“…who do you say that I am?” (Lk 9:20)
(06-20-2010)
It is obvious and joyful when we see good fathers who witness the joy of their parenthood with their child-children. Whether carrying their youngster, openly public displays of affection, playing catch, or coming to school-parent events and other ways of showing up when it matters. I’ve see the active participation of fathers grow over the decades to a fully active role in family life. Such an immensely important role requires great sacrifice, like of the love of St. Joseph who risked his life out of love for Jesus Christ.
Fatherhood is a vocation from God; it is sacred, and along with motherhood, is a call to love as God loves. However, fatherhood has taken on interesting dynamics over the past several years. Situation comedies most often depict the father of the family as a self absorbed idiot—who can never figure out what is really going on in his family, and the brunt of all the inside banter between mom and the kids. From Father Knows Best, we’ve moved to Father Knows Nothing.
There are a number or women who seek to have children without any involvement of a man other than that necessitated from biology and preferably taking place in a Petri dish. Imagine answering the question: who was my father?
Good fathers are a necessity for a stable, healthy family. Sadly, there are a growing number of families that do not have a father in the home. Perhaps due to death, or separation/divorce, abuse, or due to child born outside of marriage, the mom must suffer as she tries to do everything she can to be both parents at once. We have also seen the active and fully participating roles of grandfathers and grandmothers grow over the past few decades due to more single mothers in our society—and there are no economic boundaries for this growing trend.
It is no news that children need good fathers and good mothers who see marriage and family life in terms of equality of responsibility—that equality can shift back and forth and take on varied forms—but in the unison and harmony of love.
St. Paul's Letter to the Galatians speaks about equality among all Christians. We are all one, he says, neither Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, we are all one in the Lord. Without such equality, pride sets in and leads to prejudice. And bigotry creates the illusion that we are better than someone else because the other person does not share the same background, profession, race, culture, income or gender, as we do. People become pigeonholed into categories of importance.
In the days of the early Church, prejudice existed within the Roman Society, the Jewish Society and even within the early forming Christian-community, as some thought that Jewish converts to Christianity were better than gentile converts because they would have the mark of the Covenant—the mark of Abraham.
St. Paul shocked his audience when he wrote that before God all people are equal because the only thing that matters is their faith. Faith is a gift offered by God to accept or reject. The important point here is that equality before God is due to God, not to us.
Catholic Christians have grown over the centuries from a small group of followers to over one billion believers. It has also spread from place to place throughout the world taking on the customs and even the looks of various people. Most artistic representations of Jesus show him as a Western European. That is because the vast majority of believers over the past millennium were Western Europeans. Artistic representations of the Lord by such masters as Rembrandt portrayed Jesus as the face of a 17th century Dutchman. Dependence on human strength found the Lord looking like a strong northern Italian with abs of steel --if the artist was Michelangelo or Raphael. But Jesus was not German or Italian; he was Semitic-Jewish, dark skinned-olive complexion, probably dark haired with a large nose (like mine-not my ears though). Gradually, in the mid 19th century, many scholars (primarily from the German school of philosophy, went on a quest to find “the historical Jesus.” Gradually, the Middle-Eastern face of the Lord grew to be a more authentic portrayal of his earthly image. The quest and growth continues.
“Who do you say that I am”?
The work of the Lord in His Church in the world is drawing more and more people from varied backgrounds. It is predicted that the Church in the US will be mainly Hispanic within fifty years. One of the largest, most thriving Catholic areas in the world is the Church in Africa. One of the African cardinals, Cardinal Arinze, was considered by some for the possibility of being elected Pope after the death of John Paul, II. Now 78 years old, and serving once again in the position of Prefect for the Congregation of Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. The Church is also growing rapidly among the people of Asia, Polynesia, and India, and interestingly enough shrinking in Western Europe.
We are all Catholics (universal). Before the Lord, none of us is European, American, Middle Eastern, Hispanic, African, Asian, or Polynesian or whatever. We are all one in Jesus Christ. All other differences between people are insignificant, whether these differences are due to nationality, race, intelligence, profession, gender or whatever new bigotry we come up with to divide us.
Those division and differences must melt away when we hear the Lord ask us: “…who do you say that I am?”
Today we pray that we might look on others and on ourselves with the eyes of Christ—all as one in him. Let’s try to live that answer to his question. Blessings, Fr. Gordon
Back to Discipleship Readings
| 