To the Editor:
As we approach, once again in our liturgical calendar, Holy Week and Jesus ultimate act of love for us via His crucifixion, I truly wish we would stop making “God, The Father” out to being such a monster.
We make if appear that He would not be satisfied until His Son gave his very last ounce of blood. In this theology of God the Father sending His only son to be tortured and crucified, we say clearly and without any question that the grievances and disobedience of His creatures can only be rectified by His having His own son horribly bled to death. How, we can come to this conclusion, when even in the Old Testament He would not permit Abraham to spill the blood of Isaac, his son, is truly mind boggling.
The Father sent Jesus, as our Redeemer, to attempt to teach us how to love]the Father and to love one another. What was our response? We didn’t and we don’t want to hear of it. We used and are still using the greatest gift of the Father, namely, “free will” (which is our right to choose good or evil, love or hate, peace or war, life or death, light or darkness, the Holy Spirit or Satan) in a detrimental way.
It was and it is because of our inability to use this precious gift of our Creator for good, that Jesus’ blood was spilled for us at Calvary. Not because the Father wished to suck the last ounce of blood out of His son , like a monster. The Father tried, although in vain, to send His son to teach us to love Him and all His creation.
How did we and how do we respond to this momentous event? By sending it back to Him as “undeliverable.” Could the Father have intervened and blocked the mistaken actions of our free will?
No! Why? Because then He would have destroyed the greatest item in His creation, the one item that makes mankind into his image. This is beautifully exposed in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, in the chapter entitled, “The Grand Inquisitor.”
Finally, if the Father was responsible for the bloody and cruel death of Jesus, then why on the cross did Jesus, knowing that it was we who wanted His blood, ask the Father’s forgiveness for us when He said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
What is there to forgive, if it were the Father’s will?
John P. Lynch
Smithfield
