Abba Above!

For the shepherd, it started out like any other day on the west side of the wilderness. He'd drifted that far with an eye to finding new shrubbery his father-in-law's sheep hadn't eaten yet. He had no idea the shrub he was soon to see. The light caught his eye. Evidently there'd been a lightning strike – or else some other twist of nature had lit the bush ablaze. But it had been quite a while since any storms had come through – why was the fire still going? The shepherd decided to investigate. But he was stopped in his tracks when he heard a voice – a voice saying his name. Now that was unexpected! Who knew him out here? And the voice told him to stop, said that it wasn't safer to get any nearer to the bush, that he'd already encroached on holy ground. Then the words came that changed everything. “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob!” With that, the shepherd's heart began to pound. It was as if he'd stumbled into a minefield. He quickly pulled his cloak over his face, over his eyes, terrified to see what he oughtn't see. Moses “hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God” (Exodus 3:1-6).

That was a common reaction enough to the idol-grubbing spirits who pawned themselves off with stolen valor: distant figures of fearful splendor and unpredictable judgment. But how much more was there reason to fear “God Most High, possessor of heaven and earth” (Genesis 14:19), the only active God either in earth or in the realms above it (Deuteronomy 4:39). And though he spared the delicate shrub, he was “a consuming fire, a jealous God” (Deuteronomy 4:24). He was no tame God – Moses knew of cities he “overthrew in his anger and wrath” (Deuteronomy 29:23). Nor was it expected to find this righteous Judge down here where he could be reached. “Are you not God in heaven?” (2 Chronicles 20:6). He would, indeed, one day be known by the title “God of heaven” (Ezra 5:11-12; 6:9-10). “God looks down from heaven on the sons of men” (Psalm 55:2), surveying us. “It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to dwell in” (Isaiah 40:22). He sees all and knows all – he has a heavenly perspective. It's his prerogative to conceal or reveal: “It is the glory of God to conceal things” (Proverbs 25:2), but “there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries” (Daniel 2:28). This “God is in the heavens: he does all that he pleases” (Psalm 115:3). His heavenly glory is sovereign freedom, an unhindered ability to act, a transcendent independence that allows him unilateral power over which we have no veto. For that reason, it was recommended to “not let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven and you are on earth, so let your words be few” (Ecclesiastes 5:2). God being 'in heaven' was a check on our presumption. So “let us lift up our hearts and hands to God in heaven” (Lamentations 3:41).

With all those truths on display, it's no wonder the Old Testament scriptures are sparing in their depictions of the God of heaven as a Father. But it is there. First, God is a Father in the sense of being Creator. “But now, O LORD, you are our Father: we are the clay, and you are our potter: we are all the work of your hand” (Isaiah 64:8). “Is he not your father, who created you?” (Deuteronomy 32:6). “For we indeed are his offspring” (Acts 17:28). So he is “the Father and Creator of the whole world” (1 Clement 19.2), “one God and Father of all, who is over all” (Ephesians 4:6), “from whom are all things and for whom we exist” (1 Corinthians 8:6). In the most distant sense, then, he is the Father of every creature he has made. And as the Father of every creature, he's owed blessing and worship from all. “Exalt him before every living being, for he is... our Father and God forever and ever!” (Tobit 13:4).

But in particular, the Old Testament reveals God as the Father of Israel – he adopts the entire nation as being collectively his child, and he commits himself to them as a Father. “Thus says the LORD: Israel is my firstborn son” (Exodus 4:22). “When Israel was a child, I loved him; and out of Egypt I called my son” (Hosea 11:1). So they say: “You, O LORD, are our Father” (Isaiah 63:16). In their culture, a father was known for two things: his authority over his household, and his role as protector and provider. So, as they reflected when the old covenant was drawing to a close, surely “God in heaven protects the Jews, in alliance with them continually like a father with his children” (3 Maccabees 7:6). And as God himself asks: “A son honors his father … If, then, I am a Father, where is my honor?” (Malachi 1:6). God, as Father of Israel, was owed reverence and obedience.

