Who’s your Abba
Who’s your Abba
As we come to the end of the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, and the Creed that bears its name, our readings this first Sunday after Christmas make clear that only because he is “of one being with the Father” can Jesus the only begotten of God make us children of God and heirs of eternal life, not slaves of God. The Nicene Creed is not a set of intellectual propositions about God. It is our adoption certificate.
“But to those who did accept him he gave power to become children of God, to those who believed in his name, who were born not from blood, or from the will of the flesh, or from human will but from God himself.” (Jo 1:12-13). This assertion becomes almost scandalously concrete in the First Letter of John, the same John, son of Zebedee and brother of our own James, to whom this Gospel is attributed. We are children of God, John says, “because God’s seed remains in [us],” in the original Greek, sperma. The Common English Bible uses a more modern term of which the ancients were unaware, but which makes the same point, “DNA.” A metaphor to be sure, but still a statement that our adoption by God through Jesus Christ is thicker than blood.
And this adoption is possible only because, first, “In the beginning the Word already was. The Word was in God’s presence, and what God was, the Word was” (Jn 1:1 Revised English Bible). Second, “The Word became flesh and made his home among us,” that is, he took our human nature into himself. Fully human, fully God. Without both being true, as the Nicene Creed states, Jesus