The Image of the Father

I carried this question for a long time without daring to formulate it. Today I write it for those who still carry it.

I did not have a remarkable father. In fact, I never had one. I never called anyone papa. The man who was in the house — in the middle of a family of five children — was violent. He beat my mother. He arranged to do it while I was at school. When I came home, I sometimes found torn-out hair on the floor, a trace of forgotten blood on the corner of the sink. A few days later, bruises would appear on her face and arms that she tried to conceal.

I was too small to know what it meant. But I watched. I recorded without really knowing. In the silence and ignorance of a nine- or ten-year-old boy.

That was the image I had of "father."

So when people spoke to me of God the Father — loving, near, faithful, above all things — something in me resisted without my being able to explain it. It was not unbelief. It was a wound. The image had been tarnished before I could even look at it head-on.

We did not speak of these things. We put them away. We moved on. But the question remained, somewhere deep down, in the shadow: if that is what a father is… then who is God the Father?

And then one day there was the discovery of the Bible. Not argumentation. Not demonstration. A slow, gradual encounter, revealing a face I did not know.

In the Gospel of Luke, the father sees his son from afar and runs. In an Old Testament book (Hosea 11), it is God who teaches His child to walk, and lifts him to His cheek. But it was this sentence from the apostle Paul that stopped me short:

Every family takes its name from Him. Not the other way around.

What I had seen and received was not the right definition of "father." It was a broken, disfigured version — a bit like a blurred or out-of-focus photograph. The original was elsewhere; it had always been elsewhere.

I had three daughters, then four grandchildren. And I learned — truly learned — to be a father, to be a grandfather. Not from what I had received. But from what I had discovered in the Word, and received from Him. Something stopped, like a broken chain, and something else began.

Many of us carry a damaged image of the father. Perhaps you too grew up in a house where fear reigned. Where the blows fell. Where the silence after the violence was even heavier than the violence itself. Perhaps your father was absent — physically, or present but inaccessible, closed, cold. Perhaps he said words to you that should never be said to a child. Perhaps he did things that should never be done.

And perhaps since that day, you look at God the Father with mistrust. With a distance you cannot explain. With an inner resistance you sometimes call doubt, but which is perhaps something else — an old wound, never named.

You are not alone. And it is not a shame.

My father took. God gives.

That is perhaps the simplest — and the most immense — difference.

A violent father takes — he takes your fear, he lets a storm of anger pour down on you, he takes your freedom and gnaws at your youth, he pours tons of cruelty on someone weaker than himself.

God gives. He gives what He has most precious. It is not the same direction. It is not the same love. It is not even the same world.

At the end of all the meanders of Scripture, there is a cross. And on that cross, it is not God who strikes — it is God who absorbs. It is not God who takes — it is God who gives. All the way. All the way to you, reading these few lines.

That is where the face of the Father is definitively revealed.

How to approach a Father one has never known

But how do you approach a Father you have never really known? How do you cross the mistrust, the distance, this inner resistance that settled in so early?

That is where Jesus comes in. He did not come only to speak to us of the Father — He came to lead us to Him.

Watch Jesus pray. In John 17, the night of His arrest, He lifts His eyes to heaven and says: "Father, the hour has come…" — He calls Him Father with every breath, with absolute confidence, tenderness, and familiarity. At Gethsemane, in the deepest anguish, He still says: "Abba, Father…" — that Aramaic word, the word of a very small child to his daddy.

And this same Jesus, when His disciples ask Him how to pray, tells them: "Pray then like this: Our Father…" He brings them into His own relationship with the Father. He brings us in.

If you want to know who the Father really is, do not begin with what frightens you. Begin with Jesus, who touches the leper. Who lifts up the woman caught in adultery. Who weeps before the tomb of Lazarus. Who welcomes children onto His lap. Who forgives from the cross.

That is the face that reveals the Father. That is the love that is the original.

The image of the father you carry may have done great damage. But it does not define you. And it does not define God.

He is greater than what you received. Sweeter. Nearer. He is what your child's heart was searching for without finding it. He is waiting for you, not with the face you fear, but with the one you may never have known — and yet deserve to meet.

The image is damaged. But it can be restored. That is exactly why the Son came.