If it were a conceivable thing that we had to part with all the words of
Scripture save one, and if we were allowed to choose that one, there are
some of us who would elect to retain that great declaration of
Jesus--"If ye being evil know ... how much more ... your heavenly
Father." For, having that, we should still be rich in knowledge of the
Love and Fatherhood of God. We should still know Christ's dominating
conception of God, and have His last and highest word regarding Him. We
should still be able to rise, as Jesus not only warrants but invites us
to do, from the little broken arc of true fatherhood on earth to the
perfect round in Heaven.
At the warm reassuring touch of that "How much more your heavenly
Father" whole systems of brainy divinity vanish away! The truth of the
Fatherhood of God, vouched for and lived on by Jesus, kills men's hard
and unworthy and hurtful thoughts about God as sunshine kills the
creatures that breed and prevail in darkness and ignorance. They can no
more live alongside of a realisation that Christ's name for God is His
true name, and really describes His attitude to all the sons of men,
than the dark, creepy things that live under the stone can remain there
when you turn it over and let in the air and the light.
But, say some, you must not carry the truth of God's Fatherhood too far.
What is too far? I ask. I want to carry it, and I believe Christ means
us to carry it, as far as ever it will stretch, and that is "as far as
the East is from the West." Think of a father's GOOD-WILL. It is
conceivable that other men may do you a deliberate wrong. But you are
entitled to believe that your father won't. You may not understand what
he proposes, but you can be quite sure that he means only your good.
Henry Drummond tells how his early days were made miserable by the
conception he had of God as of some great staring Eye in the heavens
watching all he did. But that is a policeman's eye, not a father's.
There are many tokens that, even yet, we have not realised what these
blessed words of Jesus mean and imply. A mother vainly trying to answer
the old, old question why her little one was taken from her, will say,
"Perhaps I was too fond of him." Or, should sudden sorrow come, the
explanation suggested by the troubled one himself is, "I was too happy."
There are plenty of people who are afraid to declare that they feel very
well or are very happy, in case the upper Powers should hear and send
trouble, apparently out of sheer malice! "Bethankit, what a bonny
creed!" Oh! what a dreadful caricature of God! How it must pain the
Father to hear His children talking so!
There is another mark of fatherhood, as we know it on earth--COMPASSION,
pity, the willingness to forgive. There is no forgiveness on earth like
a father's or a mother's, none so willing, none that will wait so long
and yet give itself without stint at last. Pity, as the world of
business and of ordinary relationship knows it, is at best a transient
emotion. It murmurs a few easy words and then forgets. But parent love
suffereth long and is kind, hopes against hope, and waits and is still
hopeful when every one else has written the offender down irreclaimable.
It is such compassion and pity for us sinners, how great soever our sins
be, that Jesus would have us come for to God in Heaven.
But will not men abuse such patience and long-suffering? it is asked. Is
it not a risky thing to tell them that God is our Father? It is. But it
is the risk that Love takes cheerfully, and that only Love can take.
And when men talk lightly and complacently about the great mercy of God,
there is something, I think, which they have forgotten, namely, that at
the heart of the divine Fatherly forgiveness there lies the shadow of
the Cross. I do not say that in any conventional sense. I say it
because I have seen for myself that at the heart of all true earthly
forgiveness of a fatherly sort there lies this same mysterious shadow.
Shall not the father forgive his returning prodigal? Yea, verily, and
with all his heart. But, ah, before that, think how the father has
suffered with his son, and for his son. The prodigal's shame is the
father's shame too, and lies heavy on his heart. And it is out of a
chamber where he and that pain have long been companions that the
earthly father issues to welcome and receive at last the lad who has
sought his face penitent and in his right mind. The welcome is real.
The forgiveness is full and free. And yet behind it there is sacrifice.
The price of it is suffering. Aback of it lies--the Cross! That is what
silences cheap thinking and glib speech about the forgiveness of God.
If God's long-suffering be like a father's here, it is, first, long
suffering.
The danger, however, is not that we abuse God's grace knowingly and in
callous complacency. Far more is it, I think, that we never actually
accept and realise and build our lives upon the gracious compassion of
the Heavenly Father and His willingness to forgive.
Every parent ought to know Coventry Patmore's beautiful lyric, "The
Toys." In it a father tells how, when his little son had been
disobedient again and again, he struck him, and sent him with hard words
and unkissed to bed--"his mother, who was patient, being dead." And
when, later, he went upstairs to see him, he found him asleep, his
lashes still wet with tears, and--what touched him most--on a table
beside his bed all his little treasures heaped together to comfort his
sad heart--a box of counters, and a red-veined stone, a piece of glass
abraded by the beach, and six or seven shells, a bottle with blue bells,
and two French copper coins--all his little store of precious things.
So when that night I prayed
To God, I wept and said--
"Ah, when at last we lie with tranced breath,
Not vexing Thee in death,
And Thou rememberest of what toys
We made our joys,
How weakly understood
Thy great commanded good,
Then, fatherly not less
Than I, whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,
Thou'lt leave Thy wrath and say:
'I will be sorry for their childishness.'"
One word more about our Father's SILENCE. Our fathers here on earth had
their silences when we were children. We asked him for something that
we wanted very much. And he gave no reply. We went on asking. We
expected to get what we had set our hearts on. He heard us hoping and
believing that this good thing would come to us, and he held his peace.
But we knew that silence, and we trusted it. We were quite sure that he
would have told us if we were deceiving ourselves, that his gift, when
it came, would, at least, not be a mere mockery of our hopes.
And I often think of these words of Christ's, "If a son shall ask bread
of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone?" when I stand
by a graveside, and speak the words of radiant hope with which we lay
our beloved to rest. Our Father hears us speak that hope. He has heard
hearts in an agony through all the generations wish that it might be
true--that this bleak fact of Death is not the end, but only the
beginning of a better thing. But He keeps silence. We have no sure
proof, only the blessed hope of the Christian evangel.
He keeps silence. But, my brethren, can we not trust that silence since
it is our Father's? We have asked this bread in our pain and through
our tears. We have asked it because it seems to us we need it so. And
whatever gift His silence hides, this at least is certain, it is not, it
cannot be, only a stone.