The Father and the Son are not the same Person. They are distinct. When we say Jesus is God we are not saying God and Jesus are identical. It is like saying John is human. We are not saying that John’s identity is human. Human is his nature. But, John is not himself identical with humanity, since he is only one human. Likewise we are saying Jesus has a divine nature. And really it is the Trinity that is identical with God. Jesus is a part of that Trinity. But, by himself is not identical to it. So saying Jesus is God describes his nature,** not his identity.**
Why do you make such a distinction?
**262 **The Incarnation of God’s Son reveals that God is the eternal Father and that the Son is consubstantial with the Father, which means that, in the Father and with the Father
the Son is one and the same God.
430 Jesus means in Hebrew: “
God saves.” At the annunciation, the angel Gabriel gave him the name Jesus as his proper name, which expresses both his identity and his mission. Since God alone can forgive sins, it is God who, in Jesus his eternal Son made man, “will save his people from their sins”. In Jesus, God recapitulates all of his history of salvation on behalf of men.
**464 **The unique and altogether singular event of
the Incarnation of the Son of God does not mean that Jesus Christ is part God and part man, nor does it imply that he is the result of a confused mixture of the divine and the human.
He became truly man while remaining truly God. Jesus Christ is true God and true man.
During the first centuries, the Church had to defend and clarify this truth of faith against the heresies that falsified it.
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**470 **Because “
human nature was assumed, not absorbed”, in the mysterious union of the Incarnation, the Church was led over the course of centuries to confess the full reality of Christ’s human soul, with its operations of intellect and will, and of his human body. In parallel fashion, she had to recall on each occasion that
Christ’s human nature belongs, as his own, to the divine person of the Son of God, who assumed it.
Everything that Christ is and does in this nature derives from “one of the Trinity”. The Son of God therefore communicates to his humanity his own personal mode of existence in the Trinity. In his soul as in his body, Christ thus expresses humanly the divine ways of the Trinity:
The Son of God. . . worked with human hands; he thought with a human mind. He acted with a human will, and with a human heart he loved. Born of the Virgin Mary, he has truly been made one of us, like to us in all things except sin.
