July 29, 2007 Sunday: 17th Sunday Ordinary (C)
When I was 6 years old, my dad bought a paper airplane kit for a dollar. He promised that he would help me put together the airplane kit on the weekend. From then on, I looked forward to the weekend. But one weekend passed and the second weekend passed, and dad said he was too tired and too busy to help me. I nagged and nagged and got another promise that the next Saturday morning, he was going to help me. Well, that Saturday came, and dad was sleeping past noon because he came in late the night before. By 10am on Saturday, my anger began to build up as he was sleeping and snoring. And at noon, I was ready to fume my hot steam temper-tantrum. Just as he was waking up and sitting up, I took the paper airplane kit and ripped it in a million pieces right in front of him. My dad did not know what was going on. He probably thought “Why is this kid so angry over a one dollar paper airplane kit?” And he probably brushed it off from his memory. But for an impressionable child who looked up to the father, the ripping of the airplane kit was a solemn declaration that the father cannot be trusted with promises. And that was the image that I had brought into my faith.
All of us bring our own image of our fathers into our faith as well. Many of us have dependable, compassionate, funny, and trustworthy fathers. And so when we pray the prayer, 'Our Father', we can picture God the Father as dependable, compassionate, and trustworthy. Some of us have fathers who were strict and authoritarian. And so we approach God the Father just as Abraham did in today's first reading with awe, fear, and trembling—a God who was mighty in power, swift with justice, and exact in punishment. And some of us have fathers who were absent from our lives. And our image of God the Father is God who is irrelevant because he is never there for us. But is our own experience the true measure of who God the Father truly is? To where or to whom can we turn to learn about what God the Father is truly like?
That is the question the disciples were asking Jesus today in the Gospel. “Lord, teach us to pray.” The disciples have noticed over many months that Jesus would sneak away early in the morning and late at night to pray. They assumed that Jesus was praying to Yahweh, like all Jewish people did for thousands of years since the days of Abraham. But Jesus tells them, “When you pray, say: Father...” Many times the disciples heard Jesus refer himself as the Son of the God Most High. God as the Father is a new revelation. For thousands of years, Jewish people would dare not utter God's name. When Moses asked for God's name in the presence of the burning bush, all he got was, “I am.” Now, Jesus confidently instructs all of his disciple to approach God as Father, Abba, daddy. How come for thousands of years, Jewish people have been instructed not to utter God's name, and now with arrival of Jesus they are to call God as Father, Abba, daddy. Where can we turn to find an explanation for this? The Mass tells the whole story.
From the time of the Last Supper when the Eucharist was first instituted, the mass has been, is, and always will be a loving dialogue between the Son and the Father. And their dialogue is about us, their children. The mass tells the story of God the Father heart broken over his children and their condition of sin. By our own choice, we separated ourselves from the Father through our sin, and we live as though he does not exist—and what a tragedy, the children not knowing who their Father is! And the Son responds to the Father's grief by offering himself to become like one of us, to reveal who the Father is to us. Then the Son offers himself as a sacrifice on the altar of the cross to take away the sins of his children. The Son laid his own life down so that we can be together with the Father. Regardless of whether the mass is said in Aramaic, Greek, Latin, or English, and regardless of whether it is a Byzantine Rite mass, a Greek Orthodox mass, a Tridentine Latin mass, or a Gospel mass, the essence of every mass is that the Father so loved all his children that He sent his only Son, not to condemn but to save them. The Son then responds by lovingly sacrificing himself on behalf of all of God's children because he loved the Father.
If we have ears to hear Jesus speaking to the Father during the mass, we would hear the following. Father, you sent me here on earth because you loved Paul so much. And I love Paul so much that I'm laying down my own life for him. Forgive him Father, for he does not know what he is doing. Father, when Paul takes my body and blood in the Eucharist, restore him, give him the grace to love others as You love Me. If we realize what the Father and the Son are doing and have done for us, we would cry for joy. We would look forward to every mass. How could I not trust such a father who gives so much, yet I give so little in return.
Eternal Father, I offer you the body and blood, Soul and Divinity of Your dearly beloved Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, in atonement for our sins and those of the whole world.
For the sake of His sorrowful Passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world.