Beyond his national adoption of Israel, God was also known as “my Father” to select individuals. Israel's kings had the right to call on God personally like that, because God told David that to any son who succeeded David, “I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son: when he commits iniquity, I will discipline him with the rod of men..., but my steadfast love will not depart from him” (2 Samuel 7:14-15). And so David and all his sons were given the right to cry to God, “You are my Father, my God, and the Rock of my salvation!” (Psalm 89:26). But, because God was also committed to being “Father of the fatherless” (Psalm 68:5), other righteous people in need took courage in addressing God as “Father” or even “my Father” (Wisdom 2:16). Sometimes, what they were looking for from God was discipline to nurture their growth (Sirach 23:1-4; cf. Hebrews 12:7-10). Other times, what they were looking for was a rescue “in the midst of storms and dangers” (Sirach 51:10).

That's when Jesus steps onto the scene. He's the true Son of David and the true Righteous One; he's a one-man Israel, and the Firstborn above creation. And all that would entitle him to call God his Father. But he's got even more to it than that. So when he appears as this mysterious celebrant of God's Fatherhood, it seems to be all he can talk about. And when he calls God his Father, he's not talking about some abstract God heretofore unknown – he's speaking of the same God who created the world and made a covenant with Israel and with David and did all that the Old Testament scriptures speak of. Jesus is talking of a God who is no less glorious than that, no less honorable than that, no less disciplinary than that, no less sovereign and free than the God of the Law and the Prophets. Jesus did not come to cancel anything the Scriptures said about God. Everything Jesus shows us is built atop what Moses and the kings and prophets and priests learned over those long centuries. But Jesus tells people that God's heavenly freedom – the freedom to do all that he pleases, the freedom to look down on the sons of men, the freedom to conceal things and reveal mysteries – is exactly what proves that God's fatherhood, in whatever sense it's experienced, must be perfectly generous and lavish: “Your heavenly Father is perfect,” he says (Matthew 5:48). “Your heavenly Father feeds... the birds of the air” (Matthew 6:26). “How much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7:11).

And, little by little, Jesus unfolded how he was able to say things like this. What God was called 'Father' for being Creator, or for being Israel's caretaker, or for committing himself to David or other righteous ones, they spoke sparingly and in metaphor. But when Jesus calls God his Father, he speaks unabashedly, intensely, often, and more literally than anyone ever dreamed. Jesus constantly cast himself, not just as one child of God among many, but as God's unique Son in a way no one else was – more than Israel, more than David, more than any of the righteous. When Jesus spoke of God as his Father, there was neither awkwardness nor analogy going on. For since before the creation of time and space, Jesus had eternally been the Father's Son, and God had eternally been the Son's Father, and the Spirit of their relationship had flowed infinitely from and to eternity. There is just no closeness to God like the Father-Son bond that is God. And so God was already Father before there was a David to raise up, before there was an Israel to look after, before there was even a world to create. All those were derivative of who God eternally was to Jesus. He is the only Son of God by nature, in literal truth.

But “when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son..., born under the Law” (Galatians 4:4), into a particular human culture and language. And when the Word had become flesh, and after he'd come out of the manger, and when he was being raised in Nazareth by his mother Mary and foster father Joseph, I have a strong guess as to what the Word's first word was. In all likelihood, it was 'abba.' That's the common Aramaic word for 'Dad.' It's what little Jesus, and then one day teenage Jesus, would've called Joseph around the house. But Jesus always had a consciousness that it was the Temple in Jerusalem, not the hut in Nazareth, that was really his “Father's house” (Luke 2:49). And so to Jesus, it wasn't just Joseph who was 'abba.' God was 'Abba.' That is fundamentally how Jesus, in his humanity, learned to experience the God of heaven – as 'Abba,' as 'Dad.' And to no one but Jesus has that ever been as literally and naturally true. Others may have called God 'Father,' 'our Father,' 'my Father,' but none meant by those words everything that was on Jesus' lips or in Jesus' heart.

