Evangelist by Paolo Veronese. St. John is often seen with a an eagle or symbol of an eagle. The other three evangelists each have symbols. The four symbols—eagle, ox, lion, man—are taken from the apocalyptic imagery of Ezekiel 1:5-10 and Revelation 4:6-7. 1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being 4 in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. 6 There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. 7 He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. 8 He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. 9 The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. 10 He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. 11 He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. 12 But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, 13 who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. 14 And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. 15 (John testified to him and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’ ”) 16 From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. 17 The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. 18 No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known. A “Gospel” is not a biography of Jesus, but a narrative telling of the good news about Jesus, that he lived faithfully to God to the point of death, and that God raised him from that death to which he faithfulness brought him. The Gospels in our New Testament were written several decades after Jesus’ death and resurrection. For the first several years after Jesus was raised, there was no need for Gospels because those who knew him were still alive. But as the apostles traveled into the Roman Empire, they encountered people who did not know who Jesus was, and so had to tell stories about him so that their hearers would understand the gospel. As the apostles aged and began to die or were killed for their faith, the stories they told about Jesus were collected, written down, and edited into the Gospels. The names of the Gospels do not name the individual author of each book, but rather name the apostle whose account the book contains. The prologue of John’s Gospel (1:1-18) is one of the most famous passages of all of Scripture. One reason for its popularity is that it so succinctly summarizes the Church’s faith. “Theology,” we said, is talk about God. But if theology is talk about God, then it might well be that theology is impossible. How, after all, does anyone know what to say about God? How do we distinguish between accurate and inaccurate statements about God? All talk about God, if it isn’t just the product of our imaginations (what the Bible calls “idolatry”), presupposes that God has first spoken to us—that God is the kind of God who communicates and wants to be known by us. John’s Gospel begins with this bold announcement: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (v. 1) That is, from the beginning God has been communicating, and he has been communicating his very self. And the first instance of God’s self-communication to us is his gracious decision to create us: “All things came into being through him” (v. 3) Also, you might have noticed that “In the beginning” sounds familiar; it’s also the opening words of the first book of the Bible, Genesis, which says that “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” (Gen. 1:1) and goes on to describe that God created by speaking. Consistently, the Bible portrays God as one who intends to be known by his creatures. However, God’s self-communication, his very Word, is not just verbal speech. God’s Word is a person “who became flesh and lived among us” (v. 14), Jesus. Identifying Jesus as God’s Word means more than saying that Jesus’ words were God’s words; more significantly, it means that everything that happened in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection is God communicating himself. The very person Jesus is God talking to us. God’s Word to us in Jesus was promised from the beginning of creation and in Israel’s Scriptures, the Old Testament. Because creatures turned against God, we are resistant to hearing God’s Word; as John writes, “His own people did not accept him” (v. 11). Throughout his activity with his people Israel, God sent messengers to teach right living and to promise the coming of God’s Word. One messenger was John the baptizer, who was a “witness to testify to the light” (v. 7). But more than John, all of Scripture anticipated Jesus: “The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (v. 17). The Scriptures tell us about God and God’s will, but if we want to know God, we must look to Jesus, because he is “God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known” (v. 18).