Our Father: What Jesus Set Aside to Say It (2 of 9)

Two decisions sit behind the opening words, and both are easier to see by what they replaced.

He prayed in Aramaic rather than Hebrew. And he addressed God as Father rather than by the formula every Jew would have expected.

Why Does the Language Matter?

Because Hebrew was the sacred language and he did not use it.

Bailey’s claim about that is large and worth weighing. By praying in Aramaic, the ordinary speech of ordinary people, Jesus set aside the heritage of a sacred language and a sacred culture, and in doing so made every language an adequate manger into which the Word of God could be placed.

That is the theological groundwork for translation, and for the fact that Christianity has almost never insisted its scriptures stay in one tongue. The decision was made at the level of how to pray.

What Does Abba Mean?

Father, and also our Father, and the double sense is the point.

The word affirms a personal relationship and at the same time carries the deference owed to a superior. It is not the baby-talk term it is sometimes described as, and it is not a formal title either.

It was rare and daring in that setting, though not unique, and it mattered enough to the Greek-speaking church that they preserved the Aramaic word untranslated. Paul uses it in his letters, in Greek, without converting it. That is what people do with a word they received from someone and did not want to lose.

What Formula Was Dropped?

The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

That was the standard address, and it carries a claim. It locates the person praying inside a lineage and a history, and it works by descent.

Jesus replaced it with two words that any person can say. Bailey’s reading of the consequence is direct: the new phrase places all believers on the same level regardless of racial ancestry or community history.

Notice what that does to the argument John the Baptist was already having, when he told people not to say they had Abraham as their father. The prayer settles it by not mentioning him.

Is God Near or Far in This Prayer?

Both, and the address holds them together deliberately.

Our Father is as close as language gets. In the heavens is a statement about distance and otherness. The opening line contains both and does not resolve the tension.

Bailey reads that as intentional. The prayer is addressed to a God who is near and at the same time far away, and dropping either half produces something other than what Jesus taught.

What Does It Say About How to Pray?

Fewer words, and no accumulation of titles.

The instruction immediately before the prayer warns against heaping up phrases. Bailey’s summary is that words offered to God are precious, must be sincere, and can be few.

The prayer models it. No invocation of the patriarchs, no accumulated honorifics, no throat-clearing.

On set times of prayer, the passage neither affirms nor rejects them. The practice of the day was three daily prayers, and Jesus appears to have wanted his followers to go beyond that pattern rather than to abolish or endorse it.

How Is Father Defined?

By the prodigal son, and Bailey argues no other definition is legitimate.

That is a firmer claim than it first sounds and the reasoning behind it is worth having. Every metaphor for God carries a risk of idolatry, because the hearer supplies content from their own experience. Anyone praying Father supplies a father, and human fathers, in any culture, are not adequate to fill the word.

The remedy is to let Jesus define his own terms. He tells a story in which a father is publicly humiliated twice in one day, runs to a son who wished him dead, interrupts a rehearsed confession, and goes out into a field to plead with a second son who is insulting him in front of guests.

That is the content of the word. Anyone who prays it while picturing their own father, favourably or otherwise, is praying to something else.

Part of a series on the Sermon on the Mount, following Bailey’s treatment. See also the parable of the prodigal son, which supplies the definition.

Sources

Kenneth E. Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels (IVP Academic, 2008), chapter 7. Supports the significance of praying in Aramaic rather than Hebrew, the double sense of Abba, the setting aside of the patriarchal formula and its levelling effect, the near and far tension in the address, the discouragement of accumulated titles, and the argument that the prodigal son defines the word Father. Supplied in full.

The biblical texts cited: Matt 6:5-13, Luke 11:1-4, Luke 15:11-32, Luke 3:8, Rom 8:15, and Gal 4:6.

Where the sourcing stops: the claim that Abba was rare but not unique reflects a scholarly discussion about its currency in the period that has moved since it was first argued, and the strongest early formulations of its uniqueness are now generally regarded as overstated.

Footnotes

1. That the Greek-speaking church kept the Aramaic word untranslated is the sort of evidence that is easy to walk past. Paul writes to congregations who did not speak Aramaic and uses it anyway. Something about the word was received rather than composed, and they would not give it up.
2. The argument that the prodigal defines Father cuts in a direction most treatments avoid. It means the prayer cannot be taught by appealing to good human fatherhood as an analogy, because the analogy runs the wrong way. The parable is not illustrating what fathers are like. It is correcting what the word had come to mean.