We Fathers are all fractured light.
What we’ve been will always be less than what we wanted to be no matter how much we have or haven’t achieved.
There’s only One who could fully say: “If you’ve seen me you have seen the Father.”
The rest of us reflect only fractured light.
But may the light we have been able to shine somehow in His hands be enough to help point to the source of all that is good, beautiful and true in Him.
In the church we often hear sermons that speak about good fathers. Pastors search the Bible for a good one, unfortunately there aren’t very many good parenting stories to choose from...if any.
It’s a sad story, but the truth of the Bible reveals that we as humans, we as God’s people, have fallen far from who and what we should be or even could be on our own.
The stories of the Bible are hard to read: stories full of wrath, anger, adultery, drunkenness, unfaithfulness, rebellion, failure, pride, bloodshed, incest, polygamy, prostitution, violence, murder, divorce, betrayal, abandonment, defiance, rebellion and rejection.
As we have read there are more ungodly sons of godly fathers mentioned in the Bible than godly sons of ungodly fathers. Implying that failure of parenthood in relationship to spiritual matters is often the norm. That one’s state of spiritual stature doesn’t always guarantee the passing on to another, regardless of ‘how you train them up’...at least in light of the written record of parenting in the Bible.
It appears to me that ‘Fatherhood’ and ‘Sonship’ as institutions…needed to be saved.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that one of the major relational gospel titles represented in the New Testament is ‘Father’ and ‘Son’. Christ comes as the ‘Beloved Son’ and God as revealed by Christ is the ‘Heavenly’ Father.
Both roles are embodied, walked out, reflected in the Divine and in the Human in the Jesus Incarnation. Father and Son..both paths of humanity’s experience are gathered up in the act of Salvation and are swallowed up into Christ’s work of redemption.
We see all the touch points of the ache and struggle of Manhood and humanity in the experiences of Fatherhood and Sonship lived out in the life of Jesus: love, affirmation, disclosure, knowledge, wisdom, presence, empowerment, strength, mercy, weakness, temptation, anger, misunderstanding, challenge, struggle of wills, absence, obedience, suffering, death...and rebirth.
“For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.”-Colossians 1:19-20
The New Testament gives us hope through the beauty of the work of the cross. No matter how good a Dad or Mother you had or didn’t have or just how much of a super-dad or super-dud you have been...the reality is all of it needs to be redeemed in Christ.
The victories and failures of our ‘fathering’ stories are one of the ‘ALL THINGS’ of the cross that had to be saved.
This realization can bring about a ‘peace’ in you today. Christ saves, Christ redeems, Christ restores! That is a fresh stream of grace ready to break open from the side of Christ that will sooth your failure-prone father or mother’s heart.
I hope you can see the beautiful work of salvation in light of the above thoughts. I think it can encourage us, no matter what our fathering experience has been.
Painting by Caspar David Friedrich