It turned out to work perfectly that we were due to continue talking about the Lord\u2019s Prayer yesterday. The \u201cOur Father\u201d on Mother\u2019s Day makes for a great chance to talk about the gendering of God and the appropriateness of addressing God as Mother.<\/p>\n
We began with the significance of Jesus\u2019 use of the Aramaic word \u201cAbba.\u201d I emphasized (as I have before) that Abba does not mean \u201cdaddy.\u201d It is simply the Aramaic word for (the) father. So what made it so significant that Mark transliterated it and so too did Paul, in two letters addressed to communities in which there would have been few if any speakers of Aramaic? I think we can deduce this when we consider the characteristics of Jewish prayer. On the one hand, there was a tendency to use Hebrew as the sacred language for prayer, which meant that people prayed in something other than their own spoken vernacular. On the other hand, we should compare the Lord\u2019s Prayer to the ancient Jewish prayer in Aramaic that is most similar to it, and indeed which likely served as the prototype for the Lord\u2019s Prayer, namely the Kaddish. It refers to the name being sanctified and the kingdom of God being established. But it does so not via second person address to God, but through third person expression of a wish: \u201cglorified and sanctified be his great name\u2026may his kingdom be established.\u201d To address God as father in the Aramaic vernacular seems not to have been typical, which would explain why Jesus\u2019 practice stood out as distinctive.<\/p>\n
A father was primarily an authority figure in the ancient household, at least as far as expectations and stereotypes are concerned. Whether he was an approachable, even cuddly figure undoubtedly varied greatly then as now. And so this gave us a chance to think not only about how reference to God as Father could alienate those who had a negative experience with their own fathers, and also to talk about divine motherhood and motherliness.<\/p>\n
Someone in the class helpfully and poignantly stated that if we leave feminine attributes out of the picture we are \u201cmissing half of God.\u201d My thoughts immediately turned to the way humanity is said to have been created in the image of God in Genesis. It explicitly and emphatically states that it is precisely as male and female that human beings are in God\u2019s image and likeness.<\/p>\n