Bad Dads
Propers: Palm Sunday of the Passion, AD 2023 A
Homily:
Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.
Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Is God a bad dad?
Such was the question and accusation put forth recently by a former Eastern Orthodox priest, who wrote that God is essentially a failed Father because He is willing to sacrifice His Son for the world.
And what parent would do that, really—offer up their child to be killed for the greater good? I’m not talking about grown sons and daughters who take up risky professions; I’m talking about you giving up your kid, you sacrificing your kid. Would you do that to save a stranger? Would you do that to save the world? Do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few when it’s our own sons or daughters?
Unsurprisingly, in a culture so thoroughly shaped, consciously or otherwise, by Christianity, this is a theme regularly explored in fiction and in literature: Paul Tremblay, Drew Goddard, Ursula K. Le Guin. Most recently, a television show, The Last of Us, based on a videogame of the same name, presents us with a man hired to escort a special child through a postapocalyptic world ravaged by fungal plague.
To make a long story short—and my apologies for spoiling the plot of a 10-year-old game—this young girl is immune to the pandemic, and people want to vivisect her in order to attempt a cure. Will her escort, who has become like a father to her, allow this to happen? Of course not. Who could? What father could? And the story leaves us lingering with the uneasy question: has he killed the world to save a single child?
A decade back I found myself in Yad Vashem, Jerusalem’s Holocaust museum. It wasn’t the first Holocaust museum I’d visited, but one thing that stuck with me, above even the horrors with which I’d already been familiar, was an account of a ghetto at which the Nazis said they would spare the people if they sent out their children. And the leaders of the community—the religious leaders!—counseled them to do so, to sacrifice the youth so that the people could live on. And that sickened me.
Imagine the agony, the terror, the despair that one would have to endure in order to be willing to give up one’s children. I don’t blame the victims; I blame those who made them suffer to such an unimaginable breaking point. And my gut reaction was revulsion. “No, this is wrong,” I wanted to roar. “I would burn the world before I would give up my kids! Fight, damn you, fight!”
Am I a better father than God?
If we think that the Crucifixion is about God sacrificing a perfectly innocent Man, the one whom He calls Son, in order to save a guilty world, then yes, God would be a failed Father. For there is no justice in that—and that’s what we always say, right, that Jesus had to die in order to appease the justice of God? What a load of drek.
There is no justice in murdering an innocent man, period. Imagine if someone killed his neighbor, and rather than bringing the killer to justice, the police instead shot a random person on the street in order to balance the scales. That’s psychosis.
Let me be as clear here as I can: Jesus didn’t have to die in order for us to be forgiven. How do I know that? Because the Gospels clearly witness that He was already running about, forgiving people willy-nilly, as if He were God, for only God can forgive sin. And that is precisely why we killed Him, for acting like a loving God. The Romans crucified Christ for claiming Kingship, for riding triumphally into Jerusalem, but we turned Him over to them because we couldn’t take the truth.
The truth is that Jesus is a not a Man whom God sacrificed in order to slake His bloodlust. Jesus is God—the One God, infinitely beautiful, good, and true—who came down here to forgive us, heal us, enlighten us, raise us up from the dead, and bring us all home in Him. And we killed Him for it! The Cross wasn’t God’s idea; it was ours. It has always been ours. We wanted to kill God. And we did, up there on that Cross; killed Him in the worst way we knew how.
But even that couldn’t stop Him. Why, it barely slowed Him down.
Do not get the Cross backward. Do not invert it, upside-down. It was never about God’s wrath, but ours. God is Love, eternal, pure, and simple. He forgave us even as we murdered Him, forgave us from that Cross, with our nails through His hands. God didn’t kill His Son; God is the Son. He is Emmanuel, God-With-Us. And there is nothing we can do, that could ever stop Him from loving us, ever stop Him from forgiving us, ever stop Him from raising us all up and out of our graves.
God loves you all the way to hell and back. And I promise you, He will burn down everything that separates us from Him, everything that keeps Him from His children; burn the whole bloody world up in the fires of His Spirit, the fires of His love, so that no-one and nothing shall ever escape the white-hot grace of God! That’s what the Cross is: love that cannot die, truth that won’t stay buried, blood and water from the heart of God poured out to save this world.
God loves you more than your mother and your father. God loves you more than you could ever love yourself. God loves you without reserve, without remorse, without the barest hint of hesitation. He flung Himself into death for you. He filled up hell to burst for you. And He will never leave you behind.
Remember this, O most beloved of children. For in the end, there can be no escape.
In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy
Spirit. Amen.
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