8 May 2025
"For us men and our salvation..."
Christ's Incarnation and His sacrificial Love
By Stefan Kaminski
The statements of the Nicene Symbol that we have covered thus far in our series for the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicea have focussed on the divinity of Christ. They have provided the foundations of the Christian faith by stating our belief in one God, and by explicating the equality of Father and Son as Divine Persons in that one Godhead.
Having thus firmly “anchored” Christ’s personhood in the divine realm (and thus rebutting the Arian heresy that saw Jesus Christ as created by, and therefore less than, God), the Symbol next lays out the basic elements of Christ’s Incarnation.
The Symbol opens this next part by stating in simple terms the rationale for the coming among us as man of God the Son: “for our men and for our salvation”. Everything that follows from here – “descended, was incarnate, was made man and suffered” – is taken up and finds its sole rationale in the words “for our salvation”.
In this latter part – “descended, was incarnate, was made man and suffered” – is contained a summary of the Father’s loving outreach to humanity in His only-begotten Son. In this is the great mystery of God’s love: it doesn’t end with our creation in His image, but goes beyond by taking on that created human nature onto Himself in order to redeem it.
Thus, the endpoint of the whole phrase is the word ‘suffered’, i.e. the purpose for which God the Son descends, is incarnate and made man. In this sense, we can truly say that Christ is the only person who is ‘born to die’, whose human life is for the express purpose of dying, in order to shatter the bonds of death for all of humanity.
St. Paul is clear that this suffering and death on the Cross is the full expression of Christ’s love for us: “Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God…. Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children” (Eph 5:1-2).
In his beautiful catechesis of 31st August 1998, St Pope John Paul II links this notion of a sacrificial death with our redemption as follows:
“Christ’s sacrifice has become the price and the indemnity for man’s liberation: liberation from the “slavery of sin” (cf. Rom 6:6, 17), and the passage to the “liberty of the children of God” (cf. Rom 8:21). With this sacrifice, derived from his love for us, Jesus Christ completed his salvific mission. The announcement of the whole New Testament has its most concise expression in that passage of Marks’ Gospel: “The Son of Man… came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mk 10:45).
This word “ransom” has encouraged the formation of the concept and expression “redemption.” This central truth of the new covenant is at the same time the fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophetic announcement regarding the servant of the Lord: “He was wounded for our sins…with his stripes we are healed” (Is 53:5); “He bore the sins of many” (Is 53:12). We can say that redemption was the goal of the whole old covenant.”
In the light of this trajectory of the “whole old covenant” as a preparation for Christ’s redemptive sacrifice, we more easily look back at those key moments of the Old Testament, where sacrificial offerings were made as moments of renewing that bond that God desires with His people. Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice his own son, Moses’ sprinkling of the Israelites with blood after their idolatrous worship of the Golden Calf, the annual offering of the Passover lamb… all anticipate, or prefigure, the one offering that the Son of God is sent to fulfil for the sake of “us men and for our salvation”.
