Liberty, equality, patriarchy

A recording of today's gospel and reflection can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 6: 7-15) sees Jesus teaching the disciples how to pray. In this scene, we hear for the first time the words of the Our Father, the Lord’s prayer, as it is called. We listen again to the seven petitions in which Jesus formulated our dependency on the Father in heaven. And finally, we hear Him underline at the end the parallel structure of forgiveness. We cannot ask forgiveness if we ourselves do not forgive. In that case, let forgiveness be done on earth as it is in heaven, for He is not only our Father but the judge of the universe.

How many petitions could Jesus have included in this prayer! Could He not have had His disciples pray for the blessing of always following Him, or always being born again each day in the Spirit, of always being perfect as the heavenly Father is perfect? No doubt He could. Yet in many ways, all such petitions are already summed up in the petition He gave us. For what is it to follow Him and to be born again in the Spirit if not for the kingdom to come in our hearts?

Still, there is another logic in these petitions that comes from their order in this august prayer and through which we experience once again the pedagogy of the Father. Adopted by God in Christ, we are taught by the first petition to call upon God as our Father. So familiar are we with this idea that we forget the remoteness of the gods in the old pagan religions – remote, that is, unless they were coming to earth on some self-serving adventure of their own or else to trade favours with useful, favoured humans. In Judaism, in contrast, the benign tenderness of God is a tangible thing, as is suggested by the Song of Songs alone. But the emphasis remains on the distance that separates us from God: Uzzah is struck dead for touching the ark of the covenant, and even the High Priest could only enter the Holy of Holies once a year. Now, by Jesus’ own invitation, God becomes our Father – Abba in Aramaic, the word for Daddy. There is the first logic of the gospel: we are invited to the feast to celebrate our return to the arms of our loving Father who is in heaven. Christianity is a homecoming, a reconciliation, but only for those who recognise they are far from home and stand in need of reconciliation.

Thereafter, in the Our Father we honour His name. Who among us offers the prayer of praise as much as we ought? It is the one prayer the angels never tire of which is why their example is held up for us in each Preface at Holy Mass. This is not just a rhetorical flourish before the Eucharistic Prayer; God our Father is also the Lord of all, the One who is above those who are not, to paraphrase His words to St Catherine of Sienna. He is the One on whom all are dependent for existence, even those who deny Him, even – mystery of mysteries - the very devil himself. Holy be the name of the Lord then, and here the Old Testament can teach us much by its legacy of reverence and humility before the ineffable God for whose kingdom we pray and whose will we beg to be done.

For now, we move from God to His creation where we discover the great laws of alignment and communion in His will. Creation is not a world of chaos without order; rather its intrinsic structure points towards the Intelligence who orders it continually; who holds it in being; and in whom all Creation fulfils its purpose. This is the coming of the kingdom, the realisation of God’s purposes in the order of Creation and in the human order – political, social, and individual. Psychological freedom involves the freedom to sin. But authentic freedom, a freedom which is consistent with its own grounding in God’s being, is not freedom to sin but freedom to use our powers to choose what is good, i.e. to return to God

For when He evokes the will of the Father, Jesus is already hinting at the task of redemption and His incarnation. Mankind had sinned and destroyed the order of God, but by the will of God a path of salvation was reestablished:

And He who might the vantage best have took

Found out the remedy.

And, so deep was the logic of that reordering that Jesus said the will of His Father was the very bread He lived on. Not my will by thine be done.

Thereafter, all the other petitions of the Our Father are further petitions of alignment with His holy purposes: His purposes for our material good and our daily bread; His purposes for reconciliation which cuts both ways between God and man and among men; His purposes for our spiritual safety which we obtain through the trial of temptation where God alone can deliver us from the hands of the evil one.

One of the most sinister tendencies in contemporary culture is the contempt for patriarchy; not that men have not been abusive, yet what we might call patriophobia is, so to speak, an attempt to throw out the father with the bathwater. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. But in a return to our Father in heaven, there is the hope that fatherhood on earth can be redeemed along with all the other elements of redemption. Of course, there is a lot of hypocrisy spoken about equality too, but it is often the way that those who feel themselves most hurt by patriarchy are the very ones who unwittingly reassert power in some other form, backed up now by their own grievances. What would it take for us all to realise our own humble condition before the Father and Lord of all?  

Jesus is not ultimately a revolutionary so much as a restorationist, not to restore human dreams of phoney glory and habits of subtly abusive power, but to build sure paths for all to return to the glory of God and the harmony of creation from which they fell by sin. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.