Important Question, please help me understand!

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tar39

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If God does not suffer, if God is eternal, and if God does not change, why we can still say “Mary is the Mother of God” and that “God suffers and dies on the Cross.” What principle is involved???

Thanks…
 
We do not say that God dies on the cross, but that Jesus who is truly man as well as truly God, dies on the cross. Jesus does not die in His godliness, but in His humanity.
Mary is Mother of Jesus who is God as well as man. She is the mother of His humanity.
 
Trishie said:
We do not say that God dies on the cross, but that Jesus who is truly man as well as truly God, dies on the cross. Jesus does not die in His godliness, but in His humanity.
Mary is Mother of Jesus who is God as well as man. She is the mother of His humanity.
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We say Mary is the Mother of God. Jesus is one person with two natures. Mary is His mother, The Church says Mary is mother of God. That is a title. While He took His human nature from her, we do not say she is the mother of His humanity. That is not her title. She is the mother of a person, the God-man. She gave birth to this person.

A mother is not the mother of a nature. She is mother of a person.

The Incarnation is the greatest mystery of faith. A mystery is something our finite intellects can not fully understand. There are many things like this. What is love? Why do we feel it sometimes and not others? We say the soul is the life of the body. We can be present when someone dies. They are alive one minute and gone the next. The soul leaves the body and they are gone. How it happens is a mystery.

How God could be God the Supreme Being, Infinite, without beginning or end, and enter His creation and become man as a few cells in a woman’s womb is a mystery. He who can not be contained is contained in a woman, a living tabernacle.

Why God would save us is not a mystery. He loves us and pities us. The mystery is the way He chose to save us. He is all powerful. His word spoke all that exists into existance. He only has to say the word and His will is done. Why would God become one of us, take on our nature and allow His creatures to torture Him to death?

He is showing us something about Himself that He wants us to know. We say He died for our sins. It is personal. He died for your sins and mine. That means I am the one who tortured Him to death. My sins killed Him and left Him dead in His mothers arms. The Jews and Roman soldiers were my agents.

They drove the nails, but my sins caused it.

We think of God as all powerful and invincible. I am a puny nothing. How could my sins, the evil I do, hurt this being of infinite majesty and power?

He shows us by becoming Incarnate and dying on the cross. The message is, see what your sins do to me. This is how much it hurts me to see my beloved creatures do evil, to murder, to rape, to lie and steal from one another, to hate.

His will is that we repent of the evil we do and be saved by His mercy. His will is that we repent of the evil we do and learn to love as He made us to love.

We can not see God. He became one of us so we could see Him and hear Him, and we murdered Him in our evil. He did this in hopes that when we realize what our sins do to Him we would repent and turn from evil.

After the Annunciation/Incarnation, the second greatest mystery is the Ascension. He did not leave His human nature behind. He is fully God and fully man eternally. He took His body with Him to heaven. How can that be? He still has feet and hands of flesh and they bear the marks of His Passion. He still has a heart and it beats. And He feeds us with His flesh, the bread of life.

We believe all these things and they are mysteries.
 
Actually it happens also to man.
Man, as composite of body and soul, dies. But death is not the same as ceasing to exists. While a person dies, the person is continue to exist and live on.

Death means the separation of the soul from the body.

If this is true of man, it is easy to understand what happened with Jesus.

It is the same what happened at incarnation: God became man and enter creation, yet at the same time by doing so, he never vacated heaven. He never leave his throne.
 
tar39 said:
If God does not suffer, if God is eternal, and if God does not change, why we can still say “Mary is the Mother of God” and that “God suffers and dies on the Cross.” What principle is involved???

Thanks…
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The principle is called the hypostatic union. See newadvent.org/cathen/07610b.htm

Christ exits as one person with two distinct natures however these two natures are united in one person.

What follows then is when Jesus is born, He has both a human and divine nature therefore He is God at the moment of His birth. Since Mary gave birth to Jesus and Jesus is God, it is proper to say that Mary is the Mother of God. If she is not, what is she? The mother of the human Jesus? Cannot be, since you cannot separate the divine nature of Jesus from the human nature.

In the same way, although it does not sound logical, it is in fact proper to say that God dies on the Cross, since again we cannot separate Jesus’ human and divine natures.
 
Trishie said:
Mary is Mother of Jesus who is God as well as man. She is the mother of His humanity.
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No she is the mother of His whole person, she is His mother, period.

To answer the original question: the answer is the hypostatic union, the union of the Divine and Human natures in the God-man, Jesus Christ. TheDoctor is right.
 
tar39 said:
If God does not suffer, if God is eternal, and if God does not change, why we can still say “Mary is the Mother of God” and that “God suffers and dies on the Cross.” What principle is involved??..
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Hello,

You might benefit from this article on the so-called “communication of idioms.” You could probably find something more accessible, somewhere, but this article is surely correct…even if it is difficult to follow.

newadvent.org/cathen/04169a.htm

Dan
 
Trishie said:
We do not say that God dies on the cross, but that Jesus who is truly man as well as truly God, dies on the cross. Jesus does not die in His godliness, but in His humanity.
Mary is Mother of Jesus who is God as well as man. She is the mother of His humanity.
Click to expand...
That is wrong. We can say that God died on the cross. That is based on the same principle that allows us to call Mary the Theotokos. If you were to say that God did not die you would be denying the hypostatic union. On top of that we cannot interchange the concept of person with the one of nature.
 
