My Father's Voice

My father died at home, eaten up with cancer. The final week of his life he was in and out of consciousness, so he spoke very little. But the last words he ever said to me have lived in my heart for all these years.

I had come home from junior high school, slamming the front door, and bounding up the stairs to his bedroom. Dad’s eyes remained closed but he turned his face toward me, and said four words: “Hi, Boy.” And then very softly, “My favorite.” For an adopted child watching the only father he had ever known slowly slip away, those words meant the world to me.

  

Sometimes I try to imagine how Jesus felt as a man, particularly in His relationship to His Father. Of course as a sinful man, I can't really feel what my sinless Savior felt. But still, I like to try, because it humbles me, makes me love and admire Him more, and drives me deeper into His word.

As we near Holy Week, when His earthly life came to its terrible and glorious conclusion, I thought back on the start of Jesus’ public life, His baptism, and I wondered.

He had lived His thirty years in absolute obedience to God’s law. He never strayed, always did and said and thought what was right. What was it like for Him to join the crowd that flocked out into the wilderness to be baptized by John?  When John addressed this rough group of sinners, he didn't pull any punches: “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” (Luke 3:7). I picture our sinless Jesus standing there among them, patiently waiting His turn in the water.

Did He, in His humanity, ever wonder if He was on the right track? Was He conscious from earliest memory of His Father’s presence, or were there times He felt terribly alone? He trusted, obeyed, and walked forward for thirty years. But I wonder, in those long days of childhood, adolescence, and young manhood, if His Father’s voice might have been silent or distant. I think what happened on the day of His baptism meant the world to Jesus.

Can you imagine that moment when John pulled Him up out of the Jordan, His hair and beard streaming, His eyes blinking away river water?  Oh, what a joy it must have been for Him, as the voice He loved above all others spoke so proudly from heaven: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17).