Fatherhood 5

Part Five: The Husband and Father, Wife and Children

It was Mother’s Day, and I had stopped by the hospital after church to visit a parishioner.

We were talking about mothers and he shared with me some wisdom. He said, “The

greatest gift a father can give to his children is to love their mother.” Think of the beautiful

picture that St. Paul paints of the love of Christ for his church and the submission of the

church to Christ. This husband and wife relationship is not two people separated from the

world off somewhere on a perpetual honeymoon. The husband is a father and the wife is a

mother. Their relationship to each other is inseparable from their relationship to their

children.

This is not always the case. God, in his wisdom, chooses to bless some married couples

with children while withholding that blessing from other married couples. We may not pry

into the hidden will of God to try to explain what he has not explained. We don’t know why

God blesses this couple and doesn’t bless that couple. The withholding of a particular

blessing does not mean he is withholding his love. He often blesses such couples in

different ways. Children are always a blessing. Human life is precious. When God gives us

what is precious it is a blessing. In the beginning, Moses records that God blessed them and

told them to be fruitful. Children are a blessing from God.

The government God has established for the raising of children is a government of a father

and a mother who are husband and wife. Nowadays, with the insistence that every

conceivable arrangement or configuration of sex, marriage, and family be given equal

consideration to every other arrangement, even to note that there is a normal way that

things are to be arranged meets with objections from the politically correct, that is, from

those whose morality changes with the changing moral standards of the world. God loves

the single mother and the single father. God watches over the orphans and the widows.

God governs us in a variety of ways. But there is a normal and what is normal is what is

reflected in the fourth and the sixth commandments God gave to Moses. The fourth

commandment teaches children to honor their father and their mother. The sixth

commandment teaches husbands and wives to be faithful to each other. Clearly, the fourth

commandment applies to us throughout our lives. Even when our parents no longer tell us

what to do, we honor them. And sexual fidelity to one’s spouse requires celibacy for single

men and women, boys and girls. Fornication, even when engaged in by single men and

women, is an assault on marriage. It steals from marriage what is proper to it.

According to God’s law, and according to the ordinary blessing of God, the husband is a

father and the wife is a mother. The husband has a relationship with his wife as husband.

He has a relationship with his children as father. What he does as husband a father is

doing. What he does as father a husband is doing. He can no more separate his husbandly

duties from his fatherly duties than he can become two men. The offices are distinct, but

since they are held by the same man, they cannot be separated. Sometimes, they cannot be

distinguished.

The way the husband treats his wife is the way the father treats the mother. How he treats

her is what he teaches his children to do. The same applies to the wife. How she treats her

husband is what she is telling her children to do. Actions speak louder than words.

The word iconic is probably overused, but it applies well to this topic. The father and

mother are icons. They are images of God. Much has been written and said about St. Paul’s

words in 1 Corinthians 11 about head-coverings for women. Since it is no longer required

for a woman to cover her head in church, it is assumed that the significance of the headcovering

no longer applies. But doctrine does not change, even if the customs by which we

express it do. St. Paul writes:

But I want you to know that the head of every man is Christ, the head of woman is

man, and the head of Christ is God. (1 Corinthians 11:3)

That this is true, whether or not Christians express this truth by what they wear or do not

wear on their heads, is brought out a few verses later where Paul writes:

He is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man. For man is not

from woman, but woman from man. Nor was man created for the woman, but

woman for the man. (Verses 7-9)

Christ honors the Father who sent him. He is the image of the invisible God. The man

honors Christ. The woman honors her husband. Christ honors his Father by going to the

cross. “No one takes my life from me,” he says. He gave it up freely in obedience to his

Father. His obedience was out of love for the Father and out of love for those his Father

loved.

The husband honors Christ by imitating him. Even as Christ gave up his life for the church,

his bride, and thereby made her holy by his blood, just so the husband lives his life for his

wife, putting her needs above his own. He is willing to sacrifice himself, not for her

transient emotional gratification, but for her. It is for her as the holy bride, the spotless and

faultless bride, the bride without blemish, that he devotes himself. He is to be her pastor.

When Adam saw his wife being tempted by the father of lies and murderer of souls he

remained silent and by his silence acquiesced to her deception. That was his sin. He

listened to her instead of speaking to her the word of God. The husband serves his wife by

acting as her spiritual head. That’s his job.

The wife honors her husband by submitting to him. Her husband cannot impose

submission on her. She submits herself. This submission entails respect and trust. She

respects him for Christ’s sake. She doesn’t criticize him, insult him, complain about him to

her friends, and challenge his headship. Instead, she arranges her life in relationship to him

in such a way that it is obvious she regards him as the representative of the home. Jesus

said to Philip, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” Just so, Christ is found in his

church. The church is identified as the church as she honors Christ. The wife who respects

her husband respects herself, just as the husband who loves his wife loves his own body.

