The Lord's Prayer & The New Exodus (Part 2-"Our Father")

“Our Father”

Good Morning! Today is Sunday May 3rd. Welcome to today’s episode. We began a new series last week. Looking at the Lord’s Prayer from a slightly different perspective. I gave some introductory remarks about how the LP mirrors that of the Exodus out of Egypt in the OT. Which brings about a New Exodus in person of Jesus. So that is where we want to continue our examination alongside the work of N.T. Wright. If you missed any of the last episode you will want to go back and listen to understand what we are talking about. Because just like many things in Scripture. Good theology is often built on a cumulative case. So, with that in mind we want to look at the first part of the LP. Those of Faith who have memorized the LP know the beginning words as “Our Father”. This is where we want to camp for our time today.

References to Jesus’ own practice of private prayer are scattered throughout the Gospels and clearly reflect an awareness on the part of his first followers that this kind of private prayer—not simply formulaic petitions, but wrestling with God over real issues and questions—formed the undercurrent of his life and public work. The prayer that Jesus gave his followers embodies his own prayer life and his wider kingdom ministry in every clause.

Father/Our Father

Jesus’ own address to God appears regularly as “Father.” This is Aramaic word

“Abba”.

It is a term expressing warm affection and filial confidence. It has no perfect equivalent in our language.[1] But since both young children and grown children addressed their fathers as “Abba,” this word must be translated as “father” and not as “daddy.”[2] As is sometimes suggested in modern evangelical circles. The term can also refer to an ancestor, grandfather, founder (of something), protector, or even used as an honorary title for an elder.[3] Although abba does not occur in the OT, its Hebrew associate ab occurs frequently. Ab usually refers to a human father. On occasion the OT speaks of God in the role of Father to Israel (Exod. 4:22; Deut. 32:6; Isa. 45:9–11; Mal. 2:10) or to Israel’s king (2 Sam. 7:14; Pss. 2:7; 89:26–27).[4] But the term is not used specially of God. In the NT the idea of God’s intimate relationship to humanity is a distinct feature of Jesus’ teaching. God relates to believers as a father relates to his child.[5] Even when “Father” in the NT translates the more formal Greek word pater, the idea of Abba is certainly in the background. Jesus addressed God as Abba in prayer (Mark 14:36) and taught His disciples to pray in the same terms (Luke 11:1–2, pater). Jesus’ claim of intimate relationship with God offended many of His opponents because they considered Abba to be overly familiar in addressing God. Hence the reason we do not see it in the OT. Nevertheless, Jesus’ usage established the pattern for the church’s view of God and each believer’s relationship with Him. Paul used Abba to describe God’s adoption of believers as His children (Rom. 8:15) and the change in the believer’s status with God that results (Gal. 4:6–7).[6]

Though the Aramaic word Abba is only found in the Gospels in the Gethsemane narrative at Mark 14:36, there is a broad consensus (1) that Jesus indeed used this word in prayer, and (2) that the notion of God’s fatherhood—though, of course, known also in Judaism—took central place in his own attitude to God in a distinctive way. So, when the prayer given to his followers begins with “Father” (Luke 11:2) or “Our Father” (Matt. 6:9; cf.), we must understand that Jesus wants them to see themselves as sharing his own characteristic spirituality—that is, his own intimate, familial approach to the Creator. The idea of God’s fatherhood, and of building this concept into the life of prayer, was not, as must again be stressed, a novelty within Judaism. But the centrality and particular emphasis that Jesus gave it represents a new departure.[7]

It appears as a double phrase that was common in the Greek-speaking church, where its use may well have been liturgical. (The Lord’s Prayer in its Aramaic form probably began with ’abba.)

