All that Belongs to the Father Is Mine
Rev. David J. Fekete, Ph.D.
June 16, 2019
Isaiah 45:5-8, 22-24 John 16:12-15 Psalm 8
Quite a while back I was interviewing for a teaching position at our divinity school in California. I made the observation that in Swedenborgian theology, the male corresponds to truth and the female to love. The dean of the consortium to which our divinity school belonged challenged this doctrine. He said, “I feel that I love my children as deeply as my wife does.” Fathers do love their children as deeply as their wives do. I was caught off guard by this remark. I didn’t say what dawned on me later. I could have asked him if he expresses his love in the same way as his wife does. I still believe that there is a distinction between the way men and women express love. But this doesn’t mean that fathers love their children any less than mothers do. The fathers I observe in this church are very affectionate with their children.
Fathers haven’t always shown their love for their children. In my parents’ generation, fathers were often the disciplinarians in the family. “Just wait till your father gets home,” I often heard my mother say. It was difficult to relate to my father on a day to day basis; he wasn’t easy to talk with; and his general manner was harsh. While my father may have expressed his love for me decidedly differently than my mother did, on a few occasions he indicated his love dramatically. There was one time when I had set out across the United States and moved to a far-away city. I was going to be my own man, stand on my own two feet, and make it on my own. I didn’t need my parents; I was a man. Later, a friend of mine and I were driving back to our parents’ house in the winter for Christmas vacation. As it turned out, my van broke down outside of Detroit. We had to hitch-hike into the city. We waited and waited for someone to pick us up. But no one did. Standing outside in a blizzard, in the freezing cold, we seriously wondered if anyone would ever pick us up, or would we die in the cold. There weren’t any cell-phones back then, so there was no way to call anyone. Finally, we did get a ride, and my friend and I got dropped off at the bus station in Detroit. What do you suppose this man who was standing on his own two feet, who didn’t need his family, who was going to make it on his own, what do you suppose the first thing he did upon arriving at the bus station? I called home and my dad answered the phone. I broke up, and couldn’t talk. My dad asked me where I was. And while my mother slept through it all, my dad drove out in a blizzard to the bus station and took me home.
Years passed. Now I was completing my studies for ministry. But after five years of studying in good standing, the Committee on Admission to the Ministry had doubts about me. At Convention in 1985, they held a meeting of the whole council of ministers late at night to decide whether they would ordain me. In a rather perverse display of ineptitude, they told me to sit outside the meeting room while they deliberated just in case they wanted to bring me in for questioning. I had gotten a degree at our church’s university, spent five years in our church’s divinity school, I was now 29 years old, and my future was being decided in the meeting room I was sitting outside of. I sat there for three hours. But I didn’t sit there alone. For the whole three hours, my father sat next to me, trying to make the unbearable situation bearable. My mother had gone to bed.
All this happened when I was living in Boston. The result of the meeting was that I wouldn’t be ordained. I had no future. Over the next year, I applied to Ph.D. programs. One by one, my applications were declined. Only one came through, the University of Virginia. Then, as I was preparing to make the move from Boston to Charlottesville, Virginia, the engine blew out on my car. My father drove all the way from Detroit to Boston, had a trailer-hitch installed on his car, helped me load up a U-Haul, drove me down to Charlottesville, and helped me get set-up in my new apartment.
It’s unfortunate that my father was so hard to deal with on a day-to-day basis. Though these dramatic actions demonstrated how much he loved me, our relationship remained strained throughout our lives. I think that he believed that a father had to be in charge all the time;–be the boss.
I think that today’s fathers feel differently about their role in the family. Showing outward affection, hugging, playing with their children are things that today’s fathers do, which fathers of my dad’s generation didn’t. Today, we see stay-at-home-dads. Today’s dads are nurturing. Like mothers. Maybe today, even the differences between the way women and men show affection are beginning to diminish. Men and women are beginning to show love in analogous ways.
This new direction in fatherhood has important theological resonances. We use male language when we talk about God. We talk about God the Father and God the Son. And with today’s fathers showing love outwardly, our images of God are more loving than they had been a generation ago.
However, in Swedenborgian language we speak of God as Divine Love and Divine Wisdom. This includes both masculine and feminine correspondences in Swedenborg’s system. Remember, the feminine corresponds to love and the masculine to wisdom. So seen as love and wisdom, God holds includes feminine and masculine aspects.
This Sunday is also Trinity Sunday. And once again, I need to state that Swedenborgians do not have a doctrine of Three Persons, as do traditional Christians. Our understanding is based on language like we heard in John, “All that belongs to the Father is mine” (John 16:15). Only if Father and Son are the same Person can Jesus say, “All that belongs to the Father is mine.” It is all Jesus’ because the Father is in Him and He is in the Father. It is not that they are as one—they are one. How else are we to understand Isaiah 45:22,
Turn to me and be saved,
all you ends of the earth;
for I am God, and there is no other
Most Christians think that it is Jesus who saves. But Isaiah 45 clearly says that it is Yahweh who saves, or Jehovah as the King James Version translates God’s name. And also, Yahweh clearly says, “I am God, and there is no other.” So either Jesus isn’t God, or Jesus is Yahweh. “All that belongs to the Father is mine.” Jesus and the Father are one. Jesus is Yahweh in the flesh. “I am God and there is no other.”
Among the last things that Jesus says after His resurrection is, “All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth” (Matthew 28:18). Jesus has all power because He is one with the Father, is Yahweh in the flesh. This is what John’s Gospel means when it says, “Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God” (John 13:3). Only God comes from God and goes back to God. Only God has all things under His power. Jesus is God; God is Jesus. Jesus is God, and there is no other.
David Fekete 