So when Jesus gathered his crew of disciples, his destined founders of a New Israel in and around him, they listened to him pray, and they were astonished at the absolute ease and intimacy with which Jesus addressed his Abba above. They didn't dare! But they wondered if he could give them a taste. So one of them said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray!” (Luke 11:2). And so he does. And where many other Jews switched into fine formal Hebrew to pray their set liturgical prayers, Jesus gives them a prayer in Aramaic – and it starts by calling God 'Abba' (cf. Galatians 4:6). What he's saying to them, as he gives them what we call the Lord's Prayer, is that he can open up to others his privileged relationship to his dear infinite Abba above. And that's exactly what he'll do. When Jesus went to the cross, he died not for one nation alone, “but also to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad” (John 11:52). He died to make it possible for people to become God's children, to be brought into God's family, to inherit the right to treat God as Father. And then Jesus was “raised from the dead by the glory of the Father” (Romans 6:4), making him “the Firstborn among many brothers” (Romans 8:29). Dying and rising, Jesus ensures that the Father's family can grow.

And it grows by baptism. When we're broken down and die with Christ in the water, we're reborn to the life of faith – “born of water and the Spirit” (John 3:5) – but born no longer as individuals but as parts. We become on earth the Son's Body – the Body of the same Son of God who has since ascended into heaven. Each of us, being born again, is born into his Body, and thus into his relationships. If my hand is part of my body, then my hand shares in my relationship with my dad. So if our life becomes part of Christ's Body, then our life shares in his relationship with his Abba! And so we “have received the Spirit of adoption-as-sons” (Romans 8:15). The Spirit, acting by promise to usher us to new birth, is what animates us as a single Body. God's goal in all this is “bringing many sons to glory” (Hebrews 2:10), and so Jesus is “not ashamed to call [us] brothers” (Hebrews 2:11). When you were born again, you became Jesus' little brother, you became Jesus' little sister. You were brought into the family, you came to share in Jesus' own relationship with his Abba, so you were given “access in one Spirit to the Father” (Ephesians 2:18).

And that's a matter of grace, not presumption! None of this is natural to us. On our own, we have no right to act this way, no right to talk to God this way. Jesus does – he's the one and only Son of God by nature. But for us, it's all grace, it's all adoption. You and I were feral children, found abandoned in the desert, and taken home in a curious way we don't understand. So of course these things don't come naturally. It takes a lifetime – if not longer! – to learn sonship from the Spirit of the Son. But because God took us in, he has “sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts” to accomplish exactly that (Galatians 4:6). It will only be finished in the future. The completion of the adoption proceedings only take place when you and I are raised from the dead, our bodies and souls alike being fully redeemed (Romans 8:23). Until then, we're called to unlearn our natural ways and learn to take on a greater family resemblance (cf. Matthew 5:44-45). And when we say this prayer, when we call God our Father, we commit ourselves to being responsive to the Spirit who's teaching us family resemblance.

So while we oughtn't go strutting about the house in presumption and pride, we instead ought to be delighting in awe at the privileges of grace. Because Jesus brought us home to his Father and opened to us everything that's his, including a share in his very own relationship with God. You have become, and are even more becoming, a child of the Consuming Fire! And so you, with great thankfulness, can approach God in prayer the same way Jesus does: as Abba. And that's exactly what we do when we pray the Lord's Prayer while the Spirit of the Son lives in us and points us toward God as Father. By this Holy Spirit, “we cry: 'Abba! Father!'” (Romans 8:15) – and when Paul writes that, he's talking about the Lord's Prayer! Every time we say it, the Holy Spirit is working in us to help our own spirits realize the privileges of our adoption.

What that means for our prayer lives is incalculable. The same God from whom Moses hid his face in fear? Now you can pray to him as 'Dad,' like you're a child running home from school, with every reason to expect bursting through the door will get you swept up and twirled around in an embrace of love. That's prayer, as you laugh and feel his embrace and listen to his warm welcome and tell him how glad you are to be his child: that's “Our Father, who art in heaven.” You tell him how glad you are to be home and how much you love him: that's “Hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come; thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” You ask him what's for supper: that's “Give us this day our daily bread.” You apologize for anything mean you said before school and any misbehavior at school: that's “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” You ask him to help you out when it comes to the neighborhood bully, or to check under the bed for monsters as he tucks you in: that's “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” And you murmur how glad you are, as you nod off, to be his kid: that's “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.” The Lord's Prayer is the prayer of a child's absolute joy and devotion.

