The Journey with Jesus: Notes to Myself

God Our Father
New Year's Day 2003

Week of Monday, December 30, 2002

Lectionary Readings
Isaiah 61:10–62:3
Psalm 148
Galatians 4:4–7
Luke 2:22–40

With the passage of the old year and the beginning of the new year, there are some things I would like to forget and other things I would like to remember. The lectionary text from the epistles this week reminds us that we should never, ever forget what God is like.

Although atheism and its cousin naturalism (physical matter is all that exists) have their following here in the west, compared with all of human history and culture these people exist as a tiny minority. Most all peoples of all times and places throughout human history have been resolutely religious. The philosopher John Hick observes that the “the history of religions sets before us innumerable gods, differently named and often with different characteristics.” These many human conceptions of God, Hick notes, would likely comprise a book “as bulky as the telephone directory of a large city.”¹

Do all these many and varied notions of God help us to know what God is really like? As the Creator of all, God has always been at work in human history. In the history of salvation, says the writer of Hebrews, God has worked in different times and ways (Hebrews 1:2–3), so maybe some of the many names of God are inklings of His true nature. But with the advent of Jesus we come to what Paul calls “the fullness of time” (Galatians 4:4) and what the writer of Hebrews calls “the last days” (Hebrews 1:2). With Jesus we have reached the fullness of the last days. In what sense? In the sense that for the first time in human history we catch a distinctly clear and true glimpse of God's nature, a glimpse that is far brighter and more focused than any of those in the previous 10,000 years of human civilization. Here is our lectionary text for this week from Galatians 4:4–7:

But when the time had fully come, God sent His son, born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those under law, that we might receive the full rights of sons. Because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, “Abba, Father.” So you are no longer a slave, but a son; and since you are a son, God has made you also an heir.

The problem with this notion of God as a heavenly father is that our experiences of our earthly fathers fall short of the ideal. For some people their fathers fall very short of anything like perfection, comfort or care. For still others the idea of God as a father strikes terror in their heart. Some of our earthly fathers remind us of violent tyrants, absentee apparitions, a silent and threatening presence, or maybe just some non-existent name. When you think of your own father you know this is true to at least some extent; if you have been a father you know this even more deeply. Consequently, one of the greatest challenges of Christian discipleship is to stop projecting these experiences of our earthly fathers onto our ideas of what our heavenly father is like.

In the lectionary text above Paul says that God sent His Son, and then it says using identical language that God sent His Spirit into our hearts. His Son, says Paul, was born of a woman, meaning he experienced all of our human frailty, weakness and grief. He sent His Son to redeem us from the curse of living under law-like conditions. Like what? In Paul's larger theology this is clear, that every attempt to live under the law or by the law is an attempt of self-justification, and that all attempts at self-justification are doomed to failure.

To require your child to live in constant self-justification (grades, behavior, wealth, friends, job, status, the list is almost endless) is precisely what a loving father does not do to his child. Instead, you are loved simply as a child, whether you succeed or fail, live well or poorly, and so on. Paul compares this freedom from self-justification to the difference between a slave who lives in craven servitude and fear, always needing to prove himself, and an heir who confidently possesses all that the father owns. As a consequence, says Paul, we cry out to God not as to a distant deity, but intimately to “Abba, Father.” “Abba” is the term that Jesus Himself used to address God (Mark 14:36). This was the common word that children of the day used to address their fathers, and if the idea of “Daddy” is probably too casual, there is nevertheless an explicit sense of loving intimacy that generates total confidence in one's unconditional acceptance.

Homes with loving fathers are safe places, free from fear and any need for self-justification, and this, says Paul, is what the coming of Jesus tells us about what God is like. One of the most famous stories that Jesus told, the parable of the Prodigal son (Luke 15), makes this precise point, that God is a gracious, loving father who always welcomes us to safe places and even celebrates us no matter how grossly we have failed.

The story is familiar to us. A son rudely asks for his inheritance long before it is his due. He then goes to “a far country” and wastes not only the money but his very life. The story is a tale of obstinance and grotesque self-degradation—for a Jew to eat the feed of ceremonially unclean pigs would have been unthinkable. The turning point for this lost son is when he realizes that any and all attempts at self-justification to return home are futile. No, he realizes, “I am not worthy to be called your son.” But then he is stunned to learn that failure at self-justification does not matter.

His father was “filled with compassion.” When he saw his son, he ran to meet him, threw his arms around him, kissed him, clothed him in the finest robes, gave him a signet ring, and then threw the biggest party he could. Celebration was in order. Why? Because the son had amended his ways and finally proved himself? No, celebration was due because the loving father had his child back, period.

It can be hard to accept such gratuitous love when every other part of our culture judges us based upon our merit and success. But at this New Year this is precisely what Jesus tells us God is like. Among all the tens of thousands of human conceptions of God, some helpful and others gross distortions, you should be confident, says Paul, that God is like a loving, gracious father who embraces us without any expectation that we prove or justify our worthiness. Remember that as you begin yet another new year.

1. John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion (New Haven: Yale), pp. 233–234.