By Nicholas Soellner
Connecting Creed and Life
Editor’s note: For 2025, the weekly Connecting Faith and Life column will be renamed Connecting Creed and Life. To celebrate the 2025 Jubilee Year and the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, the columns will consist of reflections on the Nicene Creed, corresponding with related paragraphs in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC).
“God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God” (CCC 512-534)
Say what you want about the millennial generation, we grew up in some interesting times. We’re old enough to remember when you would literally “hang up” a phone. We used phonebooks, but we also helped usher in the smartphone. We watched Saturday morning cartoons and saw TiVo give way to streaming services. In this time, we saw some of the most creative and outlandish TV commercials ever aired. Among them, one often played the iconic words, “He is … the most interesting man in the world.”
From 2006 to 2016, Dos Equis ran commercials peddling their beverage as a panacea to a boring life. Their spokesman, played by Jonathan Goldsmith, was presented as a legendary debonair, whose renown exceeded all others. His feats and traits included the following:
- Accomplished treasure hunter
- People hang on his every word
- Speaks multiple languages
- Globally well-traveled
- Extraordinarily wealthy
- Exotic pets
- Sutures his own wounds while making the medical tent staff laugh
- Frees trapped bears from bear traps
- Space mission veteran
- Adept at all major international sports
My list is not exhaustive, but 18 minutes and 42 seconds was a sufficiently long YouTube video to showcase a comprehensive compilation of all his remarkable accomplishments and characteristics. I’ll admit, while I was growing up, these commercials stirred within me a desire for ambition and renown. Looking back, I’ve heard eulogies longer than that video, for people seemingly far more ordinary. However, what of Jesus of Nazareth? John wrote, “But there are also many other things which Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (John 21:25). And yet, we know so little about him. Less than 1% of his life is known to us. But if he is to be so important in our lives, why is so much of Christ’s life a mystery?
Sections 531-534 of the “Catechism” address what we know. “During the greater part of his life Jesus shared the condition of the vast majority of human beings: a daily life spent without evident greatness, a life of manual labor. His religious life was that of a Jew obedient to the law of God, a life in the community” (CCC 531). The Scriptures reveal that Jesus was “obedient” to his parents and that he grew in wisdom and in stature, as well as favor with God and man (cf. Luke 2:51-52). Jesus’ obedience to his parents fulfills the fourth commandment to “Honor your father and mother” and foreshadows his obedience even to his death on the cross. “The obedience of Christ in the daily routine of his hidden life” was already laying the foundation for “his work of restoring what the disobedience of Adam had destroyed” (CCC 532). How little we know of Jesus is, in a sense, a blessing, because there is less to distract us from what is most important to know about him.
The mysteriousness of Jesus is twofold. First, everything revealed about Jesus reveals something about the Father. “Christ’s whole earthly life — his words and deeds, his silences and sufferings, indeed his manner of being and speaking — is Revelation of the Father.” As Jesus says: “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (CCC 516), Secondly, the mystery of Jesus prevents overfamiliarity that might devolve into irreverence. As Thomas Aquinas said, “God’s essence is not made known to us because we are not capable of comprehending it … for human nature is such that, when it has fully comprehended something, it begins to take it for granted and may lose its sense of awe … The mystery of God’s hiddenness preserves His majesty. Were His nature fully revealed, man might treat Him with contempt.” With Jesus, we lack the typical information we learn about others as we make friends and get to know one another. The mystery of Jesus’ earthly life invites us into the even more hidden mysteries of his divinity. I invite you: suspend your preconceptions about Jesus and open your Bible. I’d be willing to bet most of us don’t know Jesus as well as we think we do.