God’s Chosen People

So the Jews were God’s own Chosen People, and for that reason, if you had been a Jew in Our Lord’s day, you would have been much closer to God than you could have been had you belonged instead to one of the pagan nations.  And yet, when Our Lord, God the Son, came to his own people, their leaders stirred up the crowds so that they asked for the release of a brutal murderer called Barabbas, and yelled for Jesus to be executed.  “Crucify him, crucify him”.  And their voices and those of the Jewish leaders prevailed.  “So Pilate gave his verdict that their demand should be granted” (NRSV, Luke 23:18-24).  As St John says, “He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him” (NRSV, 1:11).

The New Israel

So Jesus made a new start with those who did accept him, with his Apostles.  Just as God had chosen the Jews to be his own people, so now Our Lord, the Son of God, chose the Apostles to be his own Family, the Church.  You and I became members of that Family when we were baptised.  In this Family of God, Jesus – God’s Son – calls us and treats us as his own brothers and sisters.  And because of that, God the Father also calls us and treats us as his own sons and daughters, and we can truly pray to him as Our Father (Hebrews 2:11; John 1:12; 1 John 3:1; Romans 8:14-17).

So the Prayer Book Catechism says that in Baptism each one of us is made, not a child of God, but the child of God (1) in God’s own Family, the Church.