Who is “he”?

I connected a couple of dots a couple of Sundays ago; at least I think I did.  It was during the saying of the Creed at one of the morning services. At the words ‘on the third day He rose again’ I had a new thought, perhaps heretical, perhaps the essence of some truth that it has taken me seventy-seven years to see, I don’t know.  I’ve always understood this “he” to be the physical Jesus, and I’ve always had difficulty grasping how that could happen.  But then, for the first time, I thought back to the words a few phrases earlier “he came down from heaven … and was made man/”  Is the “he” who rose from the dead, the same “he” that existed before Jesus, existed from the beginning of time, and became Jesus for a few years on earth,  the same as the “Word” to which John refers in his Gospel that existed “in the beginning” and “became flesh and dwelt among us?”

I’ll be thinking on this for a while.

Ron Hicks, Parish Verger, St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, Washington DC, 17-November-2015.