God's promise to Abraham
As you know, Jesus and his Apostles were Jews and belonged to the Jewish people. The Jews were neither a large nor a powerful nation, but there was one thing which made them more important than all the large and powerful nations put together: God himself, the Lord of the Universe, had chosen them to be his own special people. This actually happened about the year 2100 BC when God made his promise to Abraham: “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, … and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (NRSV, Genesis 12:2,3).
By about the year 1200 BC, when they had escaped from Egypt under the leadership of Moses, the descendant of Abraham, they were already a nation; and God took the opportunity to remind them of how he had kept his promise: “…the Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on earth to be his people, his treasured possession. It was not because you were more numerous than any other people that the Lord set his heart on you and chose you – for you were the fewest of all peoples. It was because the Lord loved you and kept the oath that he swore to your ancestors, that the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand … from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt” (NRSV, Deuteronomy 7:6-8).
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.
Inheritor and heir
The Catechism goes on to say that in Baptism each one of us is also made an inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven and the Baptismal Service in the Prayer Book tells us that, besides that, we become heirs of eternal salvation. (2) The Kingdom of Heaven means the Church, the people whom God rules as King. So an “inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven” means one who has come to possess the blessings of the Church. An “heir of eternal salvation” means an heir of Heaven itself.Being an heir has to do with the future, not with the present. If you are an heir to a fortune, it means that one day it may be yours. I say may and not will, because whether the fortune will actually be yours depends on whether you are still alive at the time. In other words, there is no certainty about being an heir. So although you and I have been baptised and are therefore heirs of Heaven, that does not mean we are sure to go there. Heaven is where God is seen, and there is one thing which can separate us from God and keep us from him, and that one thing is sin. That is why, at the end of the Public Baptism of Infants in the Prayer Book, it says, “It is certain by God’s Word, that children which are baptized, dying before they commit actual sin, are undoubtedly saved”. (3) Notice, by the way, that nothing is said at all about infants who die unbaptised. We leave that to God.
However, as far as we are concerned, sin can stop us getting to Heaven, and we have to face that fact. But we can face it with confidence because, by the powerful blessings which we possess as members of the Church, we can get the better of our sins, and come to love and serve God and our neighbour, and be well set on the road to Heaven and to God.
For in the Church all those blessings which God promised to Abraham long ago come true. We are taught what God is like, and in the Sacraments we are given the power to imitate him ourselves. And in the Eucharist Jesus brings us, Sunday by Sunday, before his Father’s Throne and there we join in the worship of Heaven itself, with the angels and archangels and all the Blessed Saints. So God’s Family on earth and his Family in Heaven become one (Hebrews 12:22-24).
SUMMARY
1. In the great Christian Family of the Church we are brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and therefore we belong very closely to God his Father. That is why, since a person’s Baptism, he or she is not just a child of God but the child of God in a special way.
2. An inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven means one who possesses the blessings given by God to the Church which is his Kingdom.
References
1. Church of England (1662) The Book of Common Prayer. A Catechism. Available from: http://www.cofe.anglican.org/worship/liturgy/bcp/texts/catechism.html (Accessed 23 August 2010) (Internet).
2. Church of England (1662) The Book of Common Prayer. The Ministration of Publick Baptism of Infants to be used in the church. Available from: http://www.cofe.anglican.org/worship/liturgy/bcp/texts/publick-baptism-of-infants.html (Accessed 23 August 2010) (Internet).
3. Church of England (1662) The Book of Common Prayer. The Ministration of Publick Baptism of Infants to be used in the church. Available from: http://www.cofe.anglican.org/worship/liturgy/bcp/texts/publick-baptism-of-infants.html (Accessed 23 August 2010) (Internet).