What does the Church teach about the Father of Jesus Christ? Part Two

Let us begin by recalling the words of the Nicene Creed that are the focus of this series:

I believe in one God,
the Father almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all things visible and invisible.

In the last post, we focused in on the words “one God”.   Tonight, we will focus in on the word “Father”.

God is one, but in three divine persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  This is the central mystery of the entire Christian faith, and it is the central message of Divine Revelation.    When we spoke in the last series about Christ, who is the Son, we made some allusions to his relationship to the Father.   Here is one that is important for our purposes here as we discuss the Father:

 Jesus reveals himself as the Son, and therefore, reveals God as Father.   He is the reason God is Father, and therefore, has a special understanding of him.

Now it is very important to note something here.   As the Catechism notes in #238, many religions invoke God as Father, but more in the sense of being the creator of things, the first origin of everything, and a transcendent authority.   And some may even add to that a sense of parental care for the world and his children in it.   However, Jesus reveals God as Father in a whole new sense, as one who is rightly called Father because he has a Son.   God is not just Father because he created the world, or even because he cares for it, but rather, again, because he has a Son.  This is what is utterly unique about Christianity amongst all the world religions.  This notion of divine sonship in God may be tough to grasp, but trying to come to some understanding of it, with the help of divine grace, is a task that can bring us more joy than any other task we will ever take.

As we said before, Jesus is begotten of the Father, not created, so he always existed in time.  The Father begets the son, and the love between them is the Holy Spirit.   The Father, therefore, in the words of the Catechism (#245) is “the source and origin of the whole divinity.”    We also read the relationship between the three explained this way (#254):  "It is the Father who generates, the Son who is begotten, and the Holy Spirit who proceeds." 

It is the Father who created the world, and creates our life.  (We will speak more about creation later in this series.)  He is the ultimate decision maker.  But everything he does is through the Son, in the power of the Holy Spirit.   Or, put, another way as we read in #258:  Thus the Church confesses, following the New Testament, "one God and Father from whom all things are, and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom all things are, and one Holy Spirit in whom all things are".

We all came from the heavenly Father.   We owe everything to him.

The Catechism notes that because of fallen human nature, the ideal of fatherhood is not always lived out as it should be in the world today.  And because of that, some people may have difficulty relating to God as Father.    The Catechism addresses this reality in in #239:   God's parental tenderness can also be expressed by the image of motherhood, which emphasizes God's immanence, the intimacy between Creator and creature. The language of faith thus draws on the human experience of parents, who are in a way the first representatives of God for man. But this experience also tells us that human parents are fallible and can disfigure the face of fatherhood and motherhood. We ought therefore to recall that God transcends the human distinction between the sexes. He is neither man nor woman: he is God. He also transcends human fatherhood and motherhood, although he is their origin and standard: no one is father as God is Father.

Jesus reveals God as Father, and so we should call him that.  However, the Father transcends human fatherhood and so calling God Father is not quite the same as calling our earthly parents Father, even though there are similarities.  Therefore, if we have not had the best experiences with our earthly fathers, we still can relate to the Father because he transcends motherhood and fatherhood as we know it, but we can incorporate images from both, even as we call him Father.

It is important that society come back to acknowledge God as Father not just for the standard "return to morality" reasons, or "to stop the erosion of family life" reasons, important as they both are.  What is even more important, I think,  is that we come to grips with the reality that we have a Father who loves us as his own, cares for us, and is a God of relationship, who wants to have one with us.  This can help us deal with the reality of the loneliness and isolation so many of us experience.  By coming to know God as Father, and telling others about him, we can help make the world a little less lonely, and we can become more of the human family God wants us to be.

In the next post, we will look at God as “almighty”.

Joseph, foster father of the Son of God, pray for us.


(The attached painting is “God the Father” by Giovanni Domenico.)