Finding Our Real Father
If you are a Christian, you have probably recited the Our Father, also called “the Lord’s Prayer,” more times than you can count. Even if you’re not a Christian nor profess any faith, you have at least heard of the prayer and maybe even have recited it occasionally.
That prayer, writes theologian and Scripture scholar, Leonardo Boff – who specializes in the branch of theology called “Christology” – summarizes “Jesus’ fundamental project.”
In the “Our Father,” he writes, there is no information that is considered essential to the Christian faith, such as the mystery of the Incarnation, the Church, the hierarchy, the Eucharist, the Trinity. It’s a simple prayer that Jesus taught to his disciples, according to the gospels of Matthew and Luke.
Salvific Plan?
“What is important is our Father, his salvific plan which is the Kingdom,” writes Boff, “and Our Bread, the human being in his basic needs.”
Last week’s Skeptical Faith focused on Boff’s view that people searching for God in the Christian tradition should “start with the historical Jesus to arrive at the Christ of faith.” Now we explore what God wanted to accomplish in sending his son to join the human race.
In my view, and more importantly in Boff’s, it is to awaken us to the truth about who our real father is.
“… Jesus calls God Abba,” Boff writes, “an expression without parallel in all Jewish literature, a childish language that no one would use to refer to God. But Abba reveals a relationship of intimacy and total trust such as one has, in everyday life, with one’s father or grandfather. Jesus uses the expression Abba, Dear Daddy, 170 times.”
Could Substitute “Mother”
In our time and culture, we could substitute “mother” for “father.” For some of us, our father may not be such a great model. I happened to have had a wonderful father, so the model works for me, but many don’t. In that case, it seems to me, you can also imagine all you would want in a father, and that is what Jesus was talking about.
This kind of father is presented in the famous parable of the Prodigal Son, featured in the Gospel of Luke. As you recall, this father had a young son who demanded his inheritance in advance. The son goes off to “a far country” where he squanders the inheritance in “reckless living.”
He runs out of money just before a famine and takes a job as a swineherd, an occupation that, for Jews – who considered pigs to be particularly unclean – must have been especially humiliating. He’s so hungry that he longs to eat what he is feeding the pigs but “no one gave him anything.”
He resolves to return to his father’s house, seeking forgiveness and offering to work as a hired hand. But before he has the chance, his father sees him from far off, “feels compassion and runs and embraces him and kisses him.” There is no doubt that the son represents all of us, and it’s obvious who the father represents.
The Whole Point
Boff writes that this message about who our father is, is the whole point of the “Our Father,” and is the whole point of Jesus’ mission on earth. Knowing this, and developing a loving relationship with our real father, is, according to the phrase about bread in the “Our Father,” as important for humans as eating.
Not knowing our real father could be compared to people who don’t know their biological father but have a vague yearning to know and to love and receive love from that father. If we’re “seeking God,” we should remember that God is also seeking us, inviting us to receive the love of a parent for a child. What a difference this love makes in human lives! And what a difference the love of our real father could make in our lives, and society’s, if we accept and return it!
Could the indifference to “Jesus’ fundamental project” and lack of knowing our real father help explain human frailty, indifference, selfishness, cruelty, and lack of compassion and kindness?
I think so.
