God the Father Almighty

General Audience: January 30, 2013

In this week's audience, Pope Benedict XVI spoke about the specific affirmation of the Creed that  God is "Father."

Even though we pray the Our Father every day at Mass and at other times, many people don't have a sense of what it means to call God "Father" because the meaning of paternity has been obscured in our times.  Oftentimes men have work obligations which keep them away from their families, but other factors influence the father-child relationship adversely, too, such as the distraction and invasion of mass media into the private homes of people.  If we don't have adequate models of fatherhood, it is difficult to imagine what God as "Father" means.

We can learn a great deal, however, and overcome these limitations by reflecting on what Scripture tells us about God's fatherhood.  First and foremost, he loves so much that he gave us his Son to save us, and there is no other savior for humankind.  Salvation comes from Jesus Christ alone.  Because God loves us, he created us, sustains us in being, and every single blessing that comes to us is from Him.  He teaches us and gives us grace so that we might become his faithful children in Christ.

God as Father never abandons his children; His love never wanes; He never tires of us.  These are perhaps themes that we have heard before, but in faith we must make these truths the groundwork of our lives.  Then, we will live out of the reality of being a child of God and it will transform us.  Everything that we experience--difficulties, dangers, darkness, crisis--in all these things, we are never alone.  God is working through all these things to bring us to Himself and give us eternal life.

To believe in the Father, we also have to believe in the Son, and look to the cross to understand the love that God has for us.  All of our fragility, smallness, and the weakness of human nature is loved by God and taken up by Jesus.  The cross also makes us ask the question (and it is a really important and difficult one): How can God be omnipotent if there is so much evil?  The Son of God died on the cross--is that what omnipotence looks like?

We would like to think of divine omnipotence according to our understanding of it, that is, that God "all-powerful" will resolve all our difficulties, intervene to avoid unpleasant situations, and get rid of all the bad things in the world.  Since God does none of these things, we conclude that God doesn't exist or that He is not all-powerful.

When we draw this conclusion, we have put God in a box and said that He should be a certain way, rather than saying with faith, "I believe in God the Father Almighty" and working from there.  What we miss is that God does not put his divine omnipotence on auto-pilot, nor is it arbitrary.  It is full of paternal and loving freedom.  He creates and bestows freedom on his rational creatures (us); in so doing, he gives power to our own freedom, respects it, and loves us in our free response to his own love.

His omnipotence is not expressed by violence, nor by destruction of every adverse power as we would like to see; he expresses his power in love, mercy, and pardon, in accepting our freedom, and in his untiring appeal to the conversion of our hearts.  God seems weak to us because he is patient, meek, and loving.  What we do not understand is that this is the true face of power, and this power is victorious.