09 MARCH 2016. WEDNESDAY, WEEK 4 OF LENT

1.Isaiah 49:8-15

Gospel: John 5:17-30

                             "The big picture"

Dear friends as we continue meditating on the mysteries of our salvation more especially in this Lenten season, from our readings today we hear Isaiah's vision of his people returning from exile and today's section from St. John both invite us to see the larger picture. First and foremost, the prophet is having the image of God splitting the mountains to bring his people home from afar. Prophet Isaiah in the same thinking imagines God as a mother, tenderly loving the child of her womb. Even if these images are mismatched, however, they tend to serve and depict the saving mysteries of the almighty God. Likewise, in the Gospel, John the evangelist portrays the equality of the Father and the Son, alongside the subordination of Jesus to the Father. Questions about life and death, judgment and resurrection, sin and grace, heaven and damnation, life received and life possessed are actually the subjects of John's contemplation. Such are possibilities of our own life.

                                    

What is the image of God the Father to us?

The image of God we find in today's first reading is the one of a mother cherishing a child in her womb and giving life to her child, even so more does God cherish us and work to bring us to fullness of life. God guides us to springs of water. In the prayer of our father when we pray, " your will be done," we pray that the culture of life should prevail over the culture of death. We are also committing ourselves to doing God's will by protecting life, by bringing life to others, by helping others to life fully human lives, lives that are shaped by the Holy Spirit and lead to eternal life.

Someone once said that fathers are fading out of the world today. Many of them are becoming invisible in their families. They leave home for work before  the children are awake. They return home but their children have gone back to bed. Unless fathers make a special effort they may seldom even see their children. There are even cartoons that habitually show fathers as rather stupid, absurd and inept figures.

One of the main reasons why we have negative images about God is our tendency to identify Him with the people we look up to, like fathers, having the unloving characteristics. We tend to believe that God is going to treat us as our fathers do. However, intensive clinical studies on the development of people's images of God show that it is not simple. Somebody said that one psychologist found that this spiritual development of the God image is more of an emotional process than an intellectual one. This is because our negative images of God are rooted in our emotional hurts and destructive patterns of relating  to people that we carry with us from our past.

Imagine a seven-year-old little girl who has known only rejection and abuse from her father whom she loves dearly. And then at a Catechism class she is taught that God is her Heavenly Father. What is her perception of Him going to be? Based on her experience with her natural father, she will see God as an unstable, rejecting, abusing person that she cannot trust. Consider just a few ways in which our image of our father possibly may have affected our perception of God which in turn affects our self-image. If this is the case, then what parents nowadays, especially fathers, need are helps, support and not ridicule and blame.