The Abba Prayer

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Ruth, a dear reader of my “musings,” emailed me a really good question recently.  She’d always been bothered by this phrase in the Lord’s Prayer:  “lead us not into temptation”.   Would God, who is love, ever lead anybody into temptation?

In his prayer, Jesus expresses an ancient conception of a supernatural God with an intimate relationship with the Jewish people.  The Hebrew Scriptures include several stories in which people tried to work out deals with Yahweh.  Abraham bargained with God in an effort to save Sodom and Gomorrah from destruction.  Jacob bargained with the angel who manifested God in their wrestling match, to get a blessing.  The God of the Jews was a personality with feelings and moods and grudges.  A deity whose emotions you could manipulate, up to a point.  The Lord's Prayer reflects this, saying, in effect: "Tell you what, God:  you forgive me, and I'll forgive others."   Such a God indeed could lead people into temptation: read the book of Job, in which God allowed Job to be tested with all sorts of miseries, aimed at tempting him to curse God.  Job complained bitterly to God, as he would to another human being who did him wrong. 

Imagine a kid plying Daddy with sweet-talk followed by bargains and promises.  Such was the intimate relationship between Jews and their God in ancient times. 

In Aramaic, which Jesus spoke, the Lord's Prayer begins with the word Abwoon, or Abba, which means something close to our word "Daddy."  The noted biblical scholar, John Dominic Crosson, believes that “Abba” is the essence of the whole Lord’s Prayer.  He points to Romans 8:15-17: “When we cry, “Abba!   Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs: heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if we in fact suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.”  Calling out to “Daddy!” or “Mommy!” directly connects us with our Source in divine love. 

As early Christians separated from full identification with the Jewish people, their understanding shifted away from a God strongly identified with Israel and toward a more "universalized" God – a supernatural being engaged with the entire cosmos.   We as progressive Christians focus on a universal God – unconditional love extending beyond any local boundaries.  And surely one way to visualize that divinity is through the image of an ever-loving parent.

The Lord’s Prayer was antique even in the era of the formation of the New Testament.  You could say that by the time of the writing of the first letter of John, in which we find the statement that “God is love”, God had lost some of “his” Jewish identity for Christians.  In mytho-poetic terms, you might say that by the time the New Testament writings were completed, God had stopped speaking Aramaic, the language of Israel at the time, and started using Greek, the language of the whole Roman Empire, instead.

We repeat this antique prayer in almost all Protestant worship services.  So what emotional and spiritual sense shall we make of it, being aware of its historical context? 

I believe it is worth repeating because it connects us deeply with the founder of our movement of radical, unconditional love.  It is an intimate expression of the spirituality of Jesus.  When we repeat his prayer, we’re being ushered into the inner sanctum of his soul and the souls of his earliest followers.  Jesus and his theology were very first-century Jewish.  When we repeat the Lord’s Prayer, we’re getting back to our roots.  But we should not be stuck in our roots: we need to grow out and up from them.  We need not hold exactly the same theology as Jesus.  His movement grew out of his roots and evolves, moving higher into the divine love expressed in the first word of his prayer:  “Abba!”