In Matthew 11, John the Baptist sends messengers to Jesus to ask: "Are you the one who is to come or are we to wait for another?" And Jesus sends word back: "Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them." The prophecies in Isaiah 35:4-6 and 61:1 are being fulfilled. Jesus is the Christ.
Our Creed passes over this part of Jesus' ministry completely. "For us and our salvation", Jesus came down, became flesh and blood, was crucified, rose and ascended - not a word about preaching or healing. And the Creed is in good company - when Paul summarizes his message for the Corinthians (I Cor 15:3-8), there is no mention of parables or of miracles.
The reason is simple. If you read Mark's Gospel, with its straightforward and to-the-point account of Jesus' work, every action foreshadows and every word foretells the new life with God in glory. John's Gospel is even more explicit - the miracles are not conjuring tricks, but "signs" of this new life.
So the Creed passes from Jesus' coming straight on to his death: for our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, he suffered death and was buried. The modern translation brings out more clearly the two different prepositions translated as "for" in the 1662 version - he came from heaven for us, because we needed saving. He was crucified for us, on our account, to help us.
We should not try to read too much into this, though. Christ died for us, but we are unwise to picture this in one single logical sequence of events. The Bible is rich in images. Jesus "redeemed" us (Rom 3:24), but if someone redeemed a slave, they paid the slave's worth over to the owner. He "ransomed" us (Mt 20:28). He "conquered" death, sin and the world (Gal 6:14, 1 Cor 15:57). Like the lamb of the Passover, he has been "sacrificed" (Eph 5:2, Heb 9:23) to "take away the sin of the world" (John 1:29). He has "shared our sorrows", "borne our sins" - or, in a phrase, has been crucified at a point where God's mercy meets our sinfulness.
It is important that this happened within historical time. Pontius Pilate is mentioned not to blame him for Jesus' death (and it is important to note that nobody is blamed for it - not the High Priest, not the people, not the Roman authorities), but to fix the event in time, "some time between 26 and 37 AD".
And the Creed stresses that Jesus "was buried". Not only did he "suffer death" (and this is not at all the same as accepting death gladly!), but it was a normal death, the sort that leads on to a burial, something perhaps even more decisive than death itself.
An older creed, the "Apostles'" Creed, adds that Jesus "descended to the dead" ("to the lower regions"). We may have different ideas about what happens to the dead, and Mat 27:52 or 1 Pet 3:19 are not a lot of help. Our Nicene Creed brings us back to essentials - what matters is not what happened between Friday afternoon and Saturday night, but what took place on Sunday morning. And that we shall see next month.
HD