An excerpt from The Lord's Prayer: Drawing Heaven and Earth Together.
My father was a quiet man. Many times he would speak just a few words. I can remember sitting in the living room with him some evenings when he would say hardly anything. Dad had a quiet strength about him. He provided well for his family and took seriously his responsibilities as a husband and father. He worked hard and was a loyal employee at the factory where he worked. But one thing that has lingered with me is that I don’t remember Dad ever telling me that he loved me. Even in the final sixteen months of his life when a series of illnesses took hold of him and we watched his life ebb, Dad and I never were able to say in words that we loved one another. That doesn’t mean that there was no bond of love between us. It just means that we “spoke” our love in other ways.
It’s hard for me to think of fatherhood without thinking about my Dad. But I’ve also had other fatherly figures in my life who, while not my biological parent, have been fathers to me in other ways. The most important was my maternal grandfather with whom we lived from early in my childhood. Ern, as we all called him, was a unique individual. His own childhood had been tinged with tragedy. His father died when Ern was a young boy and his mother placed him and one of his sisters in a children’s home in England. Then in 1905, as a boy only 9 years of age, he was sent to Canada as a farm worker. Later, he enlisted in the military during the First World War and served in Europe until the conflict ended in 1918. What I remember about my grandfather was some of the contrasts between him and Dad. While Dad was quiet and short on words, Ern overflowed with them. He would tell me stories, hug me with his huge embrace, and take me with him everywhere. We were constant companions during my childhood. From my grandfather I learned that love could be expressed in words and embraces, as well as deeds.
I also think of my doctoral dissertation advisor, Brian Peckham, who was an intimidating professor. A Jesuit priest and a graduate of Harvard, he was intense and he demanded a lot of his students. His scheduled two-hour classes often stretched out to four, five, or even six hours! But what I remember most vividly about Brian is that he was the first professor who instilled in me the belief that I actually had a contribution to make. No one had shown that confidence in me before.
Finally, I think of a retired professor who became a dear friend in the final years of his life. Gordon Harland treated me partly as a colleague, partly as though I were one of his students, and partly as a surrogate son. Our conversations usually were laden with important ideas and observations—as well as a few reading assignments for me! Gordon projected a complex combination of intimacy and distance at the same time. We were close friends—I delivered the eulogy at his funeral—but I also knew there were boundaries that I would not cross with him.
The complexity of our experiences with the father figures in our lives sometimes makes it difficult to separate them from what we express, hear and experience when we refer to God as “our Father.” Our own parents and parent-like figures fill out the image for us. If our experiences with fathers have been troubled, we may find it difficult to name God as our Father without projecting all that we have experienced onto God. But it’s also important for us to recognize the limitations of our experiences when it comes to thinking about God through the lens of fatherhood. For this reason, in addition to our personal experiences we need to consider various biblical representations of God as father.
God as “Father” to Jesus
For Christians, calling upon God as “Father” goes back to Jesus himself. Thinking about Jesus as God’s Son and therefore God as the Father of Jesus, is embedded deeply in our Christian ethos. The New Testament writers interpreted several key Old Testament texts as referring to the relationship between God and Jesus as the Son of God (for example 2 Samuel 7:14; Psalms 2:7; 89:26). Most biblical scholars think that these texts originally referred to a metaphorical father-son relationship between the LORD and Israel’s kings, beginning with David. But certainly in the New Testament and beyond they have been interpreted to refer specifically to the relationship between God and Jesus as the Messiah.
One only needs to read the Gospel of John to gain a sense of the closeness of the parent-child relationship between God and Jesus. In the opening verses of John we read, “No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known” (John 1:18). Numerous times in John, Jesus refers to God as his Father and to himself as God’s Son. In John 14:10b-11a Jesus says, “The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me.” Or in John 17, when Jesus prays for his disciples, he repeatedly addresses God as “Father” (verses 1, 11, 21, 24, 25). Jesus does the will of the Father (John 5:30); Jesus makes the Father known (John 17:6); Jesus and the Father are one (John 10:30). The inescapable claim of John’s Gospel is that God and Jesus are Father and Son.
God as Our Father
In the Gospel of Matthew the image of God as Jesus’s heavenly Father has an additional emphasis. While still stressing the closeness of the relationship between Jesus and God, Jesus takes this relationship a step further by extending the fatherhood of God to include those who follow him. In the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) in which the Lord’s Prayer is embedded in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus repeatedly describes God as the Father of Jesus’s disciples and the crowd gathered around him. What is striking about the Lord’s Prayer is not that Jesus addresses God as his Father, but rather that he invites us to join him in this prayer by addressing God as “Our Father.” By doing this, Jesus fundamentally changes the image of the relationship between God and us as those who follow Jesus. No longer is God our overlord, a tyrant of sorts, who imposes his will upon those over whom he rules. No longer are we just God’s servants called to obey every command of God simply as an act of submission to the overwhelming power of God. Rather, God is our Father and we are God’s children.
When he taught the Lord’s Prayer to his disciples and the crowd with him in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus invited them—as he also invites us—to address God as “Our Father in heaven.” The entire prayer that follows this opening address to God is governed by that “our.” I find it fascinating that even in private, we do not pray, “My Father who art in heaven…give me my daily bread…forgive me my trespasses…deliver me from evil…” This suggests that this “our” is deeply embedded in our recitation of the prayer. By addressing God as “Our Father” we are stepping outside the individualism of our culture to identify God not as a personal possession, but rather as the Father of a larger community. Our voice is joined with that of others with whom we share this relationship with God.
With its invocation of God as “our Father in heaven” the Lord’s Prayer is a prayer for the Christian community. It turns our thoughts away from a self-centred obsession with our individual concerns toward the larger world community in which we live. This most common of Christian prayers therefore has a horizontal as well as a vertical focus. Leonardo Boff articulates this insight in this way, “…a new community is emerging here, one of brothers and sisters in the elder brother, Jesus; all of us are sons and daughters in the Son, and we are encouraged to call out with the same cry as the Son Jesus: Abba!”
We are connected to one another through the Son, Jesus Christ. It is at the invitation of Jesus that we call upon God as “our Father in heaven.” It is together with Jesus that we pray the Lord’s Prayer. And it is together with our brothers and sisters that we invoke the goodness of God as the Father of us all. The idea that God is “my Father” as an individual apart from my brothers and sisters in Christ cannot be sustained. This, I think, strikes the same note as John Wesley did when he suggested that a solitary Christianity cannot be a true faith. A Christian cannot live isolated from others. The solitary Christian is an oxymoron. For there is no Christian faith where there is no community of sisters and brothers who together with Jesus call upon God as “our Father in heaven.”