What does it mean to be a child of God? In John 8, Jesus is confronting the Jews who were following him. “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free,” he tells them. But wait, they respond. Aren’t we already free?
After all, they say, we are descendants of Abraham. We are not slaves, nor have we ever been. (Except for that whole Roman occupation thing they were living under at the time, but we digress.) But Jesus says they actually are slaves—to the impulses and behaviors rooted in not loving their fellow human beings and themselves as God loves them. That is the “sin” that Jesus is referring to when he tells them “everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin.” But Jesus offers a way for every person to be released from slavery and to be brought into the household of God as a full family member. “So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.”
Then Jesus tells them that if they were really children of Abraham, they would not be plotting to kill him. Jesus reveals that he sees through what turns out to be a false allegiance.
They said to him, “We are not illegitimate children; we have one father, God himself.” Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and now I am here…”
John 8:41-42
Being a child of God means being able to see and honor the God in your brethren and in yourself. But the people who called themselves children of God were actually not connected to God enough to see the new thing that God was doing through Jesus. They were really being children of their history and, more precisely, the myths that they told themselves based on their selective reading of history. That is tragically familiar to those of us today who see groups of people claim to be operating under a divine mandate when in fact their mandate is built on a set of lies they tell themselves.
But the truth—the reality of what God through “the word made flesh” has been, is and will be doing in the world to forge is into one human family—will set us free. Then we will know what it really means to be under the parentage of God.