THE FATHER AS THE CENTRE OF FOCUS

WEDNESDAY, ELEVENTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME

2 Cor 9:6-11; Ps 112:1-4,9; Mt 6:1-6,16-18

Our Relationship with the Father

We have dwelt on the significant fact that our spiritual life is the life of the Son within us. What guides the development of our spiritual life, therefore, is our relationship with the Father. We noted that the Father has special care for the life of his Son in us and sends us our daily bread for that purpose. Our Lord himself taught us to pray, calling God our Father. The constant and frequent repetition of the prayer of our Lord establishes and reinforces the Father-Son relationship within us. God is called Father for the life and consciousness of the Son to grow and develop within us. Just as the love of the Father in heaven defined the mission of the Son of Man on earth, as Jesus Christ testified himself, saying, ‘I have come, not to do my own will, but the will of the One who sent me,’ the knowledge and love of the Father defines our mission as Christians and continues or extends that of Jesus Christ. So, the less we have the consciousness of our Father in heaven, the less we identify with the mission of the Son on earth, and the more we drift into sin, for sin is a lack of faith in the Son and living away from the will of the Father. “Be careful not to parade your good deeds before men to attract their notice; by doing this you will lose all reward from your Father in heaven.” So, good deeds are not good unless we do them to please our Father in heaven.

Following this, the Lord admonishes us to focus our attention on the Father in doing every good work. “So when you give alms, do not have it trumpeted before you; this is what the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets to win men’s admiration. I tell you solemnly, they have had their reward.” If our giving is not prompted by the desire to please the Father and fulfil his will on earth, to cause people to praise and thank God, then the almsgiving will benefit us nothing but lead us to sin against God. The same applies to the holy activity of prayer, which has a natural focus on God. We can empty prayer of its heavenly value by praying for any other purpose that is not to reach God. “And when you pray, do not imitate the hypocrites: they love to say their prayers standing up in the synagogues and at the street corners for people to see them; I tell you solemnly, they have had their reward.” The same applies to the discipline of fasting; we must fast when we have to fast to seek the face of the Father in heaven. These characteristic activities of a Christian are in secret in the sense that they are interior activities; they are interior because the heavenly Father lives in our interior or spirit through our faith and the love of God poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. Thus, the Christian vocation is a vocation to the awareness and knowledge of the fatherhood of the Father in heaven. The awareness is the operative and stabilizing force or grace in our journey into Jesus Christ.

Saint Paul captures the understanding above in his sayings about sowing and reaping. “Do not forget: thin sowing means thin reaping; the more you sow, the more you reap. Each one should give what he has decided in his own mind, not grudgingly or because he is made to, for God loves a cheerful giver.” The more we understand God to be our Father indeed, the more he draws us into the force-field of his love. The Father loves the Son and gives him all things; the Son, knowing the Father’s love and his inheritance of everything the Father possesses, sows himself in abandonment to accomplish the will of the Father. God draws us into this Father-Son love force field that is the Person of the Holy Spirit. Hence, communion or fellowship belongs to the Holy Spirit, and his presence within us is to cultivate, grow, and develop the communion of the Father and the Son within us, individually and communally. Paul speaks of the solicitude of the Father to grow this communion within us. “And there is no limit to the blessings which God can send you—he will make sure that you will always have all you need for yourselves in every possible circumstance, and still have something to spare for all sorts of good works.” Everything the Father gives us daily is in answer to the prayer of the Son living within us for our daily bread. “The one who provides seed for the Sower and bread for food will provide you with all the seed you want and make the harvest of your good deeds a larger one.”

Let us pray: O God, strength of those who hope in you, graciously hear our prayer and give us the grace to grow in our awareness of your fatherhood, that established in the love you have for your Son, we may follow your commands and please you by our resolve and our deeds. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.