Jesus' insight into the wisdom of fathering like the Father

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/061719.cfm
II Corinthians 6:1-10
Matthew 5:38-42

That innocence in our children, and how we look at their moral struggles with a shared yearning and dread — something parents and children both must attend to — tells us that God shares that with us. We are all God’s children. I could say that God is like us as a parent. More correctly, we are (supposed to be) like him.

The readings for today remind me of how I should react to the consternations in my children. I typically ponder these verses and apply them to strangers I might run into, or to friends who’ve gone off the deep end. Not this time. How do I apply these verses to me and my children?

Even though two of my children are now in their fourth decade, they will remain always my children. Father and child. Twenty-seven to forty-one years between us. It never really gets closer. They seem more innocent than I was at every age, and intensely more thoughtful and concerned than I remember myself. I see them aging, but it does not remove my desire to hover over them and protect them at my expense, because as old as they get I just get older. I will always look more wrinkled. I have even begun to develop that translucent sheen that comes in the later decades. I’ll be gone before it settles upon their skin, I imagine.

While I am no longer innocent, my children seem always to walk and talk with an innocence I vaguely remember. Between us and God the innocence is only ours. God requires no measure for innocence; since he has every truth and all love within him. I, and mine, will always be a child of God. I can never match the goodness and authority of God. That is both appropriate and expected. 

God’s care for me causes me to turn over and over to him, and therefore be loved and washed innocent over and over again. This is the pattern that God teaches us in our own parent/child relationships. Turning to each other, and loving, and washing the sin away. He always is turned toward us, and washes us away as we repent. Every time. Nothing can stop that. The innocence becomes more mature when washed so many time. It turns into a purity, a holiness.

In the Gospel of Matthew, I see myself face to face to my children when Jesus says, “But I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil.” That sounds horrid to say that about my children. And, yet, the evil is just one thing we should allow in our children. Jesus adds three more admonitions to those children of ours, as I have decided to read these verses. We must not return evil for evil when our children are overcome and strike out in anger, or when they are bitter and seek revenge, or in later years when they become oppressively authoritative because they lose confidence and respect for their more apparently sinful father. 

I am not God. Of course not. God is not sinful. Quite often, though, I have not actually been as sinful as my children may perceive. In that I share with God. While many, including my children, have been angry with God’s allowance of evil, I too have allowed evil to take place. We learn to do this, as Jesus advises.

Sometimes my allowance for evil has been just like God would do, respecting free will to betray the truth. I, though, have also triggered evil. God has never done that. It is just a perception, and a mighty false one. Innocence does not understand the allowance of evil. As I grasp the need to allow the unholy and even demonic that’s when my innocence has faded. I know the shared pain of God’s allowance of evil. There is no innocence in it. 

As we age that innocence practically disappears. We know the horrifying truth that evil resides within this life; and is only removed by the cleansing of death. Purity and holiness have a hard rubbed cleanliness, much more formed than raw innocence.

It’s not as bad a topic as it may sound once you realize that God treats us just as we want to treat our own children. That’s how the wisdom of Jesus reminds me of fathering my children.  When I see my children in their evil, not knowing what they are doing, this is how both God and I see what they do. They truly have no idea what they are doing. Just like myself. 

In truth, raging evil is rare in children of all ages. My reactions too often, however, have put in their mind’s eye that their crime fits as a cloak they wear every day. Continual evil is not their life, for either them or me. Their evil and my retorts are mere moments. I desire to only see them as wonderful. Then, those spasmodic moments of shock bring my retort. Each of my retaliations to an evil, however deserved and struggled to reserve in application, still reverberates with a trauma in my children. It leaves a mark. I must display many more turned cheeks and handing over of cloaks and walking along side them to blunt the traumatic retorts of a father’s rage.

Rage may well be necessary. Retaliation? No. We must be clear that with God there is also the necessary traumatic retort. I say necessary, because I distinctly remember a loud “John!” which no one else hears at several instances in my life. Once just last week. The whisper of the Holy Spirit, raised every now and again to a barbed shout, has stopped me in my tracks almost in time. So I would not say that God does not raise his voice in anger. There is, though, no rancor nor spite nor cause for revenge in God. Like holy innocence as purity, holy anger is like nothing else.

Wise words that Jesus gives us, then. Offer no resistance, turn the other cheek, hand over your tunic and cloak, turn a forced march mile into a two mile road trip. This is the stuff of parenting. This is the stuff of divinity. This replaces the seeming necessary retort into a much more thoughtful and nurturing witness of courage, a dampening of evil with calm.

It’s good advice, because I have received the dampening in my own house. My children have responded to my evil in the very way that Jesus’ wisdom urges. They’ve remained with me in love. By dismissing our judgement we accept evil’s temporary outburst with love. 

I think the final verse in today’s Gospel reveals the proper way not to judge anything, evil or not. It puts in perspective the reason for allowing evil by being good. We render acceptance of rage as temporary worry that needs room to explode. Next, we offer giving as a response to insults. At its worse, we finally flatten coercion’s evil power with eager submission.

In a last admonition Jesus provides a response to the evil of judgment, changing the point-of-view of evil from the perpetrator to the respondent. We may believe there is rudeness and hubris in the pleas of our children. If we do not judge what we may not be certain about, then there is only the child asking for a father. “Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn your back on the one who wants to borrow.” 

I wished I was more of that father, but I know the Father of us all has already been up to it. I’ve called on him to repair every failed fathering of mine, and I’m trusting that he has and will respond. 

He’s never turned his back on me. That was just me forgetting who he was. Thankfully, I’m quite practiced in turning back. So it is with my children. Turned backs turning back to each other in love, reaching for the Father of us all.