Taking Courage in the Father’s Paternal Love, Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time (A), June 21, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
June 21, 2020
Jer 20:10-13, Ps 69, Rom 5:12-15, Mt 10:26-33

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today the Liturgy of the Word begins with fear. The prophet Jeremiah describes hearing the whispers of many, “Terror on every side!” as those who were his friends prepare to denounce him and watch for every misstep to take vengeance on him. The reason for their persecution, he could say with the words of the Psalm, was, “For your sake,” O Lord, “I bear insult and shame covers my face. I have become an outcast to my brothers, a stranger to my mother’s children. … The insults of those who blaspheme you fall upon me.” And that had led him to being assailed by fear at the cost of preaching, living and witnessing to faith.
• In the Gospel, Jesus is giving the instructions to the apostles right before sending them out to proclaim the Kingdom for the first time. He knows they, too, are full of fear. They know that Jesus himself has already been attacked by the learned Scribes, the meticulous Pharisees, the lax Sadducees and the corrupt Herodians and they had too much common sense not to know what awaited them. And so Jesus spoke right to those fears, saying, “Fear no one. … What I saw to you in the darkness, speak in the light; what you hear whispered, proclaim on the housetops. And do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; be afraid, rather, of the one who can destroy both body and soul in Gehenna.”
• At first glance it seems contradictory for him to say, almost in the same sentence, “Fear no one” and then “Be afraid of the one who can destroy body and soul.” But that depends on whom he is referring to as the annihilator of body and soul. If we think it’s the devil, then it would be contradictory, but the devil can harass and torment but not destroy. The one who can destroy is solely the One who created in the first place, God. And Jesus, immediately after saying, “Fear no one” to “Be afraid of [God],” pivots to talking about that God’s qualities to show what type of fear we should have. He asks, “Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin? Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge. … You are worth more than many sparrows!” Sparrows were inexpensive, almost worthless, at Jesus’ time. When one was bought, another would often be thrown in for free, because the owner was looking for an opportunity to get rid of them. But they weren’t insignificant to God. God would pay attention to anyone’s falling to the ground or flying upward. In the same way, he cares about our every movement. We are precious to him. The second image is, for those like me who have God as a barber, even more evocative. Jesus says, “Even all the hairs of your head are counted.” Blondes have 150,000 follicles, brunettes 110,000, black-haired people 100,000, red-haired men and women 90,000. The typical young adult and adult loses 25 a day. My first year in seminary, I would look at the pillow each morning and notice hundreds. Yet God keeps track. He loves us that much. And so when Jesus says we need to fear him, we don’t have to be afraid of him like we fear torturers or the devil. We have to have a holy awe of him. This is the gift of fear of the Lord that the Holy Spirit gives us. Rather than being afraid of those who can harm the body, we need to be pay far greater attention to God, Jesus is saying, because he is the one who gives us courage.
• The answer to our fears comes from recognizing and remaining in the love of God the Father whom Jesus came to reveal. This is the Father who, in response to the sin and death that entered the world through the trespass of Adam, gave a “gift … not like the transgression,” namely, “the gracious gift of the one man Jesus Christ” who forgave those sins and restored us to life. When Jeremiah prayed at the end of today’s passage, “Let me witness the vengeance you take on them,” little did he foresee that that revenge would happen on Calvary, when God responded to evil with merciful love, to death with life. Because the God whom Jesus calls us to fear “so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that whoever believes in him might not perish but have eternal life.”
• At a time in which so many are afraid — afraid of suffering and death from the pandemic, afraid of violence from mobs or police who do not protect and serve, afraid for the future with so many serious fissures in national and global society, in addition to all of the routine fears that people over family, work, school and health, we hear Jesus remind us “Do not be afraid” because we are worth so much to God, worth not only many sparrows but the life of his only begotten Son.
• Today on Father’s Day, therefore, if we’re not going to be afraid, it’s crucial for us to ponder the love of the One from whom every fatherhood in heaven and on earth draws its name (Eph 3:15). This is even more important in this year in which we mark the 150^th Anniversary of St. Joseph’s being proclaimed patron of the universal Church. St. Joseph was an earthly icon of the love of God the Father in providing for, protecting and raising the eternal Son according to his humanity. That’s the reason why, 150 years ago, as the Church faced serious crises inside and outside the Church, Blessed Pope Pius IX placed the whole Church under his fatherly protection. God the Father was so confident in Joseph’s love for the Holy Family that he did not tell him early to flee from Herod’s henchmen, but waited until the last second, in a dream, and Joseph obeyed immediately, getting the baby Jesus and Mary up and fleeing with them across the desert into Egypt. Blessed Pius IX, and the Church with him, had a similar confidence in St. Joseph’s protecting Christ’s mystical body. His paternal love is an image of God the Father’s love.
