(Isaiah 63:16b-17, 19b; 64:2-7; 1st. Corinthians 1:3-9; Mark 13:33-37)
Our reading from the prophet Isaiah on this the first
Sunday of the Advent season, is a direct preparation for what is the supreme teaching
of the Gospel: the revelation of God as Father, and of the re-birth -- by the
Holy Spirit -- of Jesus’ faithful disciples, into living members of His
Mystical Body, and adopted children of the heavenly Father.
Isaiah was very conscious and proud of the fact that God
was a Father to Israel, and In our first reading he referred to God three times
as Father, twice in the opening verse:
You are our Father. Were Abraham not to know us, nor Israel to
acknowledge us, You, LORD, are our Father, our Redeemer you are named from of
old.
But, what did he understand by his use of that word ‘father’?
Let us turn our attention to the Law, to the book of
Deuteronomy, source of the fountain which supported and inspired Isaiah, and
there (32:18) we read:
Of the Rock Who begot you, you
are unmindful, and have forgotten the God Who fathered you.
Though the word ‘father’ is used there, and even backed-up
by the words ‘begot’ and ‘fathered’, nevertheless they are all used
metaphorically, since it is all about the birth, that is, the calling, formation,
and establishment of a nation from those who had previously been wandering desert
tribespeople and latterly a persecuted minority of slaves in Egypt. And the prophet Isaiah himself was not, and
could not have been, fully aware of the real meaning and ultimate significance
of the word he was being led to use when calling God the ‘Father of Israel’,
for that required further revelation
God did indeed continue to guide His People over the subsequent
centuries and gradually formed their history in such a way that those prophetic
words and traditional faith were finally shown to be true in the sublime beauty
of their ultimate meaning and significance, when He brought about through Mary
of Nazareth -- the Flower of Israel -- the birth, in time, of His only-begotten
and eternally-beloved Son as Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of Man for mankind’s
salvation.
That, dear People of God, is why you heard St. Paul exclaim
in the second reading:
I give thanks to my God always on
your account for the grace of God bestowed on you in Christ Jesus.
As we are now entering upon a new Church year, it is not
only right and proper, but surely also most helpful and beneficial, for us to
be aware of the ultimate goal of our life in Jesus under the guidance of the
Holy Spirit, which is, that we should become truly adopted children of the
Father:
If
anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home
with him. (John 14:23)
The Father Himself, therefore, comes with Jesus and the
Holy Spirit, to abide with us and make us His children in Jesus, and this He
does in a way that is unique to Him, that is, by showing Himself to be the most perfect Father to us and for us.
Therefore, we Catholics especially must always remember
those unique words, those most ‘invasive’, serious, and solemn words, of Jesus,
which are generally considered – or consigned! – to be words of no special
significance:
Do
not call anyone on earth your Father; for One is your Father, He Who is in
heaven. (Matthew 23:9)
Moral theologians will tell you that those words ‘Do not’
are a direct prohibition.
Now, such words used by Our Lord Jesus are not ‘over-the-top’,
neither are they meaningless; they are indeed, as I said, ‘invasive’
because they penetrate to the depths of our personal being, both physical and
spiritual. They pertain to, and concern,
the supreme responsive awareness, grateful love, and self-sacrificing obedience,
of which we can be capable as children of God;
they are hights to which we can be ‘vocationally called’ when the
sovereign name of Jesus in Mother Church is impugned or threatened.
One is your Father, He Who is in
heaven.
In the begetting of a child, the father initiates the
life-giving process in the mother who subsequently gives growth, nourishment,
and ultimately birth to a child, a unique personal human being.
