What family are you from?
John 1:9–13
The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.
Today’s passage is only five verses long. Yet this short span covers both matters of enormous scale, such as the whole cosmos and its maker (v. 10), and other weighty, yet more intimate, personal matters, such as what family we are from and who our parents are.
For some of us, the parents we have are a source mainly of joy. Some of us would say that who our parents are is decidedly a mix of joy and sorrow. For others, there may seem to be a balance of mostly pain when we consider who our parents are and what they have done. Perhaps what pains us is that they were not there for us.
Whatever our parents have been to us, our family backgrounds are a mix of light and darkness. Our parents usher us into a fallen world and they, too, are fallen. We, in turn, propagate the fallenness we’ve received. We are inheritors and bequeathers of a darkened, fallen world, simply by being born into the fallen human family.
God does not want us merely to be a fallen part of a fallen family line; however much that family line can also be a source of blessing for us. He wants us to be part of an unfallen new family, as children of God (v. 12). This is how we regain the wholly blessed trajectory he desired for humanity from the beginning.
God the Son, Jesus, the “true light of the world” (v. 9) came into history to grant us membership in this new, unfallen family. Ultimately, there will be no darkness at all in the new family. It does not have parents with regrettable failures or bad secrets.
In order to graft us into our new family, Jesus takes us out of human bloodlines, out of the propagation of DNA, out of the tangles of family histories. The new family he places us in is solely a product of God’s good desire and will (v. 13). The same God who said: “Let there be light” now says to those who trust in Jesus: “Receive my Son and you are my child.”
