Lk 22, 63-71 He replied to them, "You say that I am."

(Lk 22, 63-71) He replied to them, "You say that I am."

[63] The men who held Jesus in custody were ridiculing and beating him. [64] They blindfolded him and questioned him, saying, "Prophesy! Who is it that struck you?" [65] And they reviled him in saying many other things against him. [66] When day came the council of elders of the people met, both chief priests and scribes, and they brought him before their Sanhedrin. [67] They said, "If you are the Messiah, tell us," but he replied to them, "If I tell you, you will not believe, [68] and if I question, you will not respond. [69] But from this time on the Son of Man will be seated at the right hand of the power of God." [70] They all asked, "Are you then the Son of God?" He replied to them, "You say that I am." [71] Then they said, "What further need have we for testimony? We have heard it from his own mouth."

(CCC 272) Faith in God the Father Almighty can be put to the test by the experience of evil and suffering. God can sometimes seem to be absent and incapable of stopping evil. But in the most mysterious way God the Father has revealed his almighty power in the voluntary humiliation and Resurrection of his Son, by which he conquered evil. Christ crucified is thus "the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men" (1 Cor 1:24-25). It is in Christ's Resurrection and exaltation that the Father has shown forth "the immeasurable greatness of his power in us who believe" (Eph 1:19-22). (CCC 663) Henceforth Christ is seated at the right hand of the Father: "By 'the Father's right hand' we understand the glory and honour of divinity, where he who exists as Son of God before all ages, indeed as God, of one being with the Father, is seated bodily after he became incarnate and his flesh was glorified" (St. John Damascene, De fide orth. 4, 2: PG 94, 1104C). (CCC 250) During the first centuries the Church sought to clarify her Trinitarian faith, both to deepen her own understanding of the faith and to defend it against the errors that were deforming it. This clarification was the work of the early councils, aided by the theological work of the Church Fathers and sustained by the Christian people's sense of the faith. (CCC 251) In order to articulate the dogma of the Trinity, the Church had to develop her own terminology with the help of certain notions of philosophical origin: "substance", "person" or "hypostasis", "relation" and so on. In doing this, she did not submit the faith to human wisdom, but gave a new and unprecedented meaning to these terms, which from then on would be used to signify an ineffable mystery, "infinitely beyond all that we can humanly understand" (Paul VI, CPG § 2). (CCC 252) The Church uses (I) the term "substance" (rendered also at times by "essence" or "nature") to designate the divine being in its unity, (II) the term "person" or "hypostasis" to designate the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the real distinction among them, and (III) the term "relation" to designate the fact that their distinction lies in the relationship of each to the others.