| Article I | Article II | Article III |
|---|---|---|
|
I believe in God, the Father almighty,
creator of heaven and earth. |
I believe in Jesus Christ, his only son our Lord,
He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary. He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into hell. On the third day he rose again. He ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again to judge the living and the dead. |
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen. |
The plot line is struggle of God to impress upon the creation the nature of the divine love. The subtext is, from the human situation at least, sin: we resist and revolt against and do not understand and even reject this divine love. Layered over this, again unspoken in the Creed, is the cry for justice and righteousness. And then at the center of the Creed, the heart of the story made explicit, where the drama reaches its crisis/climax: the story of Jesus Christ.
And, like theater-lovers who return again and again to performances of the great plays of Shakespeare, (knowing the plots, the outcomes, and even perhaps having memorized much of the dialog, due to long familiarity), there is the Church, the creation of the Holy Spirit, the great Memory of the Church. The church is the audience that’s finds its catharsis (the transforming power of salvation) over and over again in the retelling, the re-membering, of this story of the great acts of God. That is exactly what we will be doing as we begin Holy Week on April 8. Holy Week is the drama, the story of the Creed, acted out, dramatized, as we “re-member” the body of Christ in our liturgical gatherings, and feel, to the depths of our being, the power of salvation.