My Chosen Son

“My chosen son”: God speaks these words in today’s Gospel lesson, which comes to us from Luke 9. While they are easy to overlook in the context of the transfiguration story, I think they are far too fascinating to ignore. Aside from the glaring exception of the King James Version, nearly every English translation of the Bible includes some variation of that phrase, “My chosen son.”

Typically, when we think of Jesus, we imagine that he and the Father always knew one another, and that there would be no “choosing” on the Father’s part to select Jesus for the mission of the atonement. Even in the words of the Nicene Creed we affirm the idea that the Son is eternally begotten of the Father, being “true God from true God” and all. But our passage from Luke, read on its own terms rather than in the false univocality so many Christians impose on the Biblical texts, seems to suggest that the Father, at some point after Christ’s birth, made the decision to choose him.

This phrasing, this particular choice of words on the part of the gospel writer, makes clear that Jesus shares a special relationship with the Father. Yes, we are all the children of God, but there is something different about the relationship the Father and Son share with one another. But, perhaps more interestingly, it seems to me that this phrase also captures a period of Christian history where the idea of Jesus as eternally one with the Father was still a ways out from being proposed. Even in this gospel narrative, which begins with a virgin birth, it seems that God must choose Christ rather than having him set aside from the beginning.

Now, I’m not enough of a theologian to make any kind of academic or theological claim about the implications of this, nor am I well-versed enough to make the argument that God’s words here actually hold no deeper implication that what’s on the surface. My goal with this isn’t to introduce or defend Adoptionism or any other such Christology, but rather, like so many of my pieces will intend to do on this blog, to introduce a wrench. Whether that wrench is then fed into your spiritual framework is entirely up to you, dear reader.

We try so hard to insist on univocal readings of the Bible, and to assume that the writers had the exact theologies we do - the orthodox Nicene theology that sprung immediately from the minds of the apostles and has been handed down faithfully to this day. But the reality is that we cannot crawl inside the minds of the Biblical authors, and we cannot assume their theological outlooks with complete certainty. All we can say is that they did not view things the same way we do, and that there are aspects of the Christian faith today - even the nominally orthodox faith - they would likely look down upon.

What’s left for us then is a choice. We cannot know anything with certainty, especially as we “see only a reflection, as in a mirror” (1 Cor. 13:12), so we must make our decisions in uncertainty. We will owe our allegiance to something, be it Christ or power or money or a million other things.

For me, though, the choice is quite clear. With all my uncertainties in tow, I will follow the lead God has set for us in today’s gospel and I, too, will choose Jesus.