Not far into John’s Gospel, Jesus is gaining enemies at every turn. He uses a whip to drive men and livestock out of the temple. He breaks a religious law by choosing the Sabbath to heal a man who cannot walk. But it is because of his words that they seek all the more to kill him. To their anger over the healing, Jesus simply replies, “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I, too, am working.”(1)

To the person well versed in biting comebacks and fatal rhetoric, these words hardly seem like fighting-words. But to Jewish leaders who knew a history of combating (and failing to combat) the polytheistic influences of surrounding nations, Jesus uttered what seemed the most blasphemous notion possible. He called God his own Father.

The notion of God as Father was not an entirely new concept. Even to the Jews who took offense at Jesus’s words that day, God was understood as ‘Father’ in the sense that God is Creator, that God is Lord, that God is protector and forgiver. Fourteen times in the Old Testament God is spoken of as Father, and each instance depicts a glimpse of divine fatherhood.

But here, Jesus added to the notion of Father a distinct element of intimacy and uniqueness with himself. Nowhere else in Palestinian Judaism is God addressed by an individual as “My father.”(2) Jesus’s use of such a title—and elsewhere the very intimate “abba” or daddy—reveals the very basis of his communion with God. And he adds to this vision the promise of the Spirit who comes from the Father and testifies on the Son’s behalf—an invitation to commune within the Godhead itself. To the religious leaders who considered themselves guardians of the profane and the sacred, to the crowds who would have known the significance, these words would have revealed a scandalous glimpse into the mind of Jesus. All the more scandalous, Jesus later extends his communion with God the Father to his followers. “This, then, is how you should pray,” he says:

Our Father in heaven,

hallowed be your name,

your kingdom come,

your will be done

on earth as it is in heaven.(3)

Whether a Christian familiar with the prayer and titles of the Trinity or a secularist familiar with religious jargon, it might seem rather basic to approach the mysterious thought that Christ is Son and God is Father. “Heavenly Father,” “only Son,” and “Holy Spirit” are phrases over which our contemporary ears barely perk. Even those for whom the love of a father was absent or the love of a present father was treasured, the vast allowance of being able to call God ‘Father’ hardly seems a matter to consider. We might even lump it casually together with other generic religious tidbits. Yet it is not a quality inherent in other religions; it is, in fact, an obstruction to some, an enigma to others. The Christian confidence and comfort that God can be approached as Father is the unique and vital gift of the Son made available through the Spirit.

And such is the startling, radical message of the Christian story. As one theologian notes, “[T]his one word ‘Father,’ together with ‘Our,’ contain all these concepts [Creator, Lord, King, Lawgiver] yet at the same time reveals them as intimacy, as love, as a unique, unrepeatable and joyful union.”(4) What might it mean to you to have access to a Father who knows you by name, in whose house you are invited to be who you truly are—to live and work and play as God created you? What if there is indeed a Father who waits, who longs to gather his children together and take them into his arms? What if this is the communion for which you are made? Some will be transformed by love, some will be broken by love, some will refuse to be gathered by love. But God offers a place, positioned within the greater offer of adoption, the hope of communion, and the gift of participation in the kingdom. What if this is indeed our Father whose name is hallowed and whose kingdom we seek, whom we know through the Son and worship in the Spirit as children of the divine?

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) John 5:17.

(2) See Joachim Jeremias, Jesus and the Message of the New Testament (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002).

(3) Matthew 6:9-10.

(4) Alexander Schmemann, Our Father (Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 19-20.