God is a family

588 words, 3 min read

Last Sunday our new parish priest started his homily with reflecting on Jesus’ startling rebuke of St. Peter: “Get behind me, Satan! You are thinking not as God thinks, but as human beings do.” (Mark 8:33). This, our parish priest argued, was akin to him going up to the parents of a disabled child, taking them to one side and saying: “Look, why don’t you put your kid into a home so you can live a calmer, more relaxed life?” The parents would look at him like at an alien and would be as horrified as Jesus was when Peter suggested to him to get out of his impending suffering and death. Peter’s saying “Heaven preserve you, Lord, this must not happen to you.” (Matthew 16:22) was like parents hearing someone telling them to get rid of their child for a quiet life. Our parish priest then went on to develop an edifying line of thought about “thinking as God does” but I saw a different path leading on from such an insightful opening.

What struck me was the wisdom of the simile. Jesus related to the will of his Father in as inalienable and unquestionable a way as a parent relates to their child. Suggesting alternatives to it or a turning away from it then elicits as visceral a reaction as would result from being faced with separation from one’s own kids. Jesus therefore reaches for the most savage label he has at his disposal - Satan. He, who enjoyed direct access to the Father’s will and chose to turn away from it with full knowledge of the consequences. He, about whom Jesus said: “I watched Satan fall like lightning from heaven.” (Luke 10:18). St. Peter must have been well freaked out, as must have Jesus. “How can he say that to me when I just wanted the best for him”; “How can he still not get it?! Hasn’t anything I said to him sunk in?” they may have thought …

Then it seemed to me that this simile points to another angle: that the preference parents have for their children mirrors an essential aspect of the nature of God, whose inner life is that of a family. As St. John Paul II said, “our God in his deepest mystery is not a solitude, but a family, since he has in himself fatherhood, sonship and the essence of the family, which is love.” The Father favors the Son, the Son favors the Father and their preference for each other is the Holy Spirit, who thereby doesn’t remain “unfavored” since he is integral to the preferential relationship of the other two Persons. Thinking about my relationship with my family, I at times wonder about how my manifest preference for them sits with my relationship with everyone else, whom I am called to love equally. What struck me on Sunday is that the solution here is not to diminish my preference for my own family but to realize that every single person I meet is loved by God as his own child. Being a child of God myself, this places everyone else into my immediate family. Having a spouse and children (and parents and siblings) also serves the purpose of making me experience more deeply how it is that the Persons of the Trinity favor and love one another and each one of us. Yet again I return to Patriarch Athenagoras’ dictum: “God loves us all equally, but secretly each one of us is his favorite.”