Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C (2025) - Fr Mannes Tellis, OP

Often, I take walks around the city, and I am amazed at the amount of Jehovah’s Witnesses that camp around the place. Even when I was in Rome they seemed everywhere especially where there were a lot of tourists.

One of their mistaken claims is that Jesus is not God. Thus, they also reject the Trinity and a whole lot of other orthodox Christian positions.

So, one may ask, Why bother trying to prove the divinity of Christ? As a Catholic one must believe it, it is an assumed cornerstone doctrine of the Church. In fact, if one did not believe it most of the Church’s teachings would collapse like a pack of cards.

How is Jesus God? To state our thesis, we must turn to the scriptures as human reason cannot attain this concept on its own. Our reading from St Paul’s letter to the Colossians is one of those texts which go to stating something about Jesus’ divinity.

Christ Jesus is the image of the unseen God and the first-born of all creation, for in him were created all things in heaven and on earth: everything visible and everything invisible,

The passage starts off with this claim, that Jesus is the image of the unseen God. Ok, but human beings are made in God’s image and likeness too, so what? The rest of the passage however fills us in on who Jesus is though when it states:

for in him were created all things in heaven and on earth: everything visible and everything invisible,

Now only God can create, no other creature has the capacity to create all things in heaven and earth. So this is our first clue that Jesus along with the Father are eternal God.

Similarly, the phrase:

Before anything was created, he existed, and he holds all things in unity.

Points to the pre-existence of Jesus as God the Son. This phrase likewise puts pay to the argument of our JW friends that Jesus is a creature of God. How so if “Before anything was created, he existed,”. Either Jesus is created and therefore not before anything was created, which is a contradiction both logically and in the scriptural verse itself, or Jesus is God with the Father.

Furthermore, Paul ascribes the unity, or holding in being, of all reality to this Christ Jesus. This power classically is only ever ascribed to God, who, as Necessary Being, not only has the concept of a thing as an idea in the divine mind but also has the capacity to grant existence to whatever is and not only granting it existence but always sustaining it.

Moreover, Paul outlines the “incarnational” work of Jesus. First, that he founded the Church, a gathering of believers who form spiritually his body on earth. So, Paul is claiming that the gathering of all the baptised into the Church is not just the creation of a man but the creation of God himself. The Church belongs to God and all the baptised participate in this divine society.

As an adjunct to the development of this divine society, wherein one finds relationship with God we see Paul further assert that Jesus, God made flesh, died on the Cross:

because God wanted all perfection to be found in him and all things to be reconciled through him and for him, everything in heaven and everything on earth, when he made peace by his death on the cross.

This final point in the Pauline theological manifesto notes that creation, through the primordial fall, had become dissociated from God.

More clearly human beings had lapsed from true relationship with their Creator. Shrouded in that mysterious state of Original Sin humanity had lost its destiny which was always a sharing in God’s own life, and it is the possibility of resuming this relationship that sees God take flesh and suffer for all humanity. Taking every form of evil upon himself and demonstrating God’s love as expiatory, Christ Jesus , this God-man, removes the debt which humanity incurred with its disobedience thus rendering humanity potentially debt free, the curse of eternal punishment lifted and thus as Paul writes he made peace by his death on the cross.

As we meditate on this profound mystery set forth by St Paul in his letter to the Colossians let us be mindful that emptying Christ of his divinity leaves humanity in the same state of sin as before. It is only by the embracing of flesh of a God-man that the infinite offence rendered to God by humanity’s disobedience, selfishness, and ingratitude, can be overcome.

No creature however perfect could offer a perfect apology to God, only God could do this by uniting himself with a human reality so that truly humanity would have peace through Christ’s death on the cross.

Fr Mannes Tellis, OP is the Parish Priest of Prospect-North Adelaide, South Australia.