By Emily Mendez
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).
“I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God” (cf. CCC 422-440).
Nothing is more central to our Catholic faith than the Good News that God has sent his Son, Jesus. We are transitioning from the first section of the Creed which focuses on the Father to the second section which focuses on the Son. The name “Jesus,” given by the Angel Gabriel at the Annunciation, means “God saves” in Hebrew and shows both Jesus’ identity and mission (CCC 430). In Jesus, God saves, but what is he saving us from? Definitively from sin and death, but what does it mean?
When I was 18 years old, my father died very suddenly, and in my grief, I started spending quiet hours in the adoration chapel. A bit mad, but mostly just sad and heartbroken, I sat in the presence of Jesus in the Eucharist and I experienced what Jesus promised in his sermon on the mount, “Blessed are they who mourn, for they will be comforted” (Matthew 5:4). I was comforted by being drawn more deeply into the heart of Jesus. The “blessing” of the mourning was being drawn to knowing Jesus himself and his love more deeply.
Grief never goes away, but Jesus sat with me in the depths of it and helped me to bear reality. He saved me from despair and from the dark alleys where people turn when life feels like too much. Jesus gave me hope for the future: Both that my father is in heaven and we will meet there again, but also hope for my life now that God has purposes and plans that are for my good. I changed and wanted to know what God’s plans were, instead of the path I had been on.
Because of what they had experienced, “… the first disciples burned with the desire to proclaim Christ: ‘We cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard” (CCC 425). I felt this way, too. Why? Because God saves and he saved me. I had an undeniable strength in my most broken time, and I wanted others to know this strength, too.
By having fellowship with Jesus and with one another, the disciples’ lives were changed. They were saved from their sins, but also from despair, from selfishness, from doubt, from fear, from loneliness, from anxiety, from guilt, from shame, from hopelessness, from feeling lost in life and on and on. What was it all replaced with? Joy!
“They invite people of every era to enter into the joy of their communion with Christ” (CCC 425).
This is Good News! These are “the unsearchable riches of Christ” (CCC424). This is the foundation of evangelization and catechesis and discipleship. Jesus is God, the Christ, the anointed one that fulfills the divine mission “… to inaugurate his kingdom definitively” (CCC 436). A kingdom with no end!
The beauty is Jesus does not just do this once in our lives and that’s it. He continues saving us day after day. What do you need God to save you from today?