Claimed as Children (5 of 49)
Series: Lectionary, Year B
Christopher B. Harbin
Ephesians 1:3-14
My great-grandfather was adopted from an orphanage in Mobile, AL. His would appear to have been a different world than my own, with no one looking after the best interests of an orphan in the aftermath of a civil war. From Mobile, he was carted off to Texas as a replacement for slave labor. A boy with no legal standing to protect himself from lies and abuse, he survived as best he knew until he was old enough to escape the cruelty of his adoption and make his way back East.
That is not the adoption story Paul was discussing in his letter to the Ephesian believers. There is here no being ripped away from all one knows. There is no being cut off from familial support. There is no trauma of learning to make one's way under some oppressive new regime that ignores one's grief, loss, and personhood. Paul's picture is something else entirely. Rather than any focus on what God might exact from us, this is a portrait of God's goodwill to enable and empower us to live out a joyous new reality in hope, love, acceptance, and belonging. It is a portrait of becoming the children of God.
My Greek professor in seminary would have had a bone to pick for our using the term adoption here. As far as he was concerned, the Greek was about becoming the children of God. Just as Joseph named Jesus, and thus claiming him as his own son, so God claims us in Christ, independent of any of our modes of paternity testing. Paternity in the First Century was all about a father claiming a child and thus bestowing on that child a name which designated both paternity and belonging. It had nothing to do with DNA. It had nothing to do with blood type matching. It was about laying claim and offering the child belonging and full participation in the family.
The paternity claim God makes of Jesus upon his baptism is the same claim Paul extends to us in keeping with the claim in John's gospel t ...
Series: Lectionary, Year B
Christopher B. Harbin
Ephesians 1:3-14
My great-grandfather was adopted from an orphanage in Mobile, AL. His would appear to have been a different world than my own, with no one looking after the best interests of an orphan in the aftermath of a civil war. From Mobile, he was carted off to Texas as a replacement for slave labor. A boy with no legal standing to protect himself from lies and abuse, he survived as best he knew until he was old enough to escape the cruelty of his adoption and make his way back East.
That is not the adoption story Paul was discussing in his letter to the Ephesian believers. There is here no being ripped away from all one knows. There is no being cut off from familial support. There is no trauma of learning to make one's way under some oppressive new regime that ignores one's grief, loss, and personhood. Paul's picture is something else entirely. Rather than any focus on what God might exact from us, this is a portrait of God's goodwill to enable and empower us to live out a joyous new reality in hope, love, acceptance, and belonging. It is a portrait of becoming the children of God.
My Greek professor in seminary would have had a bone to pick for our using the term adoption here. As far as he was concerned, the Greek was about becoming the children of God. Just as Joseph named Jesus, and thus claiming him as his own son, so God claims us in Christ, independent of any of our modes of paternity testing. Paternity in the First Century was all about a father claiming a child and thus bestowing on that child a name which designated both paternity and belonging. It had nothing to do with DNA. It had nothing to do with blood type matching. It was about laying claim and offering the child belonging and full participation in the family.
The paternity claim God makes of Jesus upon his baptism is the same claim Paul extends to us in keeping with the claim in John's gospel t ...
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