And even as we grow, even as we mature and “grow up in every way” toward adulthood in Christ (Ephesians 4:15), the same God is still our Abba. We're no less glad to be home, no less glad for his hug, no less wanting to see his business succeed, no less hungry for a home-cooked meal, no less eager for an unhindered relationship, no less glad for the protection and security he provides. At any stage of growth in the faith, the Lord's Prayer is incontestably and ineradicably domestic. Christian prayer, which is always rooted in the Lord's Prayer, is first and foremost about running in to spend time with our Father, and learning to trust him as no more a stranger. In Christ our Elder Brother, “we have boldness and access with confidence” (Ephesians 3:12), an ability to “with confidence draw near” to our Father's presence to “receive mercy and find grace” (Hebrews 4:16). Our prayers need not be shy. The Lord's Prayer is the Church's declaration of confident access, never forgetting that it's a privilege of grace beyond our nature, but finding greater grace as all the reason for greater love.

When we embrace grace without presumption, this closeness won't sacrifice our Father's honor and authority – for to do away with either would be to demote him from Abba to Buddy. He isn't just some relative, he's our Abba, our Father; and he isn't even just any abba, he's our Abba Above. He's the Father who deserves all your love, all your devotion, all your reverence, all your obedience, all your trust, all your awe, all your wonder, all your worship. Paul is right to call him “the Father of Glory” (Ephesians 1:17). He remains, throughout the New Testament, “our Lord and Father” (James 3:9), “our God and Father” (Philippians 4:20). Even Jesus prays to his “Father, Lord of heaven and earth” (Matthew 11:25). God's Fatherhood isn't an alternative to Lordship or Godhood – it's an expression of it. The closeness is combined with awe. Our affection is in tandem with his authority. If God is our Father insofar as we're the Body of Christ, then we're obligated to treat our Father as Christ treats him, because we've become physical extensions of Jesus' own loving sonship to God.

Which means what Jesus is teaching us – and which we enact, knowingly or unknowingly, whenever we pray the prayer he gave us – is that prayer begins in adoration, in the attitude and act of worship that's suitable only for God alone. We adore our Abba above, our Father in heaven, in awe and wonder, and we center ourselves on his glory with reverent and obedient hearts. That's the beginning of all prayer that is prayer. Prayer doesn't kick off with a litany of demands, or even requests. Before we ask anything of God, we're called to simply bask in his presence, adore him in childlike awe, and keep our eyes fixed on him. We confess him as Father in gratitude and joy, astounded all over again that we get to share by grace in the sonship Jesus has, and that on that basis we get to relate to God in a deeper way, building on all that came before. So we adore our Father who is in heaven.

Over the next few months, as we explore this tremendous life of prayer to which Jesus invites us, we'll be seeing how the Lord's Prayer creates, expresses, and fulfills Christians' rightful hopes – how Jesus both teaches us how to pray in general and also prescribes a prayer that each Christian rightly adopts as his or her own, just as he or she is adopted by God through Christ. When you pray like this, God's Spirit is at work in you. See, when we're praying on our own, it's so easy for things to become awkward. We can be assailed by doubts and dreads. We can default to other models of relating to God – more distant and diffident, more shy and shameful. What Jesus does is remind us it doesn't have to be that way. Prayer needn't be a long-distance call, nor need it be a business meeting. Prayer is an exalted homecoming that throws wide the gates, and our Father is always ready to run to us from the horizon. All he asks is that, for our own benefit as well as his glory, we begin by learning to call him Father, treat him as Father, trust him as Father, and simply open by running to him and resting in him. As was said long ago about the opening of the Lord's Prayer: “May our hearts perceive God as Father! Our voice should proclaim this, our tongue should utter it, our spirit should shout it aloud, and everything that is in us should be in tune with grace, not fear.”¹ For this is the great grace of God in Christ – through whom and in whose Spirit may our Father be glorified forever! Amen.

1  Peter Chrysologus the bishop of Ravenna, Sermon 67 (mid-fifth century)