Listening to a mass setting a while back, one by Orlando di Lasso, and it occurred to me that there is a word notably missing from every one of the official Christian creeds that I knew of, a word that was central to the one and only creed Jesus is recorded as having endorsed, the Jewish Shema Yisrael, the word "love". That God is one, that we are to love God with all of our heart, mind, strength and soul, and to love others as you love yourself. That last part is an abbreviation in the manner of Hillel saying to follow The Law. With the constantly given commandments of Jesus to love, you'd think that any Christian credo would at least mention the idea, but it's not in any of the various ones that spring to my mind.
The exception to that among Christian creeds that I've read - I haven't read them all - is the Maasai Creed from the Congregation of the Holy Ghost* in east Nigeria in the early 1960s that Jaroslav Pelikan wrote about in his book about Creeds,
We believe in one high God, who out of love created the beautiful world. We believe that God made good His promise by sending His Son, Jesus Christ, a man in the flesh, a Jew by tribe, born poor in a little village, who left His home and was always on safari doing good, curing people by the power of God, teaching about God and man, and showing that the meaning of religion is love. He was rejected by His people, tortured and nailed, hands and feet to a cross, and died. He lay buried in the grave, but the hyenas did not touch Him, and on the third day He rose from the grave.
As Pelikan noted in an old interview that Krista Tippet did with him, the official creeds of Eastern and Western Christianity generally go from the birth narrative to the death narrative and totally ignore the public life of Jesus in which he preached, among other things, that the two great things to believe and practice were the Shema and the commandment to love other people. You have to wonder what the history of Christianity in Europe and elsewhere would have been like if the contents of the Maasai creed had been recited at every Mass and every Divine Liturgy instead of the ones which are mostly assertions against theological theories common in the early centuries after Christianity gained official status with secular governments at the insistence of uniformity by the secular rulers and with the force of arms of some pretty ruthless emperors and Bishops with a share of that secular power.
* I don't know what, if any, connection it has with the European Congregation of the Holy Spirit but if it had any, I have to say I can't imagine such a Creed coming out of that group.
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