Fathers will be inspired by the divine model

Every day was Father’s Day for Jesus of Nazareth.

“Didn’t you know I must be about my father’s business?” he asked his mother, who thought she had lost her young son in Jerusalem, only to discover him in the temple, conversing with his elders about the heavenly Father of them all.

On this Father’s Day, the church is not nearly as male-dominated as it was in my youth. Women have brought a welcome dimension to Christian ministry. In the Catholic Church, which refers to its priests as “Father,” nuns are sometimes addressed as “Mother.”

Jesus would be the first to object to depicting God as a mother. Granted, a God who creates men and women alike cannot be limited by gender. To compromise by calling our Creator “it” strips him of personality altogether.

These days, it’s especially useful to think of God as a father, because we have largely misplaced our appreciation of what fathers are for. Increasingly, we have become a society of single mothers and separated fathers. Today, when a single woman’s biological clock approaches the 11th hour, she is often more interested in being a mother than in finding a husband.

At the outset, a father’s contribution to producing a child is laughably small, vastly overshadowed by a wife’s nine months of pregnancy and the pain of childbirth. When an infant enters the world, it already knows its mother but must be introduced to its father.

God was not a stranger to Jesus but a loving, compassionate, responsible, nurturing and forgiving father, whom he shared with every other member of the human family. Jesus’ divine father is the role model for every human father.

Regular readers of this column will recall that, for a time in my early 40s, I was a single parent responsible for raising three little daughters alone. I have now been married for 30 years to the woman who adopted us and became the girls’ mother.

A close neighbor of ours recently found himself in the same situation as a single father. He is an African-American in his 30s, originally from Cameroon, with a very young son and daughter. His pregnant wife was stricken with meningitis earlier this year and died suddenly and painfully. The loss of his wife and unborn child was compounded by the death of his father. Then his sister died, leaving him the guardian of her small son. He also takes responsibility for his own widowed mother.

He’s a blue-collar worker who drives a battered van, relying on his cell phone to earn a living for his growing family. He drives the kids to and from school daily and cooks for them. He has no time for dating.

To soften his children’s grief over their mother’s death, he got them each a puppy, teaching them to be responsible for the dogs. The Rottweiler and Staffordshire terrier are already so big and energetic that they can easily knock the kids over. So guess who has to exercise them on their frequent walks?

Dad does.

Scripps Howard News Service