Judaism and the Fatherhood of God

 

Judaism and the Fatherhood of God

It is no exaggeration to say that Christian theology began when Jesus called God his Father and taught his disciples to do the same. That was something previously unknown in Israel, and the Jews who heard Jesus say this reacted against him because of it. There are passages in the Old Testament where the language of fatherhood is used of God, but they are relatively few, and their meaning is sometimes unclear. Jesus never appealed to those passages to support his teaching, and those who heard him were astonished and upset because what he said seemed to indicate a degree of familiarity with God that they thought was blasphemous. As the story is recounted in the New Testament, what provoked this reaction was the fact that Jesus was healing people on the Sabbath day. This is significant because Israel kept the Sabbath rest out of respect for the completion of the divine work of creation in six days.¹ In this way, the Israelites sought to order their national life according to the pattern laid down by God when he made the world. By resting on the seventh day they observed a sacred time that reminded them that God’s work was complete and all-sufficient for their needs.

But in spite of that deeply ingrained tradition and its spiritual significance, Jesus did things on the Sabbath that apparently contradicted the law of God and its teaching about creation. He justified healing people on the Sabbath day by arguing that God was still at work, not in creating new things but in restoring a world that had been corrupted by human sin. When the Jewish leaders challenged him over his behavior, Jesus replied, “My Father is working until now, and I am working.”² He claimed to know that God was not at rest in eternity because as his Father’s Son, he was still doing God’s work. The implications of that claim were not lost on his audience. In John’s words,

This was why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.³

But why would those Jews draw such an unlikely conclusion? After all, when we call God our Father today, we are not making ourselves equal to him but are simply proclaiming our acceptance of his authority over us. Why did the Jews not think that Jesus was saying the same thing then as we are now? Even if the novelty of his claim caused them some discomfort, why did they not see it in the light of the allusions to divine fatherhood that occasionally appear in the Old Testament? One reason was that Jesus’ assertion of his sonship was coupled with the claim that he had the power to override the Old Testament law. That alone made it obvious that Jesus was claiming to have a relationship with God unlike anything previously known in Israel. On the few occasions when God had spoken of the Israelites as his children, he did not mean that they shared his divine power or that they could modify his commandments in the way that Jesus did. The only time when the Jewish people are known to have called on God as their Father occurs in Isaiah, where the prophet, speaking as the voice of the nation, says,

You are our Father,
     though Abraham does not know us,
     and Israel does not acknowledge us; you,
     O Lord, are our Father, our Redeemer from old is your name.
     O Lord, why do you make us wander from your ways
     and harden our heart, so that we fear you not?
     Return for the sake of your servants,
     the tribes of your heritage.⁴

The context is one of sin and judgment, in which the prophet’s voice calls out to God for the redemption that he has promised his people. It is in that way that God appears as their Father, as he also does a little later on, when Isaiah uses the image of the potter and the clay, which the apostle Paul later borrowed to great effect:⁵

O Lord, you are our Father;
we are the clay, and you are our potter;
we are all the work of your hand. Be not so terribly angry, O Lord, and remember not iniquity forever.⁶

To the modern reader, it seems that the Israelites were addressing God as their Creator, but we must be cautious about this. First, the context is not creation but redemption—the people have sinned and they are begging God for mercy and restoration. Second, if Isaiah was thinking of God primarily as Creator, Israel would not have been any different from the other nations. According to the Hebrew Bible, everyone was descended from Adam, who was created in God’s image and was the ancestor of all human beings.⁷ If that were the meaning here, Isaiah would be praying on behalf of the entire human race, when in fact he is adopting the persona of Israel alone. It is not the universal relationship between humanity and God that he is alluding to but the covenant relationship that God had granted to Israel. When God first spoke to Abraham and to Moses, the human clay (to use Isaiah’s image) was already there. The divine potter did not create Israel out of nothing but took what he found and shaped it according to his will. Finally, as Paul pointed out when he alluded to this verse, a potter’s relationship to his clay is not reciprocal, so that Israel could not pray to God as its Father in the way that Jesus taught his disciples to do.⁸ The poetic image of God’s fatherhood is powerful but it is also more distant than what we find in the Gospels, and we must remember that Jesus never referred to this text when teaching his disciples how to pray, though he often quoted Isaiah and could easily have done so if the text had been relevant to his purpose.

Furthermore, when Jews thought about their ancestry they usually did not look back as far as Adam, the generic founder of the human race.⁹ They preferred Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, whom God had made the ancestor of a chosen people. Abraham had other children, but it was through the line of Isaac that Israel came into being. Jacob was his younger son but was preferred over his older brother. It was he who was given the name Israel, and after that, all his sons belonged to the chosen people. In this sense Israel’s origin was supernatural, a constant reminder to the Jews that they were special in the eyes of God. Jesus understood this, of course, and he did not hesitate to criticize the Jews for failing to live up to their high calling. As he put it to them,

I know that you are offspring of Abraham; yet you seek to kill me because my word finds no place in you. I speak of what I have seen with my Father, and you do what you have heard from your father.¹⁰