It appears that it was Jesus who first applied the term to God, and who gave authority to his disciples to do so. Paul sees in its use a symbol of the Christian’s adoption as a son of God and his possession of the Spirit[8]

In highlighting echoes from the Exodus tradition in the Lord’s Prayer, we must begin, of course, with “Father”:

“Israel is my son, my firstborn; let my people go, that they may serve me” (Exod. 4:22–3); “When Israel was a child I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son” (Hos. 11:1).

Calling God “Father” not only evokes all kinds of associations of family life and intimacy; more importantly, it speaks to all subsequent generations of God as the God of the Exodus, the God who rescues Israel precisely because Israel is God’s firstborn son. The title Father says as much about Israel, and about the events through which God will liberate Israel, as it does about God.

Jesus’ own sense of vocation, that of accomplishing the New Exodus, was marked principally by his awareness of God as Father Now in the Lord’s Prayer he invites his followers to consider themselves Exodus people. Their cry for redemption will be heard and answered.[9]

Abba, Father: Conformed to the Pattern of Christ

It is striking that at the two places where Paul quotes Jesus’ use of Abba, the Aramaic word for “father,” he also speaks in dramatic language of the two things that have formed the underlying structure of this article: (1) the New Exodus in Christ, and (2) the incorporation of the worshiping Christian into the inner life of God. I want to conclude, with a brief look at these two passages and some suggestions as to what they mean for our regarding the Lord’s Prayer as a pattern of Christian praying.

In Gal. 4:1–11, as is fairly obvious though not always fully drawn out, Paul tells the story of the Exodus again. Only it is not now the Exodus from Egypt, when God sent Moses and gave the Law, but the Exodus of God’s people in Christ, both Jews and Gentiles, in long-term and complete fulfillment of the promise to Abraham. Thus, in verses 4–7 he says:

When the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son … to redeem … and because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying “Abba, Father.” So you are no longer a slave, but a son; and, if a son, then an heir, through God.

As a result, as he emphasizes in verse 8–11, there can be no “going back to Egypt.” God has now been revealed, not in a burning bush but in the Son and the Spirit—or, rather, as the One who sent the Son and now sends the Spirit of the Son.

The God of the New Exodus is the God revealed as Father, Son, and Spirit. The only alternative is some kind of paganism, even if, oddly enough, it is hiding underneath the Jewish Torah. And the revelation of God as Trinity is completed in the experience of Christian prayer—that is, in the Abba, which certainly refers to Jesus’ own usage and may well refer to the practice of saying the Lord’s Prayer in the early Aramaic-speaking church.

Two reflections on the use of this Abba prayer by Christians may be of note. First, just as the Lord’s Prayer is still known as the “Pater Noster” by many Roman Catholics who actually now say it in English, so perhaps—though it can only ever be a guess—the same prayer may have continued to be known as the “Abba” by those who said it in Greek. Second, it may be asked: Is it simply a coincidence that the key prayer word of the early Christians, like some of the key prayer words of their pagan counterparts, was a palindrome (that is, a word or number that reads the same backward or forward)—indeed, one of the simplest possible palindromes?

The point is that the Lord’s Prayer—by (1) reflecting the prayer of Jesus and inviting his followers to share it, and (2) embodying the New Exodus stance that summed up so much of Jesus’ whole agenda—is now the appropriate vehicle of a specific type of prayer. This prayer is not shouting across a void to a distant and perhaps unknown God. Nor is it simply getting in touch with one’s own deepest feelings and self-awareness. Nor is it getting in tune with the wider spirit of the whole cosmos. It is prayer that grows directly out of the Jewish experience and knowledge of the one creator God, but that finds, without leaving that Jewish base behind, that the knowledge of this one God has three intertwined aspects—not least of all because Jesus himself, as a human being, remains at the heart of it.

Rom. 8:12–30 completes the circle. Here we find the fully inaugurated, but not yet consummated, eschatology that so perfectly reflects Jesus’ own kingdom announcement, albeit seen now from the post-Easter perspective. We are saved in hope; but hope that is seen is not hope. And this salvation is precisely the New Exodus. Led by the Spirit, who here takes on the role of the pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, we are called the children of God. We are no longer slaves, and must not dream of going back to Egypt. Rather, because we are those who cry “Abba, Father!” we are not only children but heirs, heirs of the true promised land.

