The Father in heaven urges us, as children to heaven, to ask for the bread of heaven.
Sometimes we forget to be close to God the Father. Christmas and Easter teach us to be close to God the Son, Pentecost teaches us to be close to the God the Holy Spirit, but somehow God the Father can seem more remote and aloof to us. Or, to me anyway. He shouldn’t.
Throughout salvation history, those who were close to God the Father “walked with God,” such as Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David. He wants to be close to us, too — but we tend to follow in the footsteps of Adam and Eve, who hid from their Father when he longed to walk with them.
He is “Our Father who art in heaven” — but that means he is close, not far away.
Every day we pray to “Our Father who art in heaven,” but repeating that he is “in heaven” can create a misimpression. Being “in heaven” means that he is in eternity, outside of time and space. That doesn’t make him remote from us; it means he is with us, right behind the veil of the created world, and with all people, at all times and in all places.
As Psalm 68 puts it, “God in his holy place is a father of the fatherless and a defender of the widow. He gives the lonely a home to live in.”
In fact, the Father runs to us, to be close.
Jesus told the story of the Prodigal Son to describe how the Father loves us.
We have each walked away from God to one degree or another, and he is waiting for us to return. Jesus describes our Father’s delight at our return as like the Prodigal’s: “while he was yet at a distance, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him.”
We can even picture the Father coming out to meet us as the Way of the Cross.
On the night before he died, Jesus told his Apostles, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” The next day what the Apostles saw was Jesus carrying his cross up Calvary.
In that seen we can see the Father walking out to us, coming to meet us in our sinfulness like the Prodigal Son’s Father, longing to embrace us, dress us in royal robes, and welcome us into our heavenly home.
The fact is, we don’t just see Jesus’ sacrifice on the crucifix, we see the Father’s.
We make a mistake about the crucifixion when we think of it as a blood sacrifice meant to appease the Father’s anger. This is one of the reasons the Holy Spirit inspired the story of Abraham and Isaac: To help us see that such a sacrifice is as costly to a father as it is to a son.
In fact, we know that the real description of the Father’s sacrifice is that “God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”
The Father applies these words to us each, individually.
The sweetest words on earth begin “God the Father of mercies, through the death and the resurrection of his son, has reconciled the world to himself and sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins …” and they end: “I absolve you from your sins, in the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
With these words of absolution in confession, God the Father, with his Son and Holy Spirit, restores us to life, fill us with hope, and gives us back our happiness.
And the Father finally gets the chance to walk with us — if only briefly — at Mass.
In each Our Father prayer, we say, “Give us this day, our daily bread.” The Catechism explains that “The Eucharist is our daily bread. …. The Father in heaven urges us, as children to heaven, to ask for the bread of heaven.”
As the Catechism says “Having passed from this world to the Father, Christ gives us in the Eucharist” and Mass “unites us even now to the Church in heaven.”
When we receive the body and blood of Christ, we pierce the veil between heaven and earth and, as we return to our pews from communion, we walk with our Father at last.