Dear readers, I’m very aware that I left you hanging with my summer series about Dads Behaving Badly. I fully intended to end with a flourish but instead l just vanished from public view. (If you do not care about my pre-amble, feel free to scroll down to the heading ‘Father of Mercies.’)
I remember I’d planned to write my final blog post the day before it was due to be posted, because I had to spend an entire day in hospital and assumed that this would afford me ample time. However, it turns out that being in a hospital ward with various goings-on around you and having your blood drawn repeatedly does not in fact get you in the right frame of mind for a good old blog-writing session.
Then I went to France on holiday and thought ‘surely I’ll do it then.’ But we didn’t take the laptop and our iPad screen is smashed so that if you’re not careful you get a sliced finger so I didn’t risk it there. Also it was very hot and I was enjoying reading Dane Ortlund’s Gentle and Lowly, which turned out to be very much applicable to my blog post. (I did also read Bring Up the Bodies which I’d been meaning to read for about 8 years.) Incidentally, we had a lovely time but I got about 200 mosquito bites (more blood drawn!) while my husband got zero. Does every married couple have a mosquito-immune and a very-much-not-immune party?
Then it was the beginning of term, i.e. the mad rush to purchase and label bits and bobs and to work out the new weekly schedule – and the unwelcome surprises that come when you’ve failed at one or both of those things. Despite my years of experience I still had to queue at the school uniform shop the day before term started. And as we continue with scheduling malfunctions I’m very grateful to live in the city where my children can just bus themselves around the place and not rely on my taxi services.
But anyway, God is faithful and as a Calvinist I believe that this is the very day He planned for me to write this post, which I humbly pray will bless you today by glorifying Him.
Father of Mercies
We’ve looked at dads behaving badly in the Old Testament. I hope that as we look at them we can be encouraged that God is not like that, and also that God really does save wretched sinners like Jacob – and me.
One of my favourite dads in the New Testament is Jairus, who comes to Jesus begging for help when his daughter is close to death:
23 He pleaded earnestly with him, “My little daughter is dying. Please come and put your hands on her so that she will be healed and live.”24 So Jesus went with him.
A large crowd followed and pressed around him. 25 And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. 26 She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse. 27 When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, 28 because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.” 29 Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.
30 At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?”
31 “You see the people crowding against you,” his disciples answered, “and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?’ ”
32 But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. 33 Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. 34 He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.” (Mark 5)
Jesus here draws a suffering, outcast woman into the centre of the crowd so that he can give her much, much more than she’d ever hoped for. She was desperate to be healed, but she came away with peace as well: the peace of a restored relationship with her maker.
And as he’s standing there next to Jairus, who’d do anything for his little girl, what does Jesus call the woman? ‘Daughter.’ Because as good a father as Jairus is, he’s just a faint shadow of the type of father Jesus is. Jesus would do anything for this woman.
Jairus was willing to humble himself to get help for his daughter. Jesus humbled himself to death, even death on a cross!
I know that Jesus is not God the Father, and yet here he calls her daughter. (He’s also called ‘Everlasting Father’ in Isaiah 9v6.) And he shows us exactly what God the Father is like:
‘In [Jesus Christ] we see heaven’t eternal heart walking around on two legs in time and space. When we see the heart of Christ, then, throughout the four Gospels, we are seeing the very compassion and tenderness of who God himself most deeply is.’ Dane Ortlund, Gentle and Lowly, p.133.
What kind of a Father do you have? What kind of a Father can we introduce people to – even those who have no earthly father? He is one who sees the needy and fills them; who touches the ‘unclean’ and makes them clean. He doesn’t just want to heal you; he wants to forgive your sins and give you everlasting life. He became unclean for us. He became sin for us. He was abandoned by his Father on the cross so that we never will be. He died and was raised so that he could raise us from the dead. We get a picture of that with Jairus’ daughter whom he woke from death with a gentle word:
He took her by the hand and said to her, “Talitha koum!” (which means “Little girl, I say to you, get up!”). 42 Immediately the girl stood up and began to walk around (she was twelve years old). (Mark 5)
So going back to how I began back in July, thinking about those who don’t have a dad: there is such hope in the gospel for this world:
‘Some of us had great dads growing up. Others of us were horribly mistreated or abandoned by them. Whatever the case, the good in our earthly dad is a faint pointer to the true goodness of our heavenly Father, and the bad in our earthly dads is the photo negative of who our heavenly Father is. He is the Father of whom every human father is a shadow.’ ‘Gentle and Lowly’ p. 132.
Mum in Zone One 