In human terms, Jesus was a descendant of Abraham just as much as his hearers were, yet here he was saying that they were not from the same stock at all. Jesus claimed that he was doing what his Father had told him, and that if they were really the children of Abraham as they said they were, they would recognize that what he was doing came from God. When the Jews heard this, they were provoked into declaring that God was their Father, rejecting Jesus’ claims and accusing him of being possessed by a demon. In other words, they tried to turn Jesus’ argument on its head—they were the children of God and he was of the Devil, not the other way around! At that point Jesus told them that Abraham had known who he was and had looked forward to his future coming. Needless to say, this seemed absurd to the Jews. How could Jesus and Abraham have known each other when Abraham had lived nearly two thousand years earlier? Jesus then replied that he was in existence long before Abraham was born, an assertion that could only mean that he was claiming to be God.¹¹

The important thing to notice here is how Jesus subtly moved his Jewish opponents from the material to the spiritual dimension in the discussion about their ancestry. He could hardly have denied that Jews were physically descended from Abraham just as he was, but he was more concerned to tell them that they had nothing in common with him at the spiritual level, whereas Abraham did. Abraham’s relationship to God was enshrined in the covenant that God had made with him, and if God was their Father, it was because they were bound to him by that covenant. The Jews maintained the outward signs of belonging to the covenant, most notably circumcision, but in their hearts and minds many of them had long since rejected it. The tragedy was that they mistook the outward signs as evidence that they possessed the spiritual reality that those signs represented, which was simply not true.

It was in the context of this spiritual dimension that Jesus pressed home the point that their true father was neither God nor Abraham, but the Devil. Of course, the Devil had not given them physical birth as Abraham had, nor was he their Creator, as God was. But they had a relationship with him that made him their spiritual master, and their opposition to Jesus showed that they were doing the Devil’s will. In denouncing the Jewish leaders, Jesus was not introducing a new idea about God of which they had never heard (and therefore could not be blamed for not knowing); rather, he was recalling the way in which their relationship to God was presented in the Old Testament. Consider what Moses said to them in Deuteronomy:

​​You are the sons of the Lord your God. . . . For you are a people holy to the Lord your God, and the Lord has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth.¹²

Moses described the Israelites as God’s sons because they were the heirs to the covenant promises, and were therefore expected to manifest the holiness that matched their status. God was their Father by implication, but the resemblance that made such a relationship possible was their holiness. Holiness was not a thing in itself, but a description of what made both God and Israel different from everything else. God was holy because he was not a creature and was not bound by the power of Satan over a fallen world, and Israel was called to be equally holy by detaching itself from the other nations, which were so bound, and obeying God instead. This theme recurs in Psalm 103, where the fatherhood of God is mentioned as the reason he would rescue Israel from the sins that had so obscured the nation’s holiness:

He does not deal with us according to our sins,
     nor repay us according to our iniquities. . . .
     As a father shows compassion to his children,
     so, the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him.¹³

In this verse God is compared to a human father, but whether this proves that the psalmist thought of God as the Father of Israel is hard to say for sure. God is compared to many things in the Bible—a rock, a fortress, fire, and so on—but he is not identified with any of them, so a comparison of this kind must be interpreted with caution.¹⁴ Nevertheless, the image of fatherhood is a powerful and significant one, and speaks movingly of the love that God has for the people he has chosen. The association it seems to have with the people’s sin and their plea for God’s forgiveness comes out with special force during the exile, as we can see from what God said to Jeremiah:

Is Ephraim my dear son?
     Is he my darling child?
     For as often as I speak against him,
     I do remember him still.
     Therefore my heart yearns for him;
     I will surely have mercy on him, declares the Lord.¹⁵

The text is striking, but although the fatherhood of God is assumed, it is implied rather than explicitly stated. Furthermore, as with most of the other Old Testament references to God as Father, this verse is also somewhat negative in character. God was perceived to be Israel’s Father in the context of the covenant he made with Abraham and later confirmed with Moses, but apart from the initial statement of this in Deuteronomy 14, the fact is mentioned only to point out the contrast between what God had originally intended and the harsh reality that Israel had betrayed his trust and rebelled against him. The Israelites do not seem to have appealed to God’s fatherly nature except when they were in need of compassion and forgiveness; it was not part of their daily worship or felt to be fundamental to their experience of him. We can therefore say with some assurance that when Jesus called God his Father and taught his disciples to do the same he was doing something new, and the reaction of the Jewish leaders who heard him confirms us in this perception.

Notes:

1. Ex. 20:8–11.
2. John 5:17.
3. John 5:18.
4. Isa. 63:16–17.
5. Rom. 9:20–21, alluding to Isa. 64:8–9
6. Isa. 64:8–9.
7. Gen. 1:26–27.
8. Matt. 6:9.
9. Apart from the genealogies in Genesis and 1 Chronicles, Adam never appears in the Old Testament, apart from possible allusions in Deut. 32:8 and Job 31:33, neither of which is certain. Contrast this with the apostle Paul, who discusses the importance of Adam on three separate occasions (Rom. 5:12–14; 1 Cor. 15:22, 45; 1 Tim. 2:13–14).
10. John 8:37–38.
11. John 8:39–59
12. Deut. 14:1–2. The small-capital style (Lord) indicates the use of the personal name of God, YHWH (Yahweh).
13. Ps. 103:10, 13.
14. See, for example, 2 Sam. 22:2; Psalm 71:3; Deut. 4:24; Heb. 12:29.
15. Jer. 31:20. The name Ephraim stands for the ten tribes of Israel that were deported in 722 BC (about 130 years before Jeremiah received this message), and the verse is a lament for the tragic fate that had befallen them.

This article is adapted from A History of Christian Theology: A Trinitarian Approach by Gerald Bray.