God is Your Father
For Father’s Day, I have been thinking about the Father. (Some insights courtesy of my ward Sunday School).
1. Some Christians emphasize how far we are from God. He is wholly other to us, full of power and majesty and so on. This view is arid and makes it hard for people to understand and follow God.
The response though is usually the tepid buddy God of mainline Christianity and Moral Therapeutic Deism who makes no demands and who has nothing to teach you except that the answer was inside you all along.
Fatherhood threads the needle. A father is both a sometimes terrifying authority figure but also warmly intimate. I feared my father and loved him. He was far superior to me in strength and wisdom, but still he loved me. He was my dad.
2. The Luke 22 cup passage is supposed to be an inspiring declaration of obedience from the Son to the Father, but it has bothered me. Why is Christ asking for the cup to be lifted in the first place? He knows there is no other way.
39 And he came out, and went, as he was wont, to the mount of Olives; and his disciples also followed him.
40 And when he was at the place, he said unto them, Pray that ye enter not into temptation.
41 And he was withdrawn from them about a stone’s cast, and kneeled down, and prayed,
42 Saying, Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.
This time, though, I read the cup passage after reading John 14-18, where Jesus talks constantly about his Father.
It makes the whole episode much more clear. Christ is not making a considered inquiry or proposal. This is a son crying out to his father because he is afraid.
In that most burdensome moment of all human history, with blood appearing at every pore and an anguished cry upon His lips, Christ sought Him whom He had always sought—His Father. “Abba,” He cried, “Papa,” or from the lips of a younger child, “Daddy.”21
This is such a personal moment it almost seems a sacrilege to cite it.
P.S. You might pray for Vader’s children, who are fatherless this year.
Rozy
June 18, 2023
Beautiful insights. Last year I gave a talk on Father’s Day about how Jesus Christ, our spiritual father, demonstrates all the attributes of fatherhood expressed in The Family: A Proclamation to the World. Jesus was, is, and always will be, the perfect example of both a son and a father. I’m glad He is how we can know what Our Father is like.
Eric
June 18, 2023
That tension between a distant God and a buddy God brings to mind something C.S. Lewis once said:
“By the goodness of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively His lovingness; and in this we may be right. and by Love, in this context, most of us mean kindness — the desire to see others than the self happy; not happy in this way or in that, but just happy. What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, “What does it matter so long as they are contented?” We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven — a senile benevolence who, as they say, “liked to see young people enjoying themselves” and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, “a good time was had by all”. not many people, i admit, would formulate a theology in precisely those terms: but a conception not very different lurks at the back of many minds.”