• Focusing on God the Father’s fatherly love is also key because so many of the problems society faces today come precisely from a crisis in fatherhood. Cardinal Ratzinger said in a remarkable March 15, 2000 speech in the Cathedral of Palermo, Sicily, “The crisis of fatherhood we are living today is an element, perhaps the most important, threatening man in his humanity.” The crisis of fatherhood facing modern society — a true “dissolution of fatherhood” — comes, the future Pope Benedict XVI continued, from reducing paternity to a merely biological phenomenon, as an act of generation, sometimes even carried out in a laboratory, without its human and spiritual dimensions. That reduction not only leads to the “dissolution of what it means to be a son or a daughter,” but, on a spiritual plane, impedes our ability to relate to God as he is and revealed himself. God, he underlined, “willed to manifest and describe himself as Father.” Human fatherhood, like St. Joseph’s fatherhood, provides us an analogy to understand the fatherhood of God, but “when human fatherhood has dissolved, all statements about God the Father are empty.” The crisis of fatherhood, therefore, when fathers are absent, abusive, deadbeat or otherwise irresponsible, can leave the human person confused about God and himself. That’s why, he argued, the crisis of paternity is perhaps the most important element threatening the human person and society.
• The consequences of this dissolution of fatherhood are great. We see it in the explosion of kids born out of wedlock (40 percent in 2014 compared to 6 percent in 1960; It’s 53% among Latinos and 71% for the Black community). Right now in the US 43% of US children live without their father. We see the effects of fatherlessness in much higher rates of youth violence, crime, incarcerations, sexual abuse, neglect, drugs, suicides, homelessness, runaways, behavioral disorders, obesity, school suspensions, staying back in school and school dropouts, child poverty, promiscuity, teenage pregnancy. One of the deeper explanations of what is happening in society over the course of this last month with regard to mob violence is a lack of the type of loving discipline fathers normally impart. Tearing down statues of so many figures from our national history, including George Washington, is a form of parricide. And such an eradication of a sense of national fatherhood has its spiritual roots in a sense of fatherlessness and a lack of fatherly love received, lived and imitated.
• David Blankenhorn in his acclaimed book “Fatherless in America” provided the sociological premises to the Cardinal Ratzinger’s theological conclusion. Blankenhorn argued that fathers are indispensable for the good of society and that unless we, as a society, recapture the idea and value of fatherhood, our society will continue to disintegrate with devastating consequences. There is a contemporary notion, he noted, that fathers are no longer necessary; fatherhood has been reduced to a biological act, with the expression ‘to father a child’ today basically referring just to procreation. The basic belief is that a dad is superfluous; a good dad in a child’s life may be advantageous but it isn’t necessary. While our culture’s failure to appreciate the role of fathers has often been experienced in law and court decisions with great sadness by many dads who are impelled inwardly to care for their children, it has also led to fathers who might need external help to fulfill their paternal responsibilities to become without it even more irresponsible. Blankenhorn’s intercultural and historical analysis showed that in most cultures men do not volunteer for the paternal responsibilities of raising children; they need, rather, to be conscripted into it by cultural support and pressure. The supreme test of any civilization, he said, is whether it can socialize men by teaching them to be fathers — creating a culture in which men acknowledge their paternity and willingly nurture their offspring. That cultural support has been fading away. Some might say that it has evaporated in many of the mobs. And so it’s essential for the Church, which is meant to continue Jesus’ Mission of revealing the face of the Father to the world, of helping us to realize that the Father loves us just like he loved Jesus, to focus on the importance of fatherhood.
• Pope Benedict in a 2012 General Audience spoke about the greatness of fatherhood in the divine plan. “Perhaps people today,” he said, “fail to perceive the beauty, greatness and profound consolation contained in the word ‘father’ with which we can turn to God in prayer because today the father figure is often not sufficiently present and all too often is not sufficiently positive in daily life. … We can learn from Jesus Himself, and from His filial relationship with God, what being a ‘father’ truly means, and the true nature of the Father who is in heaven. Critics of religion have said that to speak of the ‘Father,’ of God, would be a projection of our human fathers onto heavenly realities. But the opposite is true: in the Gospel, Christ shows us who a father is and what a true father is like, so that we may sense what true fatherhood is, and also learn true fatherhood.” 
What does Jesus reveal about God the Father and the way he loves his children? We can focus on ten elements:
  • First, the Father takes delight in his children. “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased,” God the Father thunders at Jesus’ baptism (Mt 3:17). Fathers must express their love for and joy in their children. This is the basic underpinning for all paternal interactions.
