Lent with the Early Church Fathers Day 14

Day 14

Lent with the Early Church Fathers

A daily post from Tom Bandy 

Based on A Year with the Church Fathers (Ed. Mike Aquilina, St. Benedict Press, 2010) 

Learn to be Kike God 

St. Gregory of Nyssa 

After baptism, we are called God’s children. Therefore, we should carefully examine our father’s characteristics, so that, by molding and framing ourselves in the likeness of our father, we may appear true children of him who calls us to adoption by grace. For the illegitimate son or daughter who belies his father’s nobility and in what they do is a sad reproach. 

I think this is why the Lord himself, laying down the rules of our life in the Gospels, uses these words to his disciples: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust” (Matthew 5:44 - 45). For he says that they are all “children” when their own way of thinking is molded into loving kindness toward their brothers and sisters, in likeness of the father’s goodness. 

TGB: A parent sacrifices himself or herself for the wellbeing of children; children repay this generosity through imitation, sacrificing themselves for the wellbeing of others. If God is the Father of all, then everyone is our brother or sister, Not to sacrifice personal comfort, or refuse to limit personal freedom, for the sake of the wellbeing of another, is a sad reproach to the Father’s nobility.