Spiritually, the heavenly Father is the unique Begetter of
all true disciples of Jesus. He can contact
us -- if we will listen and hear -- because He, our Creating Father and our Spiritual Father, is able to address us
through unspoken words uttered in the depths
of our being and personality. Because,
in our early years we had do not normally learn to recognize His traces, any first and/or
early experiences of such communication can seem to originate within ourselves
and to be, unaccountably, ours: mysterious longings and desires, sudden lights
and quiet convictions, protecting fears (! sic), and simple assurance, all can
seem to be very much a part of us because they come from the centre of our
being. And yet, because they are, in fact, communications from the as yet unknown-to-us-Father,
they can become intelligible to us by our walking in the ways of Jesus and thus
learning to share in His infinitely sensitive awareness of, and responsiveness
to, His Father’s abiding Presence and loving Providence. And when many apparently unrelated events and
diverse incidents come to be seen and recognized as connected and coherent
parts of one embracing plan of Providential care, then the Father’s loved-and-appreciated
Presence reveals Itself to us in glimpses reflecting the beauty of His truth in
the Scriptures and the splendour of His grace in Mother Church.
In ways such as these the Father can speak to us in any
situation and throughout the whole extent of our life. No earthly father or mother, no lover, no friend,
can speak so intimately, or be present to us in such a way; because He is the
God Who originally made us in His Own likeness for Himself.
Yet, there is even more than that; for He -- God the Father
-- wills to be our All, not only in
our origins, but also in the fulfilment and ultimate justification of our
being, because He wants to be for us the sublimely perfect Father, such
a Father Whom only Jesus can reveal to us, for Whom only the Holy Spirit of
Jesus can prepare us; a Father Whose Presence we can encounter only as living members of the mystical
Body of Christ, our Brother and our Head.
Do
not call anyone on earth your Father; for One is your Father, He Who is in
heaven.
Dear, present-day People of God, that most serious command
of Our Blessed Lord is not ‘over-the-top’ because Jesus knew full-well
the ordinary, homely, use of the word ‘father’, as His mother testified most
emphatically, being concerned about Saint Joseph more than herself (Luke 2:48):
When His parents saw Him,
they were astonished, and His mother said to Him, “Son, why have You done this
to us? Your father and I have been looking for You with great anxiety.”
What then was Jesus’ intention in that solemn injunction
about our use of the word ‘father’?
We know that He sometimes used words to startle, jolt, His
hearers into thinking, as distinct from just idly hearing. But that is not the case here, for Jesus was
not telling a parable, He was responding to a particular threat hanging over
the People of Israel in His days, a threat still virulently alive, and Jesus’
response is too imperious to be just passed over by us today.
Jesus had in mind the Pharisees who were claiming the teaching
authority and taking over the words of Moses in the Law of God, for themselves;
they would say that they were ‘adapting the words of Moses, the Law of God, for
modern times’, by interpreting those words in accordance with a multitude of
their own, very human and proud, traditions.
A ‘take-over’, indeed, not unlike that now being practiced by a majority of the bishops
– the Church ‘Fathers’ -- in the German pseudo-Catholic Church of today; a
take-over some “Jesus’-teaching-needs-updating” Catholics are today wanting to
foist on the universal Catholic Church.
In that original confrontation with the Pharisees in
Jerusalem, and in today’s similar situation, Jesus’ words were direct
and unambiguous, in order to protect; and today they are still meaning-full and
authoritative for His Church:
Do not call anyone on
earth your Father; for One is your Father .... in heaven.
Yes, God sent His co-equal Son in fulfilment of the words
of the prophet to save His People and all mankind from Satan’s power of sin and
death. Through faith in, baptism into,
and obedience to Jesus -- the Son of God become our Brother -- we are enabled
by the Gift of His Holy Spirit to become living members of the Unique Body of
which Jesus is both Lord and Head, and in Him we can become children of the
One, true God and Father of us all.
He is indeed, and wills to be known by each one of us
personally as, our sublime Father, supremely authoritative, and
yet One Who is always there, with us, closer to us even than we are to
ourselves: the Father Who can only be known by the words and teaching of
Jesus of Nazareth -- His only-begotten Son, born of the Virgin -- and can
only be understood aright in accordance with the authoritative guidance of His most
Holy Spirit, in teaching passed down to our days by the Apostolic tradition
and teaching of Mother Church, and contained in the Scriptures of the Old and
the New Covenants, and Mother Church’s own doctrinal teaching.
Advent now calls us to prepare a welcome for the nascent Son-Who-is-to-come, let us do so joyfully, and oh! so lovingly, carefully, and courageously, as did Mary our mother and model.
