Among the strongest claims that the New Testament makes bold to present is the idea of our divine parentage and, therefore, our family likeness to Jesus. Awash in the notion of love as the foundational component of Christian life, the first Johannine letter discerns divine initiative at the root of this familial inclusion. Paul would have called it ‘adoption’. The Johannine tradition captures the same objective while avoiding that distinctive Pauline vocabulary:
See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.
To find ourselves defined as God’s daughters and sons is, for John, abundant evidence of God’s love. It is a beneficent inclusion, a gathering round the paterfamlias that is all about the joy of the children.
Though this family gathering is initiated and sustained by divine love, the Johannine logic identifies a consequence in human behavior. ‘All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure’, we are told in the succeeding verse.
Family resemblance grows on a person so honored. One begins to enjoy it, sees himself in family terms, delights in the red-blooded solidarity of it all.
The next thing you know, you’re scrubbing out impurities that make you seem half-blooded in origin and appearance. So does the logic of love imply both a consequent hope and the personal re-definition in purity that this hope cultivates and sustains.
Family love is invasive, catalytic, and potent.
Canter Bridge 
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