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The Catholic Telegraph
May 12, 2000The author of this exhortation has been addressing his listeners as "children." The term occurs no less than five times in the first two chapters. It is not a judgmental term, or a means of talking down to the work’s addressees, but an expression of pastoral love, parallel with the term "beloved" that the author also uses.
At the beginning of chapter three our author pulls himself up and offers some reflections about the meaning of the term that he has been using so freely. "Children" is more than a term of affection. It also indicates a profound spiritual reality.
Our text teaches us that it is God’s generosity that enables us to be called His children. It’s not something that we can earn or deserve. Moreover, it’s not just a matter of being called God’s children but of actually being His children. To be God’s children is something really special. It is a great distinction, but a distinction that is of no interest to the world because the source of our filiation, God our Father, is of no interest to the world. But what we are now is only a beginning. Just as Christ will come again in glory at the end of time in a form that surpasses our keenest imagining, so we who now share with Christ the likeness of sonship will be changed and glorified, too. We will see and know His final exaltation and mirror it in ourselves.
What does being children of God involve? First of all, there is nothing in created reality that does not somehow reflect the richness and glory of God. It has all been made in His image and is thus somehow God’s offspring, somehow God’s child. But the filiation - being God’s son or daughter - that we speak of in the context of Christian faith is something more than that, something beyond the likeness of a creature to its creator.
The filiation that we have with God through faith is an analogue, a parallel to the filiation that exists between Father and Son in the Holy Trinity. Obviously as creatures - and creatures scarred by sin - we cannot participate in the fullness of self sharing that constitutes the relationship between the divine persons of the Trinity. But we can and do share some aspects of it.
First of all, there is likeness. Just as the Son is the full image of the Father - God from God, light from light, as the Creed puts it - so we are remade in baptism into the image of the risen Christ. We are no longer just a single dreary human individual, remote from God and turned in on our self. We are participants in the saving life of the risen Christ, the life that embraces all believers on earth, the life that offers praise and intercession to the Father in heaven. Our life has a whole new dimension and meaning because it is an extension of Christ’s life.
Next, just as Father and Son in the Trinity share with the Spirit the energy that created and redeemed the world, so our life, remade in the image of the Son, involves participation in the ongoing process of creation and redemption. We are not just images of the Son, but His collaborators, working with Him to make the world what God intended it to be, offering His love and salvation to our sinful and unredeemed fellow human beings. With that in mind, it’s easy to see that Christian morality, the appropriate behavior of God’s children, is more than avoiding sin, more than keeping lots of rules. Appropriate behavior for God’s children consists in carrying out God’s plans for creation, God’s program of redemption.
Obviously these relationships of likeness and action between ourselves and the Son involve loving. Loving is the giving of the self to the benevolence of the other. When, through baptism, God makes us His children, we enter into a whole new level of giving and receiving. It is no longer the love of creator for creature and creature for creator. It is the love of Father for Son, expressed through the Holy Spirit. It is a love that enfolds us into the deepest life of the Trinity. When we become children of God through faith in Christ, we are loved as members of God’s most intimate family. In return, we are invited to love God not just as creator and judge, but as father and brother.
But there’s more. When our life reaches its conclusion and we stand before God in judgement, the main issue will not be the extent to which we kept all God’s rules. The main issue will be whether we are in a filial relationship with God or not. If we are, we will be taken into the company of the Lord for all eternity, not as a pay-off for the good we have done, but simply because we belong.
The idea of divine filiation - being children of God - sums up the whole content of First John. Everything the author says about faith, about love, about Christian morality is summed up when he reminds us that we are children of God.
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Conversation Questions
What effect does being a child of God have on my daily life?
Does it make any difference whether those around me share filiation in Christ?
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