Sunday within the Octave of Christmas
When we hear St. Paul describe in the epistle today that we are sons and daughters of God and heirs of his inheritance, we probably take it for granted. We have heard the phrase “children of God” so often that it doesn’t seem so spectacular for us. But to be an adopted son or daughter in the Son of God is anything but humdrum. This revelation makes up part of the good news of the Gospel that God revealed to us.
This news of our adoption in Christ connects to our celebration of the Nativity, which we are still celebrating today. As a side note, I took some clothes to the dry-cleaners last Tuesday, and I wished the woman at the counter Merry Christmas. She said, “Belated Merry Christmas to you, too.” I responded that as Catholics there’s nothing belated about it. We celebrate Christmas Day for eight days, and the Christmas season even longer than that, because it’s too big of a celebration to be fit into just one day. She mentioned that she thought it was only Chanukah that was eight days long, but I told her that Catholics love celebrating, and we celebrate for eight days as well. When I went back on Friday morning to pick up the dry cleaning, she asked if I was still celebrating Christmas, and explained how long we celebrate Christmas. It’s simple opportunities like that where we can share our faith.
But back to the point about our adoption in Christ. In Christ, God took our human nature to Himself. And because of that, humanity was joined to God in a way that never happened before. But that didn’t mean we immediately became co-heirs with Christ. The Incarnation set the stage for this great news, but wasn’t the accomplishment of it.
God allows us to become His adopted children through baptism, when we die and rise with Christ in the waters of redemption. Through holy baptism, God joins us individually to Himself, just as He joined us corporately to Himself through the Incarnation. The redemption that Christ won made possible our status, no longer as servants, but as sons and daughters in the Son of God. The Father remade us, as it were, by the power of the Holy Spirit which the Father gave us in holy baptism.
And St. Paul outlines that, while we serve God, we are not servants. No, God exalted us to a status far beyond any servant. Think about it: a servant has no rights in the family, but exists only to take care of the family’s needs. He can be let go for any reason, or no reason at all. He lives in the same house, but only because that is his occupation; it is not, properly speaking, his house. He has no expectation to anything that belongs to the family, other than just compensation for the work actually accomplished.
As a child in the family of God, we have rights. And these rights are not based upon anything we have done, but only upon our status as a child. Think about your own children: especially when they are babies, but even when they are older but acting like babies, they don’t really do anything for you as parents. A baby sleeps, eats, dirties diapers, and cries (usually because he or she wants to do or has done one of the first three activities). Yes, there’s a certain amount of love that a baby brings, but the baby isn’t really trying to be cute and lovable. They just are. And yet, simply because the baby is the child of the parents, the parents commit themselves to feeding the child, to clothing the child, to providing shelter for the child, to helping the child develop physically and intellectually (and spiritually, for believers). Parents can’t simply say, “I’m tired of waking up the middle of the night. Let’s send the baby away so that we don’t have to deal with him anymore.”
In a similar way, we don’t do anything for God, not by ourselves anyway. We cry out a lot to Him; we ask to be nourished by His grace and the Eucharist; we dirty the diapers of our souls. We add nothing to God in Himself, and we’re not all that cute or lovable all the time. But, because we are joined to Christ in holy baptism, God makes a commitment to us to provide for us all that we need to be saints and to be with Him forever in heaven. We don’t deserve it, but God gives it anyway. We did not earn any good thing from God, but as a loving Father, He showers His blessings upon us.
Again, we are used to this exalted status. But it did not have to be that way. God did not have to offer us a place in His household. But out of His great love for us, He invited us to a greater status than we could have ever imagined. May Christmas help us remember not to take this great gift for granted, but to treasure it and operate out of our identity as sons and daughters in the Son of God, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit live and reign for ever and ever. Amen.
