Part One

 

Have you noticed that Jesus repeatedly addressed His disciples as “children”? Allow me to recall a few examples from the writings of the New Testament. 
After a rich young man rejected Jesus’ invitation to follow Him and went away sad, Jesus turned to His disciples and said (Mk 10:24f), “Children, how hard it is to enter the Kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” Why did Jesus call His followers “children” at that moment? Was there something in the rich young man that was not childlike and that thereby prompted Jesus to affirm the childlike nature of His followers? 
Notice, too, that at the Last Supper Jesus said to the Apostles (Jn 13:33f), “My children, I will be with you only a little while longer… I give you a new commandment: love one another.”
 Why not address them as brothers or comrades? Why does He say, “My children”? 
 And why, after the Resurrection when He appeared to the Apostles as they were fishing along the shores of the Sea of Galilee, did He address them in the same way, calling out (Jn 21:5) “Children, have you caught anything?” 
Even persecuted Christians are called children. 
Are these instances just a quirky custom on Jesus’ part? Is this merely archaic speech, signifying nothing?  But if that were the case, why would the Apostle John write in His First Epistle (2:18) to followers of Christ facing fierce persecution, “Children, it is the last hour; and just as you heard that the antichrist was coming, so now many antichrists have appeared”?  And then, a few verses later, John adds (3:1), “See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God. Yet so we are.”

 

“Children” is one of Jesus’ favorite titles for His followers, regardless of their age. He calls us children, not out of a desire to be quaint but to point to a fundamental truth about our identity in relation to God the Father. We are children of the Father because He created us, but even more because He gave us new birth through water and the Holy Spirit in the Sacrament of Baptism. 
In unequivocal language Jesus tells Nicodemus (Jn 3:3,5), “Amen, amen, I say to you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above… Amen, amen, I say to you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and the Spirit.”
Jesus tells us to call God “Father”


 

It is no accident then, and not merely arbitrary, that Christ tells His followers to call God “Father” when they gather in prayer (Mt 6:9), “This is how you are to pray: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name…” 
How we pray expresses both what we believe and who we are. To call God “Father” in obedience to Christ sets our prayer on solid footing. It also sets our life and mission in the Kingdom on a faithful course. On the other hand, to refuse to call God “Father” is to move out of the Christian tradition and to reject a key component of our Catholic and Apostolic faith, which is essentially Trinitarian. 
In this regard, the “Catechism of the Catholic Church” states (#234), “The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of Christian faith and life. It is the mystery of God in Himself. It is therefore the source of all the other mysteries of faith, the light that enlightens them. It is the most fundamental and essential teaching in the ‘hierarchy of the truths of faith.’ The whole history of salvation is identical with the history of the way and the means by which the one true God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, reveals Himself to men and reconciles and unites with Himself those who turn away from sin.”

 

Christ gives us Mary as our Mother
God’s tenderness and mercy can certainly be expressed in motherly images. We find these employed at times in the Sacred Scriptures themselves. For example, the Lord says in Isaiah 66:13, “As a mother comforts her son, so will I comfort you.” And Jesus Himself said to the people of Jerusalem (Lk 13:34), “How many times I yearned to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.” These metaphors express the loving intimacy that our God desires with each of us. 
At the same time, never does the Lord ask us to call Him “Mother.” Instead, Christ invites us to use that title for the Virgin Mary. He directs us, from the Cross, to look upon His own mother as our mother too, (Jn 19:27), “Then He said to the disciple, ‘Behold, your mother.’”

 

Throughout her history, the Church has accepted this great gift of Jesus with gratitude and frequently invoked the assistance of the Virgin Mary in prayer. At the Second Vatican Council, she was officially declared to be Mother of the Church. 
It is important to remember that Christians do not call God “Father” on the basis of human experience, although our experience may at times help us to appreciate the fatherhood of God. But we are not projecting our self-made images upon the Lord. As the catechism says (#239), “God transcends the human distinction between the sexes. He is neither man nor woman; He is God. He also transcends human fatherhood and motherhood, although He is their origin and standard: no one is father as God is Father.”

 

The catechism goes on to say (#240), “Jesus revealed that God is Father in an unheard-of sense: He is Father not only in being Creator; He is eternally Father in relation to His only Son, who is eternally Son only in relation to His Father: ‘No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him’ (Mt 11:27).”
In telling us to call God “Father” and in calling His own disciples “children” Jesus is teaching us fundamental truths about both the mystery of God and the mystery of the human person. He is also beckoning us beyond individualism and foolish pride. We shall develop the implications of this in Part

 

Christ tells us to call God “Father” when we pray (Mt 6:9), “This is how you are to pray: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name…” We say, “Father” because we believe that God is indeed “the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth” and that Jesus is “His only Son, our Lord” (Apostles Creed). 
To Jesus, the Father said (Mk 1:11), “You are my beloved Son.” And through Christ and the gift of Baptism, the Father says to us, “You are my beloved daughters and sons.”
 In Part One of this series, we explained how calling God “Father” affirms our identity in Christ, the eternal Son. In Part Two of this series, let us consider how calling God “Father” makes a difference in our Christian mission in the world.

