Father Toninho stressed the indissolubility among human and divine natures of Jesus Christ. Catholic live actually the time of Advent which is a preparation for Christmas. The celebrates the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ, one of the mysteries of the Christian faith, that has Jesus as Son of God, sent by the Father to save humanity. This is a belief that Catholics profess in the Creed, prayer that can be meditated upon in this special Year of Faith, as a form of understanding the Catholic faith better.

Being one of the persons of the Holy Trinity, Christ is called by Catholics as Lord. Father Antônio Justino Filho, ‘Padre Toninho’ of the Canção Nova Community, explained that this should be the primary fact of Jesus being the Son of God the Father. Beyond this, he lived among human as the face of God that until then no one had seen.

“The person of Our Lord Jesus Christ is the visible image of the invisible God (…) therefore, He is the Lord, because He resurrected and being Lord He has this title of Kyrios: Lord”.

This way of referring to Jesus has a special significance for Christians. “The Youcat, recent version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church for youth, explains that to say that Jesus is the Lord, implies the fact that a Christian should not submit to any other power. The Christians know the power of Jesus not only through the prophesies that announced the coming of the Son of God, but through all the miracles He did.

The faithful recognize in Jesus a divinity, God and Human at the same time, for he was made man among men. How much of this Padre Toninho reminded that the divine and human natures of Christ do not overlap, or better still, one is not better than the other. “He is not more God nor more human (…) The divinity and the humanity of Jesus are not separate, therefore, He is true God and true man”.

And when he is made man among men, Jesus called 12 apostles to follow his mission of spreading the Word of God on the Earth. But the call does not stop there. From there these 12 persons the Church called others to be apostles of the Church. An example of this, according to Father Toninho, they are the bishops.

“The bishops are the successors of the apostles and in this apostolic succession, the apostolic tradition goes being passed from generation to generation inside the life of the Church. Then today, the call to live apostolic way is where we are called in the Church, it is for all the baptized, but in a special way for those that have the call to be bishops.”

But, finally, what changed  in the world from the coming of Christ? Padre Toninho reminded that many things changed. The point stressed by him was the great evangelizing impulse that the missionary disciples had after the coming of Christ, whose words contained in the Gospel exhorted to preach the Good News to all creatures.

“If today we have this presence of  the Church in various places of the world, it should be this: after the death and resurrection of Jesus, the disciples were led to go out on mission. Then I see this great news of the Resurrection of Jesus: The world that began to know the Word of God”.

translated from Portuguese