We’re making our way through my personal guided tour of the Nicene Creed, and now we’re at my favourite bit.
I know that I probably shouldn’t have a favourite bit of the Creed, but I do.
It’s this: “He came down from heaven.”
This part takes me beyond goosebumps and into a range of emotions: tears, shame, joy, speechless gratitude.
He came down from heaven.
Just let that sink into you. He. Came. Down. From. Heaven.
He didn’t have to. God could have saved us in any number of creative ways that didn’t involve him leaving home.
But he is the original Prodigal Son who took his inheritance and came down here to blow it on us—his good-time fickle friends.
I don’t think he regretted it. Of course, he wouldn’t have been fully human if there hadn’t been some wobbly moments.
But there it is. He came down from heaven—and he stayed here. He’s still here now, in your local church and at every Mass.
If I could design an altar, I’d use a marble slab of about 30cm thickness with nice straight edges.
I’d have those five words cut on the outward-facing edge of it in large letters so that they occupied the entire space.
I would want everyone to be confronted with these burning words every time they set foot inside the church: HE CAME DOWN FROM HEAVEN.
It’s the core of everything else in the Nicene Creed. It’s the core of our whole faith: creation, incarnation, redemption, revelation.
In the first creation—the one that we spoiled—God walked in the garden that he made and gave to us for our home.
Our first parents knew him face to face, and they spoke to him as to a friend. In that paradise on earth, paradise was on earth. Until it wasn’t.
So he came down from heaven. But this time, he came like a meteorite, or a javelin, or a battering ram.
The Book of Wisdom (18:15) tells us that that at midnight, the all-powerful Word leaped from the royal throne—a quote we often read in the liturgy at Christmas.
But it’s actually about the first Passover—when the Word leaped “like a relentless warrior into the midst of a land doomed to destruction.”
He came down to slay the firstborn, which was his right. It foreshadows the incarnation and our own redemption.
God’s desire to come down from heaven drives all those incursions of the Trinity into the Old Testament—like the three men under the oak tree at Mamre (Genesis 18), and the “one like a son of man” (Daniel 7).
It’s like he can’t keep away from us. And rightly so. We are meant to live with God; we are designed by him for it.
He came down from heaven as soon as he could—at the earliest and best entry point in human history.
He could have come as a conquering tyrant, or a magician who brought us antibiotics, cheap electricity, and elastic. But he didn’t.
He came down from heaven with an ordinary woman’s consent and cried when he drew his first breath.
This is a good place in the Creed to remember everything that Jesus gave up for us in his life, as well as in his death.
Jesus lived an ordinary life for 30 years, for much of that time probably bored, tired or hungry.
He came down from heaven even though it meant he would have to live in a time and place without potatoes, chocolate, tomatoes, cashew nuts, avocados, or tobacco.
“He came down from heaven.” Every sacrament we celebrate hangs off these words like a chandelier of grace.
He came down from heaven to launch the church like an ocean liner, sailing forward into the future.
When we finally reach the end of time and this spoiled earth is re-created, we will have paradise on earth again.
There will be no longer any need for him to come down from heaven, because heaven will be right here.
This is also the point in the Nicene Creed where you should begin to bow your head.
You’re about to say out loud that you believe that God himself became a human being by the power of the Holy Spirit.
I hope they do this in your parish. If they don’t, why don’t you have a word with the parish priest about reminding people at Mass to do this?
It’s such a small thing to acknowledge the most stupendous truth of them all. He came down from heaven.