So a division occurred in the crowd because of him.
Some of them even wanted to arrest him,
but no one laid hands on him.
Since the dawn of Christianity there have been controversy and division over the meaning of the person who stands at the center of the Christian faith – Jesus Christ. One of the early heresies of the Church argued that Jesus, as good and wonderful as he was, was merely a human being. On the other hand, an equally pernicious heresy of the time said that while Jesus may have ‘appeared’ to be human in the scriptures, he was completely God with no trace of humanity.
The orthodox teaching of the Church that emerged in the foundational creedal formulas that we hold to, to this day, unambiguously stated that Jesus was and is, ‘true God and true man’ in a union with his Father that – and here we borrow a venerable Greek word that was then translated into Latin, ‘consubstantial.’
As controversies raged down through the centuries over the true identity of Christ, ultimately, each one of us at some moment in our life must respond to that question posed to by Jesus himself to his followers, “And you, who do you say that I am?”
As Easter nears, may these days of Lent, daily deepen our conviction so that we can say with Peter, “You are the Christ, the son of the living God.”