The Kerygma

A Series of Free Will Choices Between God and His Beloved Children

The Kerygma, the proclamation of the core of the Christian faith, is a love story told through choices: God’s relentless, freely given love and our free response to it. At the center of that story stands one moment in each of our lives, our Baptism. There the Father spoke over us the same words he spoke over Jesus at the Jordan: You are my beloved. Everything before our Baptism was God preparing that moment. Everything after it is us learning to live it through prayer, community, and mission. Let’s walk through the story, drawing on Scripture and the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC).

Act 1: The Invitation — Created to Be His Children

The story begins with a choice by God. Nothing forced him to create. He wasn’t lonely and he didn’t need us. “God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself, in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life” (CCC 1). From the very beginning, God’s plan was never just to make creatures. He wanted sons and daughters who would share the life of the Trinity. “God created mankind in his image; in the image of God he created them” (Genesis 1:27).

Act 2: Paradise and Choice — The Family Broken

In the Garden, humanity walked with God as children walk with their Father. Love can’t be forced, so God gave us a real choice (Genesis 2:16-17). We chose to listen to another voice and hid from the One who loved us (Genesis 3). The damage was devastating. Our fellowship with God was broken, shame entered the world, and we forgot who we were. We had been children of the Father, and now we lived like orphans.

Act 3: God’s Unwavering Love — Water That Saves

God did not abandon his children. He chose to promise a Redeemer (Genesis 3:15) and then spent centuries preparing his people for a new birth. Again and again he saved them through water. The Spirit hovered over the waters of creation. The Flood washed the earth clean. Israel passed through the Red Sea from slavery into freedom and crossed the Jordan into the Promised Land. The Church sees in each of these a foreshadowing of Baptism (CCC 1217-1222). God was already showing us how he would bring his children home.

Act 4: The Incarnation — The Beloved Son Steps Into the Water

In Jesus, God made his greatest choice: he became one of us (John 1:14). Jesus had no sin to wash away, but he chose to step into the Jordan anyway. He stood in line with sinners and went down into the waters we would one day enter. As he came up, the heavens opened, the Spirit descended, and the Father spoke: “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased” (Mark 1:11). That voice was meant for more than Jesus. The Father was speaking over everyone who would one day be baptized into his Son.

Act 5: The Cross and Beyond — Born From His Side

On the cross, Jesus chose to love to the very end (John 19:30). When the soldier’s lance opened his side, “immediately blood and water flowed out” (John 19:34). The Fathers of the Church saw in that water and blood the birth of the Church and her sacraments, Baptism and Eucharist (CCC 1225). Through his death and resurrection Jesus defeated sin and death (1 Corinthians 15:54-57), and Baptism brings us into that victory: “We were indeed buried with him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life” (Romans 6:4).

Act 6: Baptism — Our New Identity

Jesus told Nicodemus, “No one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit” (John 3:5). In Baptism, God made his choice for you personally. You were freed from sin, reborn as his child, made a member of Christ’s Body, and sent on his mission. “Through Baptism we are freed from sin and reborn as sons of God; we become members of Christ, are incorporated into the Church and made sharers in her mission” (CCC 1213). You became “a partaker of the divine nature… and a temple of the Holy Spirit” (CCC 1265).

This is who you are. It isn’t based on what you’ve achieved, what others think of you, or what you’ve failed at. “See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God. Yet so we are” (1 John 3:1). Everything that follows is simply learning to live as who we already are.

Act 7: Prayer — Living as Beloved Children

Beloved children talk with their Father. “As proof that you are children, God sent the spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying out, ‘Abba, Father!’” (Galatians 4:6). Prayer isn’t a duty we perform to earn God’s attention. It is the Spirit we received at Baptism praying within us. “In the New Covenant, prayer is the living relationship of the children of God with their Father who is good beyond measure, with his Son Jesus Christ and with the Holy Spirit” (CCC 2565). Each day we choose whether to come to him, to be still, to listen, and to hear again the words spoken over us at the font: You are my beloved.

Act 8: Community — The Family of God

Nobody is baptized alone. “For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body” (1 Corinthians 12:13), and “Baptism makes us members of the Body of Christ… members one of another” (CCC 1267). The first Christians understood this: “They devoted themselves to the teaching of the apostles and to the communal life, to the breaking of the bread and to the prayers” (Acts 2:42). The parish is our family. The Eucharist is our family meal. Our brothers and sisters in faith carry us when we’re weak and remind us who we are when we forget. We choose each day whether to live as isolated individuals or as members of one Body.

Act 9: Mission — Sent as Beloved Children

Beloved children share their Father’s heart, and the Father longs for every one of his children to come home. So Jesus gave his final command: “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19). Mission isn’t reserved for priests and religious. It flows directly from Baptism. “Reborn as sons of God, [the baptized] must confess before men the faith they have received from God through the Church and participate in the apostolic and missionary activity of the People of God” (CCC 1270). We don’t go out to earn the Father’s love. We go because we have it, and we want others to know they are loved too.

Act 10: A Story of Mercy — Always Welcomed Home

Even the baptized sometimes wander. When the prodigal son came home, the father didn’t treat him as a servant. He restored him as a son: “Quickly bring the finest robe and put it on him; put a ring on his finger” (Luke 15:22). God “wills everyone to be saved and to come to knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4), and through the Sacrament of Reconciliation he restores the baptismal grace we have wounded (CCC 1446). Our identity as beloved children is never taken back. The Father is always watching the road, waiting to run to us.

---

Salvation history is the story of God’s relentless love and our free response to it. It began with a Father who created us to be his children, and it reaches its fulfillment in Baptism, where we are reborn as his beloved. As we choose to pray as children of the Father, to live as members of one family, and to go out on mission as his witnesses, we become active participants in Jesus’ continuing redemptive mission of “restoring all of God’s creation.” That new and glorious creation will be one in which we share forever in the life of the Blessed Trinity, the ultimate love story of God our Father and Jesus, together with his Mystical Body and the Holy Spirit.

You are beloved. You were claimed at the font.

What choices will you make today, as a beloved child of God?

Sharing

Jesus’ last words to his disciples on earth are found in Matthew 28: “All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age.”

Jesus calls all of us, by virtue of our Baptism, to share in his redemptive mission here on earth. Please share this reflection with your family, your friends, and your acquaintances. Then share it with a couple of people you might not feel comfortable sharing it with, always keeping in mind the words of Jesus: And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age.

The author was assisted by AI in drafting this post.