Staring into the Sun

 See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God. (1 John 3:1 NRSV) 

When we call God “Father”, we have an entire background and tradition behind this description. Many of us have grown up praying to God as our Father (“Father God”, “Heavenly Father” etc.). It is easy to take for granted that, although having some precedent in the Hebrew Bible, this was a revolutionary concept! It was like an explosion going off in the ancient world along with the proclamation of the Good News during the first decades of the church. If we halt and ruminate over this idea, it can open so many rusty doors in our minds and displace our misconceptions of who God really is.  

For many of us, our first instinct concerning God is fear or dread. Much of this may be our inherent alienation from God due to our natural bent as broken rebels. Some of this fear and dread may also come from cultural portrayals and medieval art, we think of an angry, white-bearded man who seems quite annoyed at humanity. Additionally, if you grew up with an absent, critical, or abusive father, these fears become increasingly complicated. 

Yet, the God and Father of our Lord isn’t characterized by these things. Sure, God possess wrath and He is a judge, but His foundational characteristic to Jesus is as a good Father. Jesus passionately seeks to dislodge the false images of His Father in the minds of those who would listen to His teaching, those healed and delivered from sickness and demons by his hands, and those who witnessed loaves and fishes multiply. Jesus’ entire ministry was about re-education and clarification of the Father: 

People needed to be re-taught who God the Father is, they had a legalistic God offered to them by some of Israel’s teachers, One who needed a perfect performance to be happy with men and women. Some of the religious establishment had whole theological systems built like this. For instance, during the Second Temple period, gentiles were to be outside in the “outer courts” of the temple and not be present with the rest of Israel. Jesus combated this popular theology of ethnic purity by actively engaging with Samaritans and other groups who were excluded by those in religious authority.  

People also needed the Hebrew Scriptures clarified, and their image of God aligned with reality. Jesus claims to be sent from the Father and originating with the Father before all things. Therefore, Jesus alone has the correct knowledge to share with us. He alone knows what reality truly is and who God is truly like. God is like staring into the naked sun, we cannot really make anything out other than light, and if we look too long the brilliance of the sun will blind us. The same holds for God, He blazes with incomprehensible light that makes no sense to us. He is infinite; we are not.  

Yet Jesus has always looked into the face of God, in fact He is God! Christ is very much like a glass that has been created to make looking at the sun feasible. Now we aren’t blinded, now we can see what the Father looks like; and he actually looks like Jesus! 

When Jesus was doing good for people, the heart of His Father was in Christ’s healing hands. When Jesus blessed the little children whom his own disciples were annoyed by, God’s heart was taught to everyone in earshot in this moment of clarity. The disciples thought children were a distraction from what Jesus was doing, yet the whole point of Jesus’ arrival was to teach humanity that we are all very much like children in God’s eyes. In fact, we need to approach Him with the heart of a child to come into His Kingdom. What does this mean in light of our negative images of the Father?  

I think to approach Christ and trust Him is to begin a journey into the sun, to see with unfiltered eyes Who God really is. Will we approach him with vulnerability like a child, will we let God be God to us? The first step is always saying “yes”.