  • Second, God the Father loves unconditionally. Jesus says he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the just and on the unjust (Mt 5:45). So fathers must love children who are easy or difficult to love.
  • Third, the Father cares about every one of his children, not wanting one to perish (Mt 18:14). None of us is a number. Each of us is worth more than many sparrows.
  • Fourth, the Father is generous. Even more than parents know how to give good gifts to their children, he will give of himself to all his children who ask (Mt 6:26; 7:11).
  • Fifth, God the Father is observant. He sees what is done in secret and rewards. He pays such good attention that he knows what is needed even before it is asked (Mt 6:4, 8).
  • Sixth, God the Father teaches those who are docile (Mt 11:25-26; Mt 16-17; Jn 6:44-46). Fathers always seek to pass on God’s wisdom.
  • Seventh, God the Father is merciful. Human fathers are explicitly called to be as merciful as he is (Lk 6:36).
  • Eighth, God the Father disciplines out of love. We see this throughout the Old Testament. “What son is there whom his father does not discipline?,” the Letter to the Hebrews queries (12:5-11). There can be no disciples without loving discipline. Fathers train their children to be disciples through loving children enough to correct wayward behavior and show and incentivize good.
  • Ninth, the Father works. “My Father is working still,” Jesus says (Jn 5:17). It’s key for fathers to be hard-workers and to help their kids become hard workers, in the image of Christ who imitated his Father’s and foster father’s hard work, because work is part of the human vocation.
  • Lastly, God the Father wants to share life to the full with his children (Jn 6:40). Human fathers should likewise make it their will and desire to share their earthly life with their children and strive with their children to share eternal life together.
• All of these are basically illustrations of how God the Father fulfills what everyone knows are the two most essential duties of a dad, to provide and protect. Jesus can tell us not to be afraid because God the Father will provide and protect us, because he knows us intimately down to our last strand of hair. Fifteen times in the Gospel, in fact, Jesus tells us not to be afraid, and almost every time he returns to the reason not to fear, because our Father in heaven will be there for us. In the Sermon on the Mount, he tells us not to worry about what we will eat or drink or wear — things we really need — because that same Father who clothes the lilies of the field knows what we need and will take care of us (Mt 6:28-32). He tells us we shouldn’t even fear suffering and physical death, terror on every side, because not even death can separate us from our Father’s love (Rom 8:38-39).
• But as important as that work is, Jesus didn’t come merely to reveal the Father. He came to bring us into a relationship with the Father. He came to show us how to receive the Father’s love and live in it. He did this by showing us how to pray to the Father. Jesus was constantly showing us by example how to turn to God the Father. All of his recorded prayers are explicitly to the Father. “I rejoice, Father, Lord of heaven and earth for what you have hidden from the wise and the clever, you have revealed to the merest of children. Yes, Father, such was your gracious will!” “Father, I thank you for having heard me. I know that you always hear me. But I have said this so that they might believe that you sent me.” “Father, glorify your Son with the glory he had before the foundation of the world.” “Father, may they be one, just as I am in you and you are in me … so that the world may know that you sent me and that you love them just like you love me.” “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” Jesus’ intimate, filial relationship to the Father was so moving that the disciples asked Him to teach them how to pray and that’s when he replied, “When you pray, say, “Father…” “Father of us, who are in heaven, hallowed be thy name.” The Our Father teaches us how to enter into a dialogue of life with God. It begins with “fearing him” with holy awe, remembering he is in heaven, seeking his name (not ours) to be hallowed, his kingdom (not ours) to come, his will (not ours) to be done. Then we focus on how he provides: “Gives us today our daily bread.” On his mercy: “Forgive us our trespasses.” On his protection: “Do not let us fall when tempted and deliver us from evil.” Jesus teaches us through prayer the way to make every day Father’s Day. He teaches us the way not to fear anyone.
• And so today on this Father’s Day, we thank God the Father for the gift of his fatherly love as we ask anew for his fatherly blessing. And he gives it to us through Jesus’ own fatherhood, seen in how Jesus gives us life. A year before Jesus gave us his Body and Blood for the first time in the Upper Room, he described the Eucharist in the synagogue in Capernaum. There he said, “Just as the Father has life and I have life because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will have life because of me.” To be a Father is to communicate life and Jesus gives us that life in the Sacraments. This life is eternal, and something that should strengthen us, just like it strengthen Jesus’ first followers, since we know that not even crucifixion can extinguish that life! In the midst of so much fear, this is the source of our courage. And this is the means by which we are able to join Jesus in drawing strength from his life-giving relationship with God the Father, from whom every fatherhood on heaven and earth takes its name!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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