Loving Our Parents...Makes Atonement for Our Sins?

A few years back I wrote a post on our need to make "reparation" or "atonement" for the sins we commit after baptism. I shared that, although Christ's sacrifice makes atonement for the eternal debt of our sins, God our Father expects his adopted children to make amends for the temporal debt of their sins, which includes the damage we do to others as well as to our own souls. We do so, however, not under our own power, but by Christ's grace. Today, on the Feast of the Holy Family, our first reading contained some powerful statements on this subject. I'll quote from the NASB translation:

Whoever honors his father atones for sins.
and preserves himself from them....
Even if [your father's] mind fail, be considerate of him;
revile him not all the days of his life;
kindness to a father will not be forgotten,
firmly planted against the debt of your sins
— a house raised in justice to you.
(Sirach 3:3, 12-15)

It makes perfect sense. Every sin is a rejection of God's Fatherhood over us. We reject His loving, all-wise will to do our own thing. It's sin. This disfigures our soul, which is supposed to be taking on the image of His only begotten, Jesus. When we honor our parents, the earthly image of God put here by Him to guide us, we are in effect honoring God's Fatherhood over us and thus taking steps to undo the effects of our disobedience in our souls. In this way, we not only repair, or "atone," for sins; but we also "preserve" ourselves, take steps to protect ourselves, from falling into sin in the future. This honor we show to our parents is the triumph of Christ's grace within us, a manifestation of His obedience to Mary and Joseph out of obedience to the will of the Father! By Christ's power within us, we are overcoming sin and taking on the image of the Master.

The author of Sirach knew that the Lord sometimes calls us to atone for sin in this way while working against strong resistance. It can be somewhat easy to honor our parents in the normal circumstances of life, but we really have to overcome ourselves when we are called to care for a parent who fights our efforts, such as one suffering from dementia. This is when we really overcome the disfigurement sin has wrought in our souls via the grace-filled exertion it takes to remain firmly patient and kind in serving a parent. It cannot be done without Christ's grace, without Him loving our aging parents through us. We are called to become images of His own sacrificial love. Spiritually-speaking, this is about as lofty as it gets. Humanly-speaking, however, it feels horrible. It is an act of the will, made in union with Christ, the Ever-Faithful Son. [Believe me, I'm speaking to myself in this post.] The positive effects upon our souls are very real though — that is God's promise.

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Addendum: If your Old Testament is missing the Book of Sirach, then this post is for you.

Why Do We Address God as "Father," Instead of "Mother"?

Well, because that is what Jesus did, and as Christians we don't have an independent relationship with God; we participate in Jesus' relationship.

Over the years I have heard a number of people object, "But Jesus only did that because of the patriarchal nature of ancient cultures" - the underlying assumption being that Jesus' word choice was culturally conditioned.   

The difficulty with that assumption is the freedom Jesus demonstrated throughout his ministry in breaking with the gender conventions of the time:  meeting with women privately, welcoming them to travel with him independent of their husbands, and his selection of women (unable to testify in courts of law at that point in history!) as the first witnesses to His resurrection.  His decision to name only males as apostles and address God with the masculine “Father” was not circumscribed by the outside culture.  In fact, priestesses and female deities existed throughout the Middle East as well as among the Greeks and Romans.  As the Word made flesh, Jesus’ revelation of God as Father was both free and deliberate. But why?

In Hebrew and Christian thought God is bigger than gender.  Both male and female are reflections of the Deity (Gen.1:27).  Scripture compares God to a mother (Is.49:15; Hos.11:3-4).  And yet, throughout the whole of Scripture, God is never addressed as “Mother.”  There is something about fatherhood that is more analogous than motherhood for describing God’s relationship to us.  Scripture does not come out and explain it, but I would suggest that male and female have been invested by God with an “iconic character.”  By this I mean that the differences we observe between male and female can give us insight into spiritual realities.

Think about the complementary roles the mother and father play in the conception of the child.  The father comes from the "outside," and the mother welcomes the father into herself.  The ovum produced by the mother awaits the father's sperm cell, and the union of the two produces the child’s body.  The child then grows within her mother, unable to see her father’s face until birth.   

