Lent 2009: The Lord's Prayer
Session 2: Our Father
Tonight we are going to begin our journey through the Lord's Prayer. We start with the address "Our Father".I cannot help but wonder how appropriate it is in our day to address God as father. How misleading is it for us to be identifying God in a particular way?
Our post-Freudian society has been permeated with, whether we like it or not, an inward looking, motive searching. We now question all sorts of traditional practices, and are in danger of throwing out the baby with the bath water. The thought of God after the analogy of father is certainly high on that list of suspect practices.
Freud suggested that the idea of God was’ nothing more than parental authority writ large across the heavens’. He envisioned ‘Father-God’ as an emotional crutch on which weak and dependent people lean when they cannot face life alone.
He concluded that it was a concept that perpetuates infantilism amongst those that cannot grow up emotionally and that constantly need to relate to that power that they address as ‘Our Father’.
But what we need to do is suspend our previous understanding of God as Father and look at it the way Jesus did. There is such an intimacy with Jesus and God; this could just as easily been God and His daughter, it is not a gender thing, though the preoccupation with gender has caused, and continues so to do, innumerable problems.
God is represented as the Father who has given everything, God is not neglectful, absent, dysfunctional or any of those issues you might identify with a human father. Jesus no longer expects anything of His Father – no presents, no favours. He is the Father of whom Jesus could say, “All that the Father has is mine”. Jesus could therefore recognise in prayer that God is the giver of all good things, who only asked that this giving not stop with Jesus.
Jesus’ purpose was to give of the Father’s love and in the giving restore creation and life to that which God had intended; to assist us in expressing the deepest truth about ourselves – namely that we are the people of God made in the image of God, called to share in the creation and redemption of the world. It was out of this understanding of God that Jesus could use the intimate and lovely Aramaic word Abba ‘dear Father’.
The same powerful truth was expressed by St Paul in his letter to the Christians in Rome when he said that to say Abba was not to be a slave but a son. It is an expression of enormous intimacy and if we are not able to embrace this intimacy there is some adjustment necessary within ourselves. We ought not to carry around the scars of abuse, neglect, shame, sadness or whatever that have been heaped upon us by our own fathers.
As evidence of this look at the life of Jesus, note his strength, His security, his power and His freedom. Look at His capacity to give, to care, to love. Observe His sense of His own worth and value, His dignity and confidence. Here is someone who is whole, free and outgoing.
The overwhelming evidence is that Jesus used this Aramaic word, ‘Abba’, an intensely personal and intimate word that to the best of our knowledge had never been used before in reference to God. Not indicating so much gender as intimacy.
© Fr Michael Fuller: March 2009