A Superman to Me

I used to be a wrestler. In an unevenly matched two-on-one competition, my brother and I would roll around with my dad, giggling wildly as our hero easily overpowered us. He was strong—a superman when we were little. If our dad could pin one of us while tickling the other at the same time, certainly he could stop trains and save cities and fight evil. My dad was the strongest and most noble fellow in the world.

As a teenager, my earlier views of superman faded. Suddenly my dad became very human and just another man among others. At the time, I did my best to tip over all the sacred cows of hero-worship in my life. To an insecure, not-so-cool junior higher, my dad’s bib-overalls and sometimes folksy appearance made him become the biggest dork in the world. His coffee(and perhaps Spirit)-inspired theological rantings on the way to church Sunday mornings sounded like background static to my self-perceived finely-tuned spiritual ears. In an adolescent quest to “find myself,” I also found ways to distinguish myself from him. Dad was in a union, I became a capitalist. He was a rough-and-tumble outdoorsman, I began practicing the piano. He liked to wrestle, I joined drama club.

The past few years, as I’ve finally begun to figure out the kind of guy that God wants me to be, I’ve realized more and more how much I take after my dad and still look up to him. It began with small things like drinking coffee with a little bit of milk, just like him. Then I noticed similarities to my dad in some of my attitudes and perspectives on life. As a student at Georgetown, I find his suspicions of intellectualism present in my own mistrust of the academy. As a young guy looking for a career, the hard-working but sensible middle-class life that my dad leads is becoming more and more appealing to me. Today, more often than not, I look up to my dad as the example of a godly father and hard-working provider that I hope to be for my own family some day. I reckon that he has once again become the superman whom I admired when I was little.

Still, he’s a human superman. When you live with someone – especially family members – it doesn’t take long to figure out that they have imperfections. I’ve found this to be the case with my dad. The situation becomes much more personal, though, when I discover these same shortcomings in my own life. It seems that, along with the good I emulate in my dad, there comes some of the bad too. It’s interesting how Scripture so clearly anticipates and describes this truth. Jeremiah 31:29, a passage my dad shared with the family one Sunday morning, says, “The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children's teeth are set on edge.” Sin's impact has the effect of being passed on and continuing through the generations. Exodus 34:7 describes how God’s justice is carried out when “he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation."

Despite these seemingly unbendable rules, the message of the Gospel offers hope for breaking the patterns of generational sin and guilt. When a fellow asks Christ in Matthew 12:48, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?,” the Savior replies, “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.” Knowing Christ and participating in the unfolding will of God brings us into a new reality. Our new family becomes spiritual, our new identity from a second birth (Jn. 3:3). Relations are no longer by blood, but by water through a participation in baptism and by a common profession of faith (Eph. 4:4-6). All former distinctions – social, cultural, familial – are reconstructed in the Kingdom of Heaven, where “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for (we) are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). Christ breaks into our lives, giving us radically new identities in him and shattering the patterns and expectations of our old selves. We become fresh again as new people in Christ when we allow our Savior to re-form us in himself. This gives us a bright hope and opportunity for freedom from the sins of our parents and the patterns of imperfections that have been passed on since Adam.

Both my dad and I have become new men in Christ. Our Savior has changed our lives, and we’ve got new identities in the Messiah. Our relationship is still one of blood—that is, physically I am his son, but it is also one of water—that is, spiritually he is a mentor to me and an example of Christ’s redemptive work. Like me, my dad is not perfect. Still, though, I see that God is in the process of transforming him into the spiritual superman that I’d like to become.