Luke 3 gives perhaps the best Lent story in the Bible: John the Baptist preaching in the desert, eating locusts and calling for us to make straight our paths, and the baptism of Jesus. Perhaps because it is so perfect, I am going to be difficult and completely bypass it to focus on something I’ve never heard anyone ever talk about. At the very end of Luke 3, Luke includes the genealogy of Jesus, going all the way back. And by all the way back, I mean all the way. Like Matthew, he links Jesus to Abraham through David. But then he continues the genealogy to back to Noah, and even Adam. But he does stop there. He ends by stating “Adam, the son of God.”
So, certainly, Jesus is the Son of God, in a theological title we reserve for the Messiah. But he is also the son God by virtue of being related to Adam: the first human, who was, as Luke points out, the son of God.
The implications are rather breathtaking. If Adam is the son of God, and Jesus is thus the great-great-great-great[…]great-grandson of God through Adam—so is everyone else.
Pope Benedict XVI, the first modern Pope to humbly profess his weakness to give up the Petrine ministry when he felt called to, is a son of God.
The great Martin Luther King, Jr, the renowned activist who unabashedly centered his message for equality around God, is a son of God.
But it goes further than that. Despite her disinvitation to the Eucharistic table Kathleen Sebelius is a daughter of God.
And even still, Pontius Pilate is the son of God. He condemned his own brother to death.
And, less popularly, Osama Bin Laden is a son of God. He financed a regime that massacred his own family, and found his own death at hands of them, as well.
And so we can learn from this. Every one of us is a member of the human race. Every one of us a descendant of Adam. And every one of us is a son or daughter of God. So Luke calls us to remember that, and in the words I borrow from C.S. Lewis, it is children of God “whom we joke with, marry, snub, and exploit.”
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