Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever he does, that the Son does likewise. – John 5:19
For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of sonship.
When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him. – Romans 8:15-17
If we want to become good and true fathers, here is the first requirement: a father must know how to be a son. We can only take on Christ’s fatherhood by embracing our rightful identity as God’s son.
How does that work?
Jesus, the Son of God, the perfect man, and perfect father, constantly spoke about his relationship to his own Father.
He did not just say that he was from the beginning with the Father or that he was sent by the Father.
Those are both true statements, but Jesus went much further when he spoke about his identity as a Son of the Father.
He so identified himself with the Father that, as he told Philip, “he who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9).
He acted as a father to everyone he encountered because he was rooted in the Father as the Father’s Son.
This brings us to an important principle about fatherhood.
All human fatherhood is a participation in God’s Heavenly Fatherhood.
We have no fatherhood on our own. Whatever we are “fathering,” whether it be children, a work or mission, a job project, or the success of an institution, we own none of it ourselves.
We have fathered none of it by ourselves.
As Jesus represented the Father in everything and acted for the Father as his Son, so in the measure given to us, we represent our Heavenly Father as his sons.
This should be a source of encouragement and strength for us.
We do not need to come up with our fatherly character by ourselves.
It is given to us by our Heavenly Father, who stands with us and works through us.
This also means that we need to know our true Father and allow him to “do his job.” Jesus did not present himself on his own authority.
Although he possessed all authority, he constantly pointed back to the Father: “I have not spoken on my own authority; the Father who sent me has himself given me commandment what to say and what to speak (John 12:49).
Our Heavenly Father is continually holding us in his mind.
It is his responsibility to establish us in life, to assign a mission and a vocation to us, and to pave the way before us as he works in and through us as his sons.
He takes his responsibilities seriously.
We often act as though we were orphans, as though we must make our own way in the world.
To act this way is to forget that we are sons, and it makes our own fatherhood difficult to embrace.
The more rooted we are as sons of our Heavenly Father, the more our own fatherhood will flourish.
God teaches us his fatherhood by giving us fatherly examples.
Our own fathers may have done a good job acting in the image of the Heavenly Father, or they may have seriously failed at that task.
No human father is perfect.
Whatever our experience of our human father, the Lord is our true father, the source of all fatherhood.
St. Paul said, “Be imitators of me as I imitate Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1). We should look around us for those whose fatherhood we can imitate as they are imitating Christ.
God can make up for human inadequacies, whether by providing us with examples of fatherhood or by directly imparting his own fatherly presence to us by his Holy Spirit and teaching us to imitate him.