Alfonsus said:
Actually it happens also to man.
Man, as composite of body and soul, dies. But death is not the same as ceasing to exists. While a person dies, the person is continue to exist and live on.

Death means the separation of the soul from the body.

If this is true of man, it is easy to understand what happened with Jesus.

It is the same what happened at incarnation: God became man and enter creation, yet at the same time by doing so, he never vacated heaven. He never leave his throne.
Click to expand...
I don’t think you understand. What happens to you and all the others we know is not at all the same as what happened to Jesus. First, He rose from the dead bodily. He appeared to many and they touched Him. Thomaas probed the wounds in His side and hands. Who else do you know that rose from the dead. Then He ascended in His body to heaven, the place where spirits dwell. He did not leave His body behind. His bones are not here. When you die your soul will indeed live on, and it will be reunited with your body at the general resurrection of the dead. That is nothing at all like what happened with Jesus.

If you think this is all easy to understand either you haven’t given it much thought or have an intellect superior to all the theologians who ever existed. These are called mysteries, beyond our capacity to understand, for a reason. We try to explain them, but can’t completely. How the being who brought everything that exists into existance, is greater than all that exists, all the vast galaxies, angels, men, who said heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool could be contained in the womb of a virgin, as a few cells, and the body of a man is incomprehensible, but we believe it. It is our faith.

Jesus said to His apostles, “There is much I would like to tell you, but you can not bear it yet”. Get it! We don’t get it and even Jesus can’t explain it to us, because our minds are finite and can only comprehend finite things. We can not hold the infinite in our limited intellects.
 
1ke said:
No, she is the mother of the Person, Jesus, not his “humanity”.
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Interesting idea just presented itself.

She is the Mother of Jesus the person, not His humanity, but she is the our mother. We are humanity. She is the second Eve, the mother of humanity.
 
grandfather said:
I don’t think you understand. What happens to you and all the others we know is not at all the same as what happened to Jesus. First, He rose from the dead bodily. He appeared to many and they touched Him. Thomaas probed the wounds in His side and hands. Who else do you know that rose from the dead. Then He ascended in His body to heaven, the place where spirits dwell. He did not leave His body behind. His bones are not here. When you die your soul will indeed live on, and it will be reunited with your body at the general resurrection of the dead. That is nothing at all like what happened with Jesus.

If you think this is all easy to understand either you haven’t given it much thought or have an intellect superior to all the theologians who ever existed. These are called mysteries, beyond our capacity to understand, for a reason. We try to explain them, but can’t completely. How the being who brought everything that exists into existance, is greater than all that exists, all the vast galaxies, angels, men, who said heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool could be contained in the womb of a virgin, as a few cells, and the body of a man is incomprehensible, but we believe it. It is our faith.

Jesus said to His apostles, “There is much I would like to tell you, but you can not bear it yet”. Get it! We don’t get it and even Jesus can’t explain it to us, because our minds are finite and can only comprehend finite things. We can not hold the infinite in our limited intellects.
Click to expand...
I think you push my answer to a point I never intended.
I only want to underscore the notion that death does not equal being perish out of existence.

If by death, we perish from existence, and by that we say that Jesus died, we have a big problem: how can God perish?

But if by death, we content with definition of separation of soul from body, then it is basically not a problem.
If even a human person still on living after death, it is more so when talking about God who in the beginning is spirit, and always and is exist.

So, back to the inquirer question: what is your definition of death?
 
Alfonsus said:
I think you push my answer to a point I never intended.
I only want to underscore the notion that death does not equal being perish out of existence.

If by death, we perish from existence, and by that we say that Jesus died, we have a big problem: how can God perish?

But if by death, we content with definition of separation of soul from body, then it is basically not a problem.
If even a human person still on living after death, it is more so when talking about God who in the beginning is spirit, and always and is exist.

So, back to the inquirer question: what is your definition of death?
Click to expand...
For us it is the separation of the soul from the body. Having not experienced it that is all we can say. Actually, I have come very close. Definitions don’t help us to know what a thing is. Only experience can do that. We can know intellectually about a thing, but that is not the same as knowing it.

Sorry I misinterpreted your post.
 
Alfonsus said:
I think you push my answer to a point I never intended.
I only want to underscore the notion that death does not equal being perish out of existence.

If by death, we perish from existence, and by that we say that Jesus died, we have a big problem: how can God perish?

But if by death, we content with definition of separation of soul from body, then it is basically not a problem.
If even a human person still on living after death, it is more so when talking about God who in the beginning is spirit, and always and is exist.

So, back to the inquirer question: what is your definition of death?
Click to expand...
You’re correct as far as I know.

Just wanted to point out that death, separation of soul and body is still a “problem” – it’s a horrible thing contrary to how God created us, body and soul. The Resurrection is a promise to fix this problem. Our Lord’s bodily Ascension and Our Lady’s Assumptions are signs for us of this reality and this promise :-).

Not saying you would disagree, just something I wanted to add.
 
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