June 16, 2024—Father’s Day, Mark 4:26-34
Happy Fathers’ Day to all fathers out there. I’m a father, too, and I know what it’s like.
When my son Tim was around ten, I picked him up from soccer practice. A couple of the boys were talking tough about their next game. “We’re going to kick their bottoms,” they said, or words to that effect, and Tim said “yeah, we’re going to kick their bottoms.” Then he turned and saw me and burst into tears.
He knew what he said was wrong. He knew there would be consequences.
This is what it’s like to be a father. In a way we have a lot power. We have the power to set boundaries, and we should exercise that power, and there should be consequences when the boundaries are crossed. But in another way, we don’t have much power at all. We’re vulnerable. We can’t keep our children from rubbing shoulders with the world, we can’t keep them from being hurt, and that’s really hard. We love them. When they burst into tears, we burst into tears.
I love the word “scatter” in the first parable in the Gospel today, how it implies the hard work of sowing but also a letting go. I love the idea that the seed grows “we not know how,” because God is a mystery. I love the idea that the seed grows “of its own accord,” because grace is a gift. We can’t earn it or control it.
And our children are gifts, our children grow of their own accord. We work and work to support them and teach them, but they have free will, they make choices, and they’re their own people from the beginning, even from birth. They’re not us. We have to tell them things, important things, but we also have to learn who they really are, uniquely. God is in their lives, too.
Tim has grown up to be a wonderful man, and my son, John, too, and Maggie has grown into a wonderful woman, and I had something to do with that, but looking back now I realize how much was grace, how much was given.
Later that day, after Tim said the bad word, I dropped something heavy on my foot and said a couple of bad words and had to wash my own mouth out with soap.
And we can take this further, we can turn this around, because we are taught to call God Father.
The scriptures describe God as mother, too, in Psalm 131, several times in Isaiah, and in a couple of other places in the Old Testament. Jesus compares himself to a mother hen gathering her brood. And as the Catechism tells us, God is beyond all language, including our own, and so is beyond all gender.
But “father” is the most common image in the scriptures, it’s the word that Jesus uses most often, and that’s really important. It means something. God is all-powerful, so this comparison breaks down at a certain point, but if he is anything like human fathers he can also be hurt. He’s vulnerable. In a sense he expresses his power most fully by giving it away, out of love, out of tenderness, and he enters into our lives, and he feels what we feel. He cries when we cry.
And above all he gives us freedom. He lets us grow of our own accord. He sets us down in a garden and then lets us ruin it, and there are consequences, we are expelled, but he never stops caring for us, never stops loving us. It’s his love that is unending.
Someone told Barb the other day that she couldn’t believe in a God who would sacrifice his own son, just give him away to be killed. But she’s gotten that wrong. Jesus gives himself freely. The scriptures make that clear more than once. And though Jesus cries out on the cross, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” if the Father and the Son are one, as we believe, isn’t the Father somehow there, too, suffering with his son, and suffering with us, and for us?
In the famous parable of the Prodigal Son, the father lets his son waste his inheritance and fall among the pigs, but when his son comes home, he runs out and embraces him. He throws him a party. The father is prodigal, and the father is God, pouring out his love. All we have to do is come home.
Power and vulnerability. Authority and letting go. Both.
The father didn’t approve of how his son had chosen to live, and the son knew it. The father tried to guide the son, until he couldn’t.
I saw a young father the other day. His three or four-year-old son was driving a little child-sized bulldozer, self-powered. He could steer it. It was like the real thing. And the father was walking along beside him, looking at his phone. He never looked up. He never looked at his son.
It was just a moment. Who knows what happened the rest of the day? But that image really stays with me—I think it’s representative—and it really saddens me.
Parables like the parables in the Gospel today are simple stories drawn from everyday life, as C.H. Dodd says, but stories that “leave us in sufficient doubt” about what they mean that we are “teased into thought.” This is how Jesus taught. It’s the at very heart of the Gospel. This is why the scribes and the Pharisees had him killed, because he wouldn’t spell everything out. He wanted them to think for themselves.
Maybe the image of God the Father is the biggest parable of all. Maybe that’s what God the Father really does: he calls us to think. Maybe that’s what all of us who are fathers should try to teach our children: to read between the lines.
In the last few years of his life my father had aphasia. He knew what he wanted to say but he couldn’t find the right words. One of the last times I saw him before he died, we were standing in his carport. We were saying goodbye. When he hugged me, I heard his hearing aid buzzing. He said, “Chris, I will never forgiveyou.”
But I knew what he meant: he meant, “I will never forget you.”
God the Father never forgets us, and he always forgives. Always.
My mom and dad didn’t belong to any church, they were very skeptical about religion—and about me being Catholic, and about me being a deacon–and I always worried about what I would say as they were dying, whether I would be able to give them any comfort.
My mom died suddenly, so it wasn’t until my dad was in the hospital at the end that I had a chance to say something. He was frantic and irrational. He thought I was his brother. And he was afraid, he seemed lost, like a little boy trying to find his way home.
And I knew what to say then. I had to shout it, but I knew what to say: don’t be afraid, Dad. God is with you. Don’t be afraid.
The Father is waiting. The Father is here.