 

God’s Fatherhood calls us beyond individualism. 
In teaching us to call God “Father,” Jesus beckons us beyond the slogans of a “me-generation” and beyond temptations to selfish pride. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains (#2792), “If we pray the Our Father sincerely, we leave individualism behind, because the love that we receive frees us from it. The ‘our’ at the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer, like the ‘us’ of the last four petitions, excludes no one. If we are to say it truthfully, our divisions and oppositions have to be overcome.” 
Because God is my Father, every man is my brother, every woman is my sister. This is true whether my sister is poor and needy or she is rich and famous, whether my brother is an undocumented migrant or a Gulf Coast evacuee, whether they are graduates of Notre Dame or convicts awaiting execution on Death Row. The reality of being the Father’s children calls us beyond our feelings toward others to the objective truth of who they are. We may not feel like reaching out to the homeless, we may not feel like forgiving those who trespass against us, but the freedom the Father gives us in Baptism and the other sacraments allows us to rise above subservience to our feelings and to love every neighbor as ourselves. Just as God reminded Cain that he was his brother’s keeper, so He calls us to treat others as true sisters and brothers. This is possible because of God’s grace; still, it requires the humility to become like children.

 

Trust like a child Jesus says, “Unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the Kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the Kingdom of heaven” (Mt 18:3-4). Why does Christ demand that we become like children? He does so because children have the natural tendency to trust their mother and father, and to trust their heavenly Father. When we are born again of water and the Holy Spirit (Cf. John 3:3ff), trust is returned to our hearts with the grace to obey the Father in all things. This grace gives us an unshakable confidence that God’s will is always what is best for us, even if we do not understand. To be a child means I am ready to obey without fear.

 

St. Paul describes the gift of faith as follows, “As proof that you are children, God sent the spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying out, ‘Abba, Father!’ So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God” (Gal 4:6-7). 
We dare to say, ‘Father’ when we gather as God’s family, especially in the Sacred Liturgy, our prayer is addressed to the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit. We dare to say, “Father” because Jesus taught us to address our prayers in this way. We pray as His beloved children, as brothers and sisters to one another. To underline the highly personal nature of this prayer, personal pronouns are used. When praying in Spanish, for example, we say “tu” in referring to the Father, rather than the more formal “usted.” When praying in English, the congregation responds during the dialogue that begins the Preface, “It is right to give Him thanks and praise.” Just prior to that, the congregation prays, “May the Lord receive this sacrifice at your hands for the praise and glory of His name, for our good and the good of all His Church.” The use of the pronoun “His” rather than the formal “God’s” underscores the highly personal nature of our prayer, and it calls to mind that our prayer is directed to “the Father.”


 

Sent on mission
At the conclusion of the Mass the deacon or priest tells us, “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.” In response to our loving Father, we then go forth as His children. However, in our love and service we need to be “wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” We are, in other words, to be both mature and childlike. St. Paul put it this way (1 Cor 14:20), “Stop being childish in your thinking.  In respect to evil be like infants, but in your thinking be mature.” 
The task of handing on the Good News to others succeeds to the degree that we are courageous yet pure, humble but strong.  When we resist the temptation to lord it over others and when we rejoice in being children of the Father, we shall be convincing witnesses of the Gospel of Life.

 

Be not afraid

The great challenges that we face in evangelizing our culture tempt us to turn to worldly means to “strengthen” our efforts. But Christ repeatedly warns against this unwise choice. He says to us (Lk 12:22-25, 32): “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life and what you will eat, or about your body and what you will wear. For life is more than food and the body more than clothing. Notice the ravens: they do not sow or reap; they have neither storehouse nor barn, yet God feeds them. How much more important are you than birds! Can any of you by worrying add a moment to your life span? If even the smallest things are beyond your control, why are you anxious about the rest? …Do not be afraid any longer, little flock, for your Father is pleased to give you the Kingdom.”  And He adds (Mt 5:43-44), “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute, that you may be children of your heavenly Father.”

 

Our identity and mission are grounded in the love of the Father. Once we believe firmly that we are beloved children of God, and once we develop the practice of calling Him “Father,” then nothing can destroy our hope, and nothing can shake our faith.

The two parts of this series we have seen how Christ’s instruction to call God “Father” impacts our identity and mission as followers of the Beloved Son of God. Now let us focus on what implications this has for men who are called by God to the vocation of being a husband and Dad.

 

Call no one on earth Father?

At first glance, it may seem that calling God “Father” rules out calling our Dad on earth by the same title. Did Jesus not say, “Call no one on earth your father” (Mt 23:9)? Upon careful consideration of the context of these words of our Savior and after seeing it within the larger picture of all the rest of the Sacred Scriptures, it becomes evident that Jesus was not telling us to jettison “Dad” from our vocabulary. After all, in the Fourth Commandment of the Decalogue, God Himself refers to “Dad” as “Father,” and commands us to honor him and our mother. St Paul makes clearer the meaning of Jesus’ words when he writes (Eph 3:14), “I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named.” 
Jesus certainly underlines the fact that all His disciples have one common Father in heaven (Cf. Mt 6:1). God’s fatherhood and the privilege of being His children surpass what any Dad on earth can be for his children. However, since every family receives its name from God, Dads and Moms receive their authority and mission from Him, too. Furthermore, to call God “Father” ensures that Dads do not claim for themselves the source of fatherhood. Instead, praying the Lord’s Prayer with his wife and children helps each Dad to be a faithful icon of God’s fatherhood for them.  As the “Catechism of the Catholic Church” states (#2214), “The divine fatherhood is the source of human fatherhood.”