This is what the children witness. The relationship between husband and wife is the

pattern of life from which they live their lives. It is how they learn what life is all about.

The father is the icon of Jesus. The mother is the icon of the church. The children learn at

home what Jesus and church are all about.

Adultery, desertion, pornography, violence, drunkenness, profligacy, and other assaults on

marriage are assaults on children. The very idea that the state can provide for children is

not only an absurdity easily disproved by any moderately competent social scientist; it is

also an attack on marriage. What children need is not government money for single

mothers. They need mothers who are married to their fathers.

The biblical teaching of the husband being the head of his wife and the wife being the body

of her husband is incomprehensible apart from understanding the gospel. A Christ-less

religion cannot establish a patriarchy that isn’t exploitative, domineering, and cruel. This is

why Islam cannot honor women. Where Jesus is but a prophet and not the Savior of

sinners, the people of God are not sanctified. There is no holy church. There are not dear

children of the dear Father. There is nothing but a legal relationship. Christian patriarchy

is grounded in the gospel, even as the Fatherhood of God is understood where the Son is

lifted up on the cross to take away our sins. Islam degrades women, not because men are in

charge, but because the blood of Jesus Christ is not there to cleanse anyone of sin, and there

is no washing of water by the word to make God’s people holy and blameless before him.

Patriarchy without Christ is poison mean. But I wonder if it is as cruel as the soulless

matriarchy of the welfare state where bureaucrats make decisions affecting millions of

fatherless children. They don’t know these children and they cannot know them. They

cannot love them. Even if these bureaucrats – who are overwhelmingly female – are filled

to the brim with maternal love and devotion, it doesn’t help the children one bit and it

certainly doesn’t make government functionaries apt substitutes for the children’s fathers.

Fathers and mothers who love each other as husbands and wives are best suited to raise

the children with which God blesses them. Hiring others to raise their children so that they

can enjoy whatever material benefits come from two incomes will not benefit the children.

Children need a mother in the home more than they need more stuff.

With the advent of effective birth control methods just over half a century ago, the church

lost her voice on the blessing of children. Oh, they were still a blessing, but not one a

married couple couldn’t do without if they had financial, educational, career, or other goals

that required more immediate attention. The domestic estate suffered. Now we are

hearing from various places about the demographic challenges facing the church in the

twenty first century. It is not difficult to understand that when the care of children and

their immortal souls is measured against accumulating more and more stuff that will perish

with this world and found wanting, that children will conclude that they aren’t worth as

much as the junk that replaced them. A generation or more of indoctrination in the gospel

of self-esteem will not give the children as much confidence in their worth as the gospel

will give them.

I do not choose the word indoctrination casually. That’s what it is. The false gospel of selfesteem

is being taught to our children and grandchildren, not only in the public schools, but

in many parochial schools as well. It ought not to be reinterpreted or modified. It needs to

be exposed and rejected for the lie it is. The gospel is for sinners who need a Savior from

their sin. It is in the home where the parents of the children are married to each other that

God’s law exposing our sins and God’s gospel forgiving our sins is most effectively taught.

What is a child worth? How can we teach our children that their true value is not measured

in silver or gold but by the precious blood of Jesus Christ? We can teach them this by

confessing in word and deed the truth that children are precious gifts from God and that

the fruitful womb is his reward.

At the heart of the Christian religion is the crucifixion of Jesus who saves his church, his

body, by giving up his life for her and washing her clean in Holy Baptism. That this is the

heart of our faith requires us to confess its necessity. It cannot be central if it isn’t

necessary. We need the forgiveness of sins because we are sinners. But it is precisely the

knowledge of sin that our culture denies. Professor Marquart used to talk about the unholy

trinity of the 19th century: Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud. Darwin

attacked God the Father our Creator by his theories of how we could be what we are

without our heavenly Father making us what we are. Marx attacked God the Son our Savior

by making sin what’s wrong with the system and thus salvation becoming a social and

political process to overthrow the oppressive system rather than our personal deliverance

from sin, death, and the devil. Freud attacked God the Holy Spirit by defining away sin. If

the ego suffers because the superego cannot control the id, well then, pretend that the id

isn’t so bad after all and tell the superego to chill. It’s the conflict that’s bad. So there’s no

sin. There’s only dysfunction.

It looks like Christianity is on the ropes. So what else is new? It has always looked like

that. The same Jesus who told the seventy that he was sending them out as lambs before

wolves also said that he saw Satan fall from power. We Christians are not defenseless in

the face of cultural assaults against the gospel and the holy institutions God has established.

The gospel is its own power. It is what binds husbands and wives, fathers and mothers,

and their children together as God’s family. Jesus didn’t look almighty on the cross. But

that’s where he crushed the serpent’s head. The message of the cross remains for us the

wisdom of God and the power of God.Type text here.