The Lord's Prayer Part 1-Who's Your Daddy?

This is part one of 7 installments on the Lord’s Prayer. I’m teaching on the Lord’s Prayer in church as part of a much longer series on the Sermon on the Mount. If you can’t make it to CrossBridge or if you miss a week you can get caught up here. If you are a regular CrossBridger (BridgeCrosser?) some of this will be redundant because you know my thoughts on the importance of understanding Jesus’ life and message in its historical and cultural setting. I’m writing with the reader in mind who has not been to CrossBridge and who hasn’t heard me beat into the ground that: 1) Jesus was not a Christian, he was a Jew. Thought like a Jew, ate like a Jew. Dressed like a Jew. Liked Jewish music. And Jewish dancing. Falafel, anyone? 2) Jesus was born, lived and died during the Roman occupation of Israel. His message was understood by his original audience as pertaining largely to their own historical situation. I go so far as to say that the depth of His message cannot be understood apart from a good understanding of the Roman occupation and its implications for daily Jewish life. 3) Jesus was a Jewish rabbi. He was a travelling teacher, one whose job it was to interpret the law for others. He had disciples like other rabbi’s in his day. He, in this way, was not peculiar. 4) When properly understood, Jesus’ message and example form for us a model for living, thinking and worshiping in our day, here and now. In fact, if we will embrace His message and begin to live it out, not only will we be changed, but those around us will be changed as well. OK. There’s probably more, but that will do for now. Here’s the first installment on the Lord’s Prayer. Jewish prayers were generally recited verbatim in Hebrew, even though Aramaic was the spoken language of the people. The languages were similar, like Dutch and German are similar, or like English and red neck are similar. (Did that offend? Sorry.) Hebrew was a really big deal. It was considered on some level to be the divine language. When God spoke to the Israelites, He did so in Hebrew and so God should be addressed in Hebrew as well. (God was smart that way, making sure he did not address the ancient Israelites in Swahili or Chinese.) There was a really spiritual sound to the language of Hebrew for the first century Jew. It was beautiful. It was rich in history…the history of God saving them. The Hebrew language sounded holy. It’s like some folks today praying in King James English. Nobody talks like that anymore. But it is beautiful and it sounds reverent and holy. But there may be a downside to the KJV prayer: it puts a false distance between God and us. It puts Him way up in the clouds and us down here. It makes Him seem a bit more inaccessible. Yes, God is to be revered. His ways are higher than ours. The transcendent and intimate must both be embraced. As we’ll see below, our relationship with the transcendent God should be an intimate one. I played bass on a recording by a guy in Tulsa named Jim Edwards. He wrote the following lyric: Everyone knows that the Lord God is British That’s how King James got to know him so well Can’t get much air-time speaking Hebrew or Yiddish The sorts of words we choose make us feel a certain way. So does the language we choose (provided we have a choice). But what does this have to do with the Lord’s Prayer? You’re about to find out. Abba is an Aramaic word meaning Papa or Daddy. (Less formal than Father.) It was the first word that a baby spoke in Jesus’ culture. In fact, today it is still the first word that a baby speaks in Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Jordan. Scholars generally agree that Abba would have been the first word in the Lord’s Prayer. This would have been very controversial in Jesus’ day. Note: Abba was Aramaic, not Hebrew. Jesus was praying in Aramaic. This would have been a serious departure from religious practice of His day when ALL religious practice was performed in Hebrew, the holy language. But for Jesus, thus, there was NO holy language. He was advocating a type of prayer that was more personal and less structured than what Jewish worship normally encompassed. Because Jesus did not endorse the idea that there is a sacred language, He opened the door for the New Testament to be written in Greek and translated into other languages. It follows then, that Jewish culture is not sacred either. Jewish culture was Jesus’ culture…He was fully Jewish. But He did not hold his language or customs as universally applicable. God is above language and culture. Much of the church has done the same thing…created a culture with its own language (Christianese) and standards of behavior that are treated as universal but are not. Jesus took on flesh to show us what God is like (talk about culture shock!!) He and His followers deconstructed the system where worship was about a geographically based God that must be worshiped in a certain language, while dressed in certain garments and looking, smelling and sounding like everyone around them. It has been suggested that Jesus’ calling God ‘Father’ is original. It is not. Though Jesus showed us a level of intimacy with God that was unprecedented, the idea of God as Father was found in other religions and certainly in Judaism. The first time that father-son imagery is used in the OT is when Moses was being sent back to God to confront Pharaoh. The Jewish people were being held captive in an unjust, oppressive, abusive system in which they had no voice. Exodus 4: 21 The LORD said to Moses, "When you return to Egypt, see that you perform before Pharaoh all the wonders I have given you the power to do. But I will harden his heart so that he will not let the people go. 22 Then say to Pharaoh, 'This is what the LORD says: Israel is my firstborn son, 23 and I told you, "Let my son go, so he may worship me." But you refused to let him go; so I will kill your firstborn son.' " Justice and deliverance was the context for the father-son imagery. Jesus’ use of the word Abba echoes the history of Israel being delivered from Egypt. Jesus is calling for deliverance from oppression and for justice to be executed. The Israelites were captive by Egypt, and now by Rome. Now, as then, it is the Father who will come to rescue the captive son. Even now as we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we lift our voices and cry out to our Papa for justice, peace and an end to suffering. (Note that He moves immediately into asking for God’s kingdom to come.) Abba. It’s a slap in the face of stuffy religion-as-usual. It communicates intimacy. And it’s a prayer for God to rescue us from injustice. And that’s just the first word of the prayer.