The Loving Father

“When he saw the crowd, he had compassion for them because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”Matthew 9.36

My father worked for many years as the research director of a chemical company.It was a small company and my father was involved in all the things going on there, not just in his labs but in the rail yard where the raw materials arrived, the factory where products were formulated and the loading docks where they were put on trucks for shipment.A chemical factory can be a dangerous place. There were, of course, the periodic explosions. More than once a train derailed and plowed through a building. Sometimes there were fatal accidents. A worker had his head blown off when he started welding in a holding tank from which he mistakenly thought the highly explosive monomer had been removed.Another time, when I was a junior in high school, a crane operator accidentally dropped a steel beam that landed on, and instantly killed, a young factory worker. My father was the first one to reach the victim and ascertain that he was dead. The plant closed early that sad day and my father came home late in the afternoon.

As it happened, I hadn’t gotten home from school yet. I had stayed late, involved in some extracurricular activity - maybe detention. There wasn’t anything unusual about this; I often got home that late. But when he arrived home and found out I hadn’t come home from school yet my father got back in his car and started to drive around, looking for me. He found me walking along the street on my way home, stopped and told me to get in the car and drove me home.

It was a strange feeling when I heard about the accident, and figured out what was going on, that my father’s response to the death he saw at the plant was to go looking for me to make sure I was safe.It wasn’t that I didn’t know until then that he cared, but my father wasn’t prone to worries and anxieties, least of all irrational ones. He wasn’t much for overt expressions of love and concern, or of any emotions. All that was my mother’s speciality.I knew, in a taking it for granted way, that my father loved me, but to me he was always invulnerable, immutable, rational, in control. It was shocking to see his usually concealed care exposed, his strength made vulnerable. It was both comforting and disconcerting to see myself, through his eyes, a hostage to fortune, the risk of love.

In today’s Gospel, the people to whom Jesus brings the kingdom of God are harassed and helpless; they’re lost; they don’t know which end is up. They’re like sheep without a shepherd, like children without a father.They are the most unlikely citizens of God’s kingdom. Surely they have not kept the covenant; they have not been righteous and faithful. Yet the kingdom arrives: Jesus is not announcing some future event; in his words and actions he is making the kingdom’s presence a reality.The word he teaches in the synagogues, the good news he proclaims, is that God the seemingly absent Father has come looking for them.The tangible sign that it is so: he cures every disease and sickness, showing that the time when he will heal and make whole is truly at hand.It is in their very unworthiness and hopelessness that the people are ready for the coming of God. As St. Paul says in Romans “Christ died for the ungodly.”God comes to save us when he is least expected and when we least deserve it.The Father’s love does not weigh the worthiness; it only responds to the need.

Matthew tells us that when Jesus saw the sorry state the people were in, he had compassion for them; he was moved to pity; it hurt him, he suffered with them. It used to be that in Christian theology, only the incarnate Son is moved to feel compassion, only Jesus suffers.God the Father is immutable and impassible; “perfect being,” he is beyond being affected by human grief and sorrow; he is immovable and passionless.(The extreme version of this was 16^th century extra Calvinisticum, the “Calvinist extra,” so called by the Lutherans who rejected it, the doctrine that while the second person of the Trinity was truly present in Jesus, he was never – whatever this means – fully contained in Jesus; after the incarnation the infinite Son of God continued to be God above and beyond the finite flesh of Jesus of Nazareth. So when Jesus enters into human life, suffers and dies, it wasn’t even the whole Second Person of the Godhead, but only the human part of him that suffers and dies.)Recently, these ideas have come on hard times and the ascendant view is thatGod through and throughis moved to sorrow, grief and pain by the human condition. God the Father suffers with and for “harassed and helpless” humanity.It is the very being and nature of God, Father, Son and Spirit,to make the pain of his creatures his own and to take the burden of their sin into himself.As Henri Nouwen said “From the deep inner place where love embraces all human grief, the Father reaches out to his children” (The Return of the Prodigal Son, 95).

We can hardly think about the Father God who comes to us without invoking the story of the prodigal son: “While he was still a long way off the father saw him and was moved with pity.He ran to the boy, clasped him in his arms and kissed him”(Luke 15.20).Worn smooth with time and repetition, the sharp edges of this story need to be rediscovered.It’s a story about the love of God. How different it would have to be to be at all realistic about human behavior, about human love with its necessary terms and conditions: the son doesn’t really repent, at least not for long. He moves the pigs and his freeloading friends and a few harlots into the house, runs up huge charges on his enabling father’s MasterCard, wrecks his brother’s car while DUI, constantly gets bailed out by the mother with whom he is co-dependent and in whose eyes he can do no wrong, in family therapy announces that everything’s their fault because they always loved the older brother best…and generally makes everyone’s life miserable without end.God’s unconditional love for us, seen in human terms, is ill-considered, reckless, oblivious to the realities of the human condition.No wonder that the religious, including any number of Christians, are always ready to bury the appalling news that God’s love is poured out on the worthless, the unrighteous, on those who ignore, reject and despise him, without stint and without qualification.This prodigal God won’t keep his place. He won’t be the god of human expectations, but the true God of endless mercy, always at risk for love.

Thesimple truth is that God loves us as we are.He seeks us, helpless and lost, and gives us his life.He picks up broken humanity from the ground and makes it part of himself.Sometimes we might start to think we understand this, but we don’t; it’s a great mystery, the mystery of the Father’s love, of the gift of Christ, of the elusively present Spirit.Part of that mystery lies in the paradox of God’s power and God’s weakness.In the last analysis, only God can love this way without creating havoc. His mighty love is a power that transforms; it heals, makes whole and reshapes with gratitude those it saves.

There is also the power that God gives up in being the God who loves.Speaking at Henri Nouwen’s funeral, Jean Venier said“God is not a secure God up there telling everybody what to do, but a God in anguish, yearning for love; a God who is not understood, a God on whom people have put labels. Our God is a lover, a wounded lover. ”Too often, we let fatally sensible religion get in the way of the gospel, propagating a picture of God as remote, unmoved, powerful,and judging, a God who condemns and rejects.This is a picture that for many elicits disbelief and despair, for it portrays a God who does nothing to save, a God who in fact cannot save, a God who is merely God, not the Father.The writer Michael Thomas Ford, who grew up gay in a conservative religious community was, he says, “determined…to believe the whole God thing was a lot of nonsense;”he had known only “a lot of people who either feared God or used him as a weapon” (The Little Book of Neuroses, 55).Only the God who makes himself weak, who takes the risk of loving the likes of us, is strong enough to save us. Only that God is worth believing in.

A world of people hurt and needy, the same world Jesus walked, and talked and healed in so many centuries ago, has no use for, and no patience with, a God who is powerful and safe.Yet it hopes against the odds for the real God, the loving Father vulnerable in love who offers the sacrificial Son and sends the life sustaining Spirit.In her novel The Abyss one of Marguerite Yourencar’s characters asks “How many sufferers who are incensed when we speak of an almighty God would rush from the depths of their own distress to succor him in his frailty?”

The suffering God whose human face is Jesus is filled with compassion by the lost sheep of the house of Israel, but he does not see them from afar. He is with them, one of them: one of us, finally giving himself completely for all.May he give us the grace to join him in his works of love.

Amen.

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