I regret to inform you that you are children of God.
I say that mostly tongue-in-cheek. But only mostly. Being children of God is indeed a beautiful thing. But we do ourselves and the world a great disservice if we turn it into a platitude—a self-congratulatory truism that papers over the distinctiveness of our vocation as Christians, replacing it with vague humanism and generic good feeling.
This season of our adoption through Christ’s Incarnation is indeed cause for joy. But our readings today—the story of the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt, fleeing the massacre of children back in Bethlehem—our readings remind us that this season isn’t just about warm, fuzzy feelings of family and community.
Being children of God is cause for joy, but it is a costly joy.
So what does it mean to be children of God? Why does it matter anyway?
It matters because it’s the central reason for the Incarnation happening in the first place. In answer to the question “Why did God the Son take our human nature?” our catechism answers: “The divine Son became human, so that in him human beings might be adopted as children of God, and be made heirs of God’s kingdom.” Our adoption as children of God matters because it is the radical gift that Jesus came to give us. This gift is the “reason for the season.”
And it is a gift we are given freely in the waters of Baptism. The catechism goes on to say, “Baptism is the Sacrament by which God adopts us as his children and makes us members of Christ’s Body, and inheritors of the kingdom of God.” We are children of God because—in fulfillment of Jeremiah’s words today—we have been “gathered from the farthest parts of the earth” and bound together, united as members of the Son of God.
This is wonderful because of the inheritance we receive. And it is costly because it gathers us together with each other—with every other member of Christ’s Body and all the messiness they bring with them. Baptism binds us together, whether we like each other or not, uniting us, reshaping us, remaking us to be children of God in the likeness of God’s only-begotten Son.
Baptism is solidarity in the deepest possible sense. It changes who and what we are. As the Apostle Paul says in his letter to the Galatians, “As many of you as were baptized, have put on Christ. There is [therefore] no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Adopted as children of God, we are no longer just individuals. We are bound together with all God’s children in their brokenness, and with Jesus in both his glory and his suffering.
At a fundamental level, being children of God means we are called to live as Christ lives—to endure what Jesus endures. And Jesus’ vocation as the Son of God on earth was not an easy one. In our Gospel today, we hear how the Holy Family—Mary and Joseph must flee to escape an earthly king dead-set on murder. They are displaced, fleeing violence and seeking a better life—not unlike the many people in the world today. And they flee to Egypt—the same foreign land from which God had rescued their forebears all those generations before. And even when they return to the Promised Land, they can’t return to Bethlehem—their ancestral home that they’d left behind. They must go and find a new home for themselves in Nazareth.
In many ways, the earliest years of God’s incarnate Son mirror the struggles of the most beleaguered and vulnerable people in our world today—the refugee, the migrant, the dispossessed, the homeless. Being adopted as children of God means that we are united to Jesus in his hardship. And being gathered from the farthest parts of the earth and baptized as members of God’s Son also means that we are united to God’s other children in their hardship.
Jeremiah reminds us today that God doesn’t just gather the people who are respectable and have it together—the people who we are comfortable identifying ourselves with. God gathers the blind and the lame; strangers and aliens (legal and otherwise); those who have been exiled from their homes; and those who have never had a home. All of these are among the members of Christ’s Body—among the children that God has gathered and adopted through Christ.
Our adoption as children of God means we are no longer free to see these suffering members as other than ourselves. We are bound together and called to throw in our lot with theirs. We are called to weep with the wailing mothers of the Holy Innocents in Bethlehem. We are called to travel with the Holy Family, carrying their bags as they flee into Egypt. We are called to make our home with those who wander in desert wastes and have no home. We are called to recognize the refugee, the outcast, and the dispossessed as fellow children of God—fellow members of God’s Son—who we cannot disown without disowning ourselves, and whose fates are bound up with ours in Christ Jesus.
This is the gift of our adoption—the grace of our Baptism: to journey together as God’s beloved children, to carry one another’s burdens as our own, to walk the pilgrim way towards our shared heavenly home, and to discover together the joy of the divine life that Christ has opened to us. Yes, it is a costly joy. But it is also a joy that transforms and redeems us. It is a joy so much more precious than any trite assurance that we are all God’s children. It is a costly joy that flows from the radical gift of a radical change.
So, as we stand together at the close of this Christmas season, let us remember that this is the reason for the season—the whole aim and purpose of the Incarnation of God’s only-begotten Son. In him we have been adopted as children of God and made heirs of God’s kingdom. And that means we are in this together—not just with those who are easy to love, but with all the sons and daughters that God has gathered from the farthest parts of the earth.
May we live accordingly and walk in love as Christ loved us, journeying together to share the divine life of the one who humbled himself to share our humanity. Amen.