Main news for 1 May 2023

What does it mean "to be children of God"? And what authority is needed in order to be them? At the dawn of Jewish history, in the days of the Exodus and in the times of the conquest of Palestine, everything was simple.

Then every Jew who belonged to the people of God by the fact of being born a Jew was considered a child of God. But even in those times, to be a Jew meant not only to belong to the Jewish people by birthright, but also to keep that union-covenant which was concluded at Sinai, and therefore to follow the Torah given to the people through Moses.

Over time, the view of the Torah and of the people changed, and the question of who is a child of God began to be resolved in the context of following this or that tradition within the Yahwist community. It was understood by itself that the question concerned believing Yahwists, not pagans, of whom there were enough among the Jews in the pre-exilic era. But already in that pre-exilic era, movements were forming within the community, mainly around the prophets, whose members considered first of all one another and their like-minded companions to be children of God.

During the exile and in post-exilic times, when the Synagogue appeared, its members began to consider themselves children of God. Here, of course, the matter was not only and not so much nationality, since even those who had no blood relation to the Jewish people could join the Synagogue, but faithfulness to the community, and therefore also to the tradition connected with this community. The tradition presupposed communion with God, prayer, reading and studying sacred texts, educational activity, the study of the Torah and teaching it to children and adults, and works of mercy.

All this, as the learned rabbis of Second Temple times said, made a person a child of God. It is no accident that in the Gospel era the Pharisees above all claimed this title, members of religious brotherhoods who actively participated in everything listed. They were sure that they, at least, could certainly consider themselves children of God, because they all succeeded in the works of God as they understood them, as no one else did.

But the early Christian Church places the accent not on religious or any other kind of activity, but on that life of the Kingdom which is impossible without Christ. Of course, this does not cancel activity connected with works of mercy or religious instruction, but something else comes to the foreground: communion with the risen Christ and that unity of the life of the Kingdom which unites His faithful with Him, making them, according to the apostle Paul's word, the "body of Christ." This is not surprising: Christianity is nothing other than life with Christ in His Kingdom. Everything else is only a consequence.