Father’s Day, June 21, 2026
Psalm 69; Romans 5:12-15; Matthew 10:26-33
I’ve told this story before, but every Father’s Day I think of it again.
Years ago when my oldest son turned sixteen, my father gave him his old rusted 69’ Mercury Bobcat, and we went up to Spokane to get it. I’ll never forget how I felt the next morning when John backed out of the driveway and drove down the street—we were going to follow him later. I was worried he wouldn’t know the way. I was worried that he’d get hurt.
I’ll never forget how I felt when John’s National Guard unit was sent into combat in Iraq in 2003, where he was shot at and mortared and forever changed: this sense of helplessness, of a helpless, aching love.
I don’t know why we always think of God as all-powerful when we think of God the father, because that’s not what I’ve experienced as a father.
Of course, we believe that God is all-powerful. The question is whether we understand how he expresses that power. Of course, these are metaphors, God as father, God as mother. God, the catechism says very clearly, is beyond gender.
By calling God ‘Father,’ the language of faith indicates two main things: that God is the first origin of everything and transcendent authority; and that he is at the same time goodness and loving care for all his children. God’s parental tenderness can also be expressed by the image of motherhood.
The language of faith thus draws on the human experience of parents.
We ought therefore to recall that God transcends the human distinction between the sexes. He is neither man nor woman: he is God. He also transcends human fatherhood and motherhood. [259]
There’s a lot going on here but one thing that strikes me is the sentence, “the language of faith draws on the human experience of parents.” Metaphors tell us something about God, and our dominant metaphor for God is father, and on Father’s Day it makes sense for us as fathers to reflect on our own experience, and that experience, I think, is most of all the experience of letting go. Not power, but as the Catechism says, “tenderness.”
Think of the cross. Always think of the cross. Of God the Father giving away his Son, which is to say, giving himself away, completely emptying himself—of God expressing his power by freely abandoning it. He is always watching us drive away, down the street and out of sight, aching for us, aching with us. He is always watching us go off to war, and come back, shattered.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer didn’t sacrifice his life out of faith in a domineering God but out of faith in a God of such fierce and courageous tenderness that he entered into our ordinary lives—Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran pastor who was executed near the end of World II for standing up to the Nazis. He didn’t fight the fascists on behalf of a dictator God but on behalf of Christ, our true and gentle brother, who even when he rose and appeared to his friends appeared so subtly and fleetingly that in his generosity and tact he gave us the freedom to ignore or forget or misinterpret him, and then to walk away.
In prison Bonhoeffer understood as never before who Christ is and what the cross is trying to tell us:
God lets himself be pushed out of the world onto the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us. Christ helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering.
This is not God the wish-granter, the kind or indifferent king, the repressive or liberating father. This is the man, the real man, who hung on a cross.
Bonhoeffer didn’t believe that Christ had abandoned him. He believed that Christ was with him even in prison and especially then, and that he would always be with him, in death as in life, and finally beyond death, forevermore. As Pope Benedict puts it, “God has suffered, and through his Son he suffers with us. This is the summit of his power, that he can suffer with us and for us.” Or in Elizabeth Johnson’s paraphrase of Cardinal Walter Kasper: “it requires omnipotence to be able to love like this.” Only an infinite God can love each of us infinitely.
The truth of the cross is that God is with us, just not in the way we might have hoped for, not in the way we in our immaturity and naivete thought he would be.
‘I suspect we sometimes insist that ‘God is my co-pilot,’” Father Gregory Boyle says, “so we don’t have to fly the plane.”
What does this mean for us as fathers?
That we have to love our children fiercely and completely for who they are and not for who we want them to be.
I’ve been reading a wonderful book by Boyle, Cherished Belonging: The Healing Power of Love in a Divided Times, about his experience as a Jesuit priest working for over thirty years with gangs in LA, and how his approach is never to judge, not even to try to change the people he works with, not directly, but to love them, radically. He tells the story of a baby he baptized who grew up and joined a gang, spent time in prison, was on drugs and off drugs, and finally was shot, and of anointing him in the hospital just before he died, still young, and how at every stage of that short, sad life, God was in this man, God was with this man, this boy, whose eyes were filled with tears in that final moment, as Father Boyle’s were filled, too.
His ministry rests on two “unwavering principles,” Boyle says: that “everyone is unshakably good, no exceptions,” and that “we belong to each other, no exceptions.” It’s by loving people without conditions, without strings attached, that we help them experience their own goodness, their own sense of God in them.
“See, you lowly ones, and be glad,” the Psalmist says today, “you who seek God, may your hearts revive, / for the Lord hears the poor.”
“Be not afraid,” Jesus says in the Gospel today—”be not afraid” he is always saying—not a single sparrow falls to the ground “without your Father’s knowledge,” though they fall, they still fall. “Even all the hairs on your head are counted.”
God’s grace, Paul proclaims today, is “overflowing.”
As Boyle puts it later, God isn’t head of the “Department of Corrections.” He’s head of the “Department of Connections.”
This is hard. Terribly hard.
We have to give up our illusions. We have to stop wanting some strongman to take away all our problems and thinking of God as that kind of strongman, but to keep asking for the grace he continually pours down on us, grace we don’t have to earn, grace that is always there.
We have only to turn towards it, we have only to return to the Father, who is love itself, endless, undying, aching love.
We have to try, however much we fail, however limited we are, to reflect that love to others—to love them by letting go of them, to love them by seeing them, to love them by being with them—as God loves us, unceasingly.
No strings. No exceptions.