God also plays a "Fatherly" role in every conception - coming from outside of all creation to breathe a spirit, an intellectual soul, into the child at the instant of his/her physical conception.  All of God’s actions come from “the outside” so to speak, and in this way are Fatherly.  The Church on the other hand – and the individual souls that make it up - is the  part of creation that has received God into itself and allowed him to bring forth new supernatural life.  In this analogy, whether biologically male or female, each human soul resembles the feminine.  This explains why Scripture refers to the Church as Christ’s Bride (Eph.5:22-23), and the Mother of the faithful (Rev.12:17).

As members of Christ's Body we approach God the Father through, with, and in Jesus.  In union with him we pray "Our Father, who art in heaven ..."
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This post was adapted from Through, With, and In Him: The Prayer Life of Jesus and How to Make It Our Own.

Question:  If we think about the "iconic character" attached to gender, might that yield an insight as to why the ministerial priesthood has been reserved to males?  If the priest is ordained to function "in the person of Christ" in ministering to the Lord's Bride, then doesn't the priest's masculinity function as a sacramental sign of Christ, the Divine Groom?

Christopher West on "BRAVEHEART"

Here's a neat post where Christopher West looks at the father-son relationships in "Braveheart." I highly recommend it!

fatherhood and Fatherhood

I have been recalling how it felt when my first child arrived – ecstatic, scared, awed. Awed – that’s a good word. I was awed at the new life in my arms. Looking at him, how could anyone doubt that there was a God when they saw the beauty of this boy? I remember attending Mass a couple of Sundays afterward and, as the Eucharistic prayer began, just weeping in a loving awe at the realizations sweeping over me:


The first was in regard to Jesus: My little boy, the most important person in the world to me, was loved by Jesus. Jesus had stretched out His arms and let nails be driven through them for my child. I was grateful that Jesus had died for me, but now I felt an unspeakably deeper gratitude because He had laid down His Life for my child !


The second was in regard to God the Father: I know that theologians have explored why the Son became incarnate instead of one of the Other Persons of the Trinity. But what I saw, becoming a new dad, was that the Father's sending of His Son was an even greater act of Love for us than if the Father had come Himself. In sending His Son, the Father sent the One He Loves and cherishes even more than Himself ! And the Father sent Him, knowing how we would treat Him, knowing that we would torture and kill Him. Paul's words from Romans never penetrated me so deeply, "God proves His love for us in this: that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us."


There's fatherhood, and then there's Fatherhood. And I stand in awe.

A Good Reminder

I was walking this morning, thinking about the passing of Brennan Manning and all of the awesome stories he shared regarding God's radical love for us.  I think, and I think Brennan would agree with me, that parenthood gives us a unique entry point into the way God "feels" about us.  Being a dad has helped me wrap my mind around (at least a little better) the truth that God loves us each of us infinitely.  Having two kids has taught me the way that loving one with every fiber of my being does not make me incapable of loving the other with every fiber of my being - love is not a quantity that gets burned up.  It has taught me that discipline/punishment is not the opposite of love, but an expression of it.  And it is incredibly precious to God when he sees us loving one another. God's love is tender.  (It's good to read 1 Cor.13 every now and then.)

It also amazes me to realize how my parenthood is a pale reflection of God's Fatherhood.  Where my ability to love my children is limited by my creaturehood, His is not; He is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent!  He is not tainted by sin.  His love is always perfect - perfectly wise and just.

A Grateful Dad

I have not felt well the past few days, but the silver lining has been the way my kids have expressed their affection and taken care of me.  Getting me this or that, getting themselves this or that so I could rest on the couch - they are extremely generous little souls.

I am a grateful dad in another sense too. I remember attending Mass a couple of Sundays after my oldest, Brennan, was born and as the Eucharistic prayer began, just weeping in a loving awe at the realization that swept over me:  My little boy, the most important person in the world to me, was loved by Jesus. Jesus had stretched out His arms and let nails be driven through them for my child. I was grateful that Jesus had died for me, but now I felt an unspeakably deeper gratitude because He had laid down His Life for my child !  After Lily's birth, that gratitude doubled.

I make the Apostle Paul’s prayer for his readers my own this afternoon:  "I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” (Eph.3:17-19)

"Our Father Who art in Heaven - Stay There!"

I came across that line yesterday in Monsignor Joseph Cirrincione's little book, St. Joseph, Fatima, and Fatherhood. He felt that it was the way many of us pray the Our Father in the depths of our hearts. We are Christian in name but secular in lifestyle. God has His place in our lives, but He isn't our Life. And when we live in this way we rob ourselves of experiencing God as Father, as the one who loves us and raises us up to understand how the world really works and helps train us to make a contribution to it.