I Will Remember the Unbroken Fellowship

Of Our Heavenly Father with His Son on the Cross

Welcome to Chapter 3 of Love Embraced: A Journey in and through Suffering, as I continue to share a newly edited version of a book I first published on Amazon, ten years ago.

Chapter 3 Grace

When I returned home, grieving the passing of my Mum, my heart yearned after the Peace I had felt cover my Mum through her suffering. But for me to even consider the possibility that God could offer me this peace, my mind and heart had to reckon with the fear of God’s wrath that had hounded me since a child.

In my deep yearning, I turned to Christian authors, who spoke of God’s grace. The very first book I opened was Steve McVey’s The Secret of Grace. As I turned the pages of this book, tears flowed relentlessly down my face. Page after page assured me that the wrath of God was set aside at the Cross through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ for all those who believe in Him.

McVey showed me that God was not after my good works, but instead after an intimate relationship with me, a relationship through which His good works would flow out of me, despite and even in and through my weaknesses and failures. This gift of grace staggered me. God was beginning to loosen the shackles of fear that had kept me from His gift of grace for more than twenty years.

Later, McVey would also give me a beautiful picture of the Father’s love that would then shine upon me so many years later, on my very first evening of the SycaMore course I attended to learn more about the Catholic faith. On that evening we were shown a painting of Jesus on the Cross, but what stunned me was to see the Heavenly Father’s arms wrapped around His Son, lovingly holding Him.

It left me weeping, as I thought about growing up believing that in that moment on the Cross, the Father had cruelly abandoned Jesus, because His Son was carrying my sin. Visually beholding the truth of the never-forsaking love of our Heavenly Father for His Son did something deep within me. Just as it did again, in remembering this afresh, as I prepared this chapter for publication. The love of God flooded my whole body all over again, casting out all the fear that had been hounding me, moments earlier.

How does this connect to McVey’s words. Well, McVey explained in his blog post, Did God abandon Jesus?, that the Father could not have ever abandoned His Son on the Cross, for that would have been to break apart the Trinity, the three in One unity of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit: an impossibility.

As McVey puts it in Did God Abandon Jesus:.

Did the Father turn away and hide His face from Jesus? “Nor has He hidden His face from him,” the prophecy assured. Did the Father absent himself and ignore Jesus when He cried out from the cross? “When he cried to Him for help, He heard.

If we view God as a judicial deity whose sense of justice forced Him to punish Jesus for our sin, we will certainly believe that He abandoned His Son at the cross.

But this clear answer in Psalm 22:24 can empower you to change your mind about the matter and move beyond an angry God to an understanding of your loving Father as He really is and always has been.

Or, as I would put it: On that Cross, as He carried the full weight of our every sin in the excruciating feeling (but not truth) of His Father’s abandonment, He declared the truth of the Father’s never forsaking presence with Him, over not just Himself, but over you and I too. How? Just take a look at the beautiful Words from Luke 23:46 (NRSVCE, my emphasis) to see how:

Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” Having said this, he breathed his last.

Do you see how His Father’s hands were present to Him, even there, on the Cross? Though He may have felt abandoned, just as we do in Satan’s accusations against us in our sin, the sin He lovingly chose to take upon Himself to free us from its hold, our Savior knew and held tightly onto the truth for us all.

The truth that He remained in unbroken fellowship with the Father and the Holy Spirit, even at the Cross, even as His feelings told Him otherwise. A truth He has now given you and I also, in shedding abroad the love of God into our hearts, through the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:5). And a truth I personally have also found expressed through Father M., who has been my (weekly) confessor this past year. Never before have I experienced my Abba Father’s love for me in such a palpably, consistent and present way as through this man.

Every time I have been so afraid of judgment and a turning back, his words, tone and whole demeanour have poured out God’s love and mercy over me, lifting away my fear and revealing the beauty of Jesus inside of me, in the tears pouring down my face. And without fail, the days thereafter I have found more and more freedom unfolding. In seeing myself and those around me with new eyes, in finding a new courage arising in me, where fear once reigned and in being able to persevere, where I once gave up. Sadly, Father M. is heading to Rome today, having been promoted to a new position in his order, but he leaves behind a lasting remembrance of my Abba Father’s steadfast love for me.

A remembrance that I know will be cultivated by the Holy Spirit, who continually reminds each one of us of all Christ has already spoken to us, to comfort, reassure and root us ever deeper in God’s perfect love for us (John 14:26). A love that is expressed in and through the never-forsaking presence of our God not only within us, through the Holy Spirit (c.f. 1 John 4:8, Col. 1:27, Eph. 1:13-14), but also through the unbroken fellowship of members of His beautiful and holy Body, through whom the Holy Spirit works, weaves and binds us all together, both locally and from from afar.

The next step on my journey into this unbroken fellowship of God’s love for us would lead me into a growing understanding of a Home, whose doors had all along been open wide to me. And as this understanding unfolded, both in my mind and my heart, it would birth a powerful process of transformation. As McVey so aptly puts it¹:

“God is sovereign over the enemy, and He will use your pain to accomplish His purposes. God will use the desert experiences of life to shake away from us everything except Him.”

And use my pain He would, to draw me ever closer into His powerful all-embracing Love.

Romans 5:17 NRSVCE

If, because of the one man’s trespass, death exercised dominion through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.

1. Steve McVey, The Secret of Grace: Stop Following the Rules and Start Living (Eugene: Harvest House Publishers, 1998, 2014), 31