The true promised land is not a strip of territory in the Middle East or elsewhere, nor yet “heaven” as a far-off and basically disembodied final resting place. Rather, it is the renewed creation itself. It is God’s world restored, healed, and flooded with the Spirit, sharing in the freedom that goes with the glorification of God’s children. Creation itself, in other words, will have its own Exodus. Our Exodus experience in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is both the key starting point of that long project and the guarantee that God will complete what he has started.

In the midst of all of this, the characteristic Christian prayer is that which, inspired by the Spirit, catches the Christian up in the mysterious, and even painful, dialogue of the Father and the Spirit (cf. 8:26–27). It is this that forms the Christian according to the pattern of the crucified and risen Son (cf. 8:17, 29). And it is this that constitutes Christians as “those who love God” (cf. 8:28)—in other words, those who fulfill, at last, the great Exodus prayer-command of

Deut. 6:4: “Hear O Israel, YHWH our God, YHWH is one; and you shall love YHWH your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.”

The Lord’s Prayer, then, though not explicitly referred to by Paul, points on to what in many ways must be seen as the crown of early Christian theology and practice. For the Abba prayer, inspired by the Spirit of Jesus, is the characteristic Christian prayer. It encompasses within itself that celebration of God’s goodness and kingdom, that intercession for and grief over the world in pain and need, and that anguish over trials and temptations that still beset and besiege what is the normal state of Christian existence. More than all that, however, as an invitation to share in Jesus’ own prayer life and as the New Exodus prayer, it enables the baptized and believing Christian to share—humbly, wonderingly, painfully, joyfully—in the life of God himself, Father, Son, and Spirit.[10]

[1] Easton, M. G. (1893). In Easton’s Bible dictionary. New York: Harper & Brothers.

[2] Mowery, R. L. (2000). Abba. In D. N. Freedman, A. C. Myers, & A. B. Beck (Eds.), Eerdmans dictionary of the Bible (p. 2). Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans.

[3] Fink, M. (2003). Abba. In C. Brand, C. Draper, A. England, S. Bond, E. R. Clendenen, & T. C. Butler (Eds.), Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary (p. 3). Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers.

[4] Fink, M. (2003). Abba. In C. Brand, C. Draper, A. England, S. Bond, E. R. Clendenen, & T. C. Butler (Eds.), Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary (p. 3). Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers.

[5] Fink, M. (2003). Abba. In C. Brand, C. Draper, A. England, S. Bond, E. R. Clendenen, & T. C. Butler (Eds.), Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary (p. 3). Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers.

[6] Fink, M. (2003). Abba. In C. Brand, C. Draper, A. England, S. Bond, E. R. Clendenen, & T. C. Butler (Eds.), Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary (pp. 3–4). Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers.

[7] Wright, N. T. (2002). The Lord’s Prayer as a Paradigm of Christian Prayer. In R. N. Longenecker (Ed.), Into God’s Presence: Prayer in the New Testament (pp. 133–134). Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

[8] Payne, D. F. (1996). Abba. In D. R. W. Wood, I. H. Marshall, A. R. Millard, J. I. Packer, & D. J. Wiseman (Eds.), New Bible dictionary (3rd ed., p. 2). Leicester, England; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.

[9] Wright, N. T. (2002). The Lord’s Prayer as a Paradigm of Christian Prayer. In R. N. Longenecker (Ed.), Into God’s Presence: Prayer in the New Testament (p. 140). Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

[10] Wright, N. T. (2002). The Lord’s Prayer as a Paradigm of Christian Prayer. In R. N. Longenecker (Ed.), Into God’s Presence: Prayer in the New Testament (pp. 151–154). Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.