 

What we know of God the Father comes through His Son Jesus Christ. And Christ’s revelation of the Father is a revelation of love, a fatherly love that pours itself out for His children and a spousal love that pours itself out for his wife, even to the point of sacrificial death on the Cross. How can human fathers hope even to approach such a love for their wives and children? Given our fallen human nature, without God’s grace, it would indeed be hopeless. But we have been redeemed by Christ and sealed by His Holy Spirit. And as the Angel told the Virgin Mary (Lk 1:37), “Nothing is impossible with God.”

 

The goodness and foibles of human fatherhood

The Gospel according to St. Matthew, which records Jesus’ words (Mt 23:9) “Call no one on earth your father,” goes to great lengths from the beginning to underline the goodness of fatherhood. In the first 16 verses of the account, for example, the word “father” is used 42 times. We are told the names of 42 fathers beginning with Abraham and ending with St. Joseph. 
These 42 fathers are the ancestors of Jesus of Nazareth. Through them, even with all their moral failures and spiritual foibles, God prepared the way for His eternal Son to enter our world within the Holy Family of Nazareth. God’s providential preparation for the redemption of the world was at work through one generation after another.

 

Some of the 42 fathers were far from admirable; they brought great heartache and turmoil to their families. Nevertheless, God never called a halt to His providential plan. He never gave up and started all over again. As Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis writes in “Fire of Mercy” (p. 58), “His Son is born within time from a race of saints, sinners, ruffians, exiles, wise men, poets, quarrelers.”
 If God could prepare the way for His Son to enter our world, working with the likes of David, Solomon and Ahaz, then He can certainly bring about good things through the men called to fatherhood in 2005, even with all our weaknesses and sins.

 

The wellbeing of children

Fatherhood exists for the wellbeing of children. Kids need the care of both a mother and a father; and they need the love of God the Father, as well as the motherhood of the Church and of the Virgin Mary. 
Tragically, as David Blankenhorn writes in “Fatherless America” (p. 12), “Over the past two hundred years, fathers have gradually moved from the center to the periphery of family life. As the social role for fathers has diminished, so our cultural story of fatherhood has by now almost completely ceased to portray fathers as essential guarantors of child and societal well-being.”

 

Statistical evidence today shows that children without fathers are at a much higher risk of living in poverty, failing in school and engaging in crime. Nonetheless, fatherhood continues to receive only peripheral attention regarding its vital importance in the family and society. 
 In a sense, this is not surprising. Rebellion against fatherhood, especially the fatherhood of God, is as old as time. Pope John Paul II said as much in “Crossing the Threshold of Hope” (p. 228), “Original sin is not only the violation of a positive command of God but also, above all, a violation of the will of God as expressed in that command [#4]. Original sin attempts, then, to abolish fatherhood… placing in doubt the truth about God who is love and leaving man with only the sense of a master-slave relationship.” Our current lack of respect as a culture for fatherhood has a long history! 
Rather than cursing the darkness, however, why not encourage men, especially men of faith, to rediscover the vocation and mission of fatherhood? Was there any time in history when the very existence of children was so threatened as today? Abortion, child abuse, divorce and many other evils wreak havoc on the entire society but are most destructive for our children. While women have a vital role to play in combating these evils, the role of men is perhaps more important.

In the footsteps of St. Joseph

Following the example of St. Joseph, a father’s first and most basic duty is to protect children, to provide them with the safety and security they need to grow and to mature. When the Holy Family was in danger, Joseph got them out of it. To be sure, God assisted him through angels and dreams, but it was Joseph who acted on God’s gifts and took the lead. 
 Fathers also provide for their wives and children, as did Joseph for Mary and Jesus. Obviously, mothers also contribute to this task, but in a different and complementary way. What Dads provide certainly entails money and material resources, the things that are required for our physical and material needs. But a Dad provides something of even greater value to his children when he lives out faithfully his marriage vows to the children’s mother.

 

Children have an innate sense of wellbeing when they perceive, even unconsciously, that Mom and Dad love one another. The giving of self that makes marriage a sacrament and that deepens the bond of love between husband and wife creates a home that truly is a sanctuary of life and a domestic Church.   

 

All men who are called to married life and those of us called to celibacy for God’s Kingdom have key roles to play in the Church’s mission today of healing our culture. We must equip ourselves mentally and spiritually for this struggle.  We need ongoing faith formation and daily prayer to prepare us to exercise fatherhood that points beyond itself to God. 
 The last play that John Paul II wrote, shortly before becoming pope, is titled “Radiation of Fatherhood.” May the Lord give us the courage to be men who radiate to the world the life-giving Fatherhood of God.