Main news for 10 February 2002

Relationships differ: teacher and student, master and servant, finally, simply colleagues or friends. What distinguishes the relationship “father and son”? Not that one is older and the other younger; that happens in other forms too. But father and son are joined by blood, by kinship, by something inward and essential in common. In God such unity exists from the beginning: the unity of the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit, and Christ, the Son of God, is the Only-begotten Son, the only One to whom sonship to God belongs by nature.

But the Son of God is at the same time the Son of Man. Through Himself He unites the divine nature and the created nature, and therefore through Him the path into sonship to God is opened to us. On the day of Pentecost the Holy Spirit powerfully descends into this world, and the prophecies of the Old Testament are fulfilled, one of which we read in verse 16: “I will dwell in them and walk in them.” In this way people become inwardly partakers of God through the Holy Spirit's abiding in them, becoming like the Son of God. Therefore Paul elsewhere calls the Holy Spirit the Spirit of adoption, through whom we can cry to God: “Abba, Father!”