The following excerpt is from the book “Catholic Apologetics” by the American priest John Laux, originally published in 1928, republished 1990 by TAN Books, pages 77-82.
The expression Son of God was in ordinary use among the Hebrews to indicate a man of great wisdom and piety. It was not in this sense that Christ made use of it; for then it would not have caused such a sensation. The question that the Jews had raised was this: Did Jesus make Himself the Son of God by nature, and therefore true God? From the Gospel record of His words and deeds it is clear that He did.
a) Whenever Christ touches on His relationship with the Father He always says: “My Father”; but when He speaks of His disciples He invariably says: “Your Father.” He never speaks of “Our Father.” The Lord’s Prayer is no exception, because this prayer was composed by Him expressly for His Apostles, as we know from His own words: “Thus shall ye pray.” The distinction is very precisely drawn in the cases where both expressions occur in one sentence: “Come ye blessed of My Father, possess you the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world” (Matt. 25,34).
b) When His Blessed Mother said to Him in the Temple: “Son, why hast Thou done so to us? Behold Thy father and I have sought Thee sorrowing,” He replied: “Did you not know that I must be about My Father’s business?” A child of twelve can speak in this way only if he feels himself to be in a very special sense the Son of God.
c) Jesus had sent forth His seventy-two disciples to preach the Gospel, and their mission had met with success. On their return He welcomes them with the joyful words: “I confess to Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because Thou hast hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them to little ones. All things are delivered to Me by My Father, and no one knoweth who the Son is but the Father, and who the Father is but the Son, and to whom the Son will reveal Him” (Matt. 11,25; Luke 10,21).
The sense of these words is the same as John 1,18: “No man hath seen God at any time: the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him.” The equality of the Father and Son as to knowledge is clearly stated, and this equality implies that both are of the same nature. “The substance of the Father,” says St. Thomas, commenting on this passage, “is beyond the comprehension of a created intelligence; so likewise is the substance of the Son, which is known only by the Father.”
d) On the eve of His Passion Christ made a frank avowal of His Divine Sonship before the Pharisees in the Parable of the Wicked Husbandmen (Mark 12,1-12). The application of the parable is clear. The servants sent by the Master of the Vineyard are the prophets. His “most dear Son and Heir’ was more than a prophet, more than the anointed of God. The opening words of the Epistle to the Hebrews are the best commentary on this parable: “God, who at sundry times spoke by the prophets, in these days hath spoken to us by His Son, whom He hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also He made the world. Who being the brightness of His Father’s glory, and the figure of His substance sitteth on the right hand of the Majesty on high.”
e) When Jesus was arraigned before the Sanhedrin, the High Priest said to Him: “I adjure Thee by the living God that Thou tell us if Thou be the Christ, the Son of God.” And Jesus saith to him: “Thou hast said it. Nevertheless, I say to you, Hereafter you shall see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of the power of God, and coming in the clouds of heaven. Then the High Priest rent his garments, saying: He hath blasphemed: what further need have we of witnesses? Behold now you have heard the blasphemy” (Matt. 26,63-65).
The Sanhedrin, judging that Jesus of Nazareth had profaned the name of God in arrogating it to Himself, applied to Him the law against blasphemy, and pronounced sentence of death. Jesus died rather than renounce His right to the title of Son of God. He died because He assumed it. On this point there is no ambiguity, for it is admitted even by the most advanced Rationalists.
f) Before His Ascension into Heaven Christ said to His Apostles: “All power is given to Me in heaven and on earth. Going, therefore, teach ye all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world” (Matt. 28,18-20).
From this text it is clear that the Son is equal to the Father and the Holy Ghost, that He is omnipotent, and that He promises to be with His followers unto the end of the world, which can be said of God alone.
In conclusion we may ask with Father Knox: “If Jesus did not claim to be God, what did He claim to be? If He was conscious of belonging to any order of being less than divine, how could He have answered the challenge of the High Priest without a word of explanation or of self-defense?”
Some difficulties solved
1. Rationalists and Modernists maintain that Our Lord’s consciousness of His Messiahship and Divine Filiation was a notion which dawned on Him gradually and strengthened as He grew older. –
“This is pure speculation,” says Father Ronald Knox, “which sins by going beyond the evidence. The evidence is not that the consciousness dawned gradually upon Him, but that He allowed it to dawn gradually on the rest of the world. The fact that He forbade the devils to call Him Christ early in His ministry, yet encouraged Peter to call Him Christ later in His ministry, does not define the limit of what He knew, but what He wished to be known. And there can be little doubt in any candid mind which reads the four records merely as records that His self-revelation was a gradual revelation. It was natural, if not necessary, that it should be. The Jews, it is clear, were not expecting a Messiah who should come amongst them as a man amongst men; they looked for a Deliverer from the clouds. Their ideas, therefore, had to be gradually remodelled. Their minds had to be accustomed gradually to the idea that this was something more than Man” (The Belief of Catholics, New York: Harper and Brothers, p. 104).
[…]
5. “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?”—
These words of Christ on the cross present a difficulty to many, but they are by no means, as Rationalists would have us believe, a cry of despair. They are taken from the twenty first Psalm, which is admittedly Messianic. Perhaps Our Lord was passing over in His mind the whole of this Psalm, which foretold so truly the extremity of His human desolation. We must remember that Christ bore the fullness of suffering for us, and since desolation or abandonment—“dark night of the soul” the Mystics call it—is the acutest form of suffering, it was but natural that He should endure that too; that a barrier should have been interposed, as it were, between Himself and the loving countenance of His Father.
6. Speaking of the end of the world, Christ says: “But about that day or that hour no man knoweth, not even the angels in Heaven, nor yet the Son, but only the Father” (Mark 13,32). Does not Christ by these words place Himself below God in knowledge?—
As Son of God Our Lord knew “that day and hour”; but as the Son of Man, as the Messias, He was not commissioned to reveal it to men. When the Apostles asked Him before His Ascension: “Lord, wilt Thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?” He replied: “It is not for you to know the times and moments which the Father hath put in His own power” (Acts 1,7). Speaking as Man, Our Lord also said: “The Father is greater than I.”
7. In treating of Our Lord’s claim to be the Messias and the true Son of God, we have confined ourselves to the Synoptic Gospels, because many modern critics outside the Catholic Church regard the fourth Gospel as rather “a work of philosophic reflection” than a record of events. But to any candid reader it must be evident that the claims of Jesus recorded in the Gospel of St. John are not essentially different from those made by Him in the Synoptic Gospels.
Panorama view of the Sea of Galilee. Image by Larry Koester, CC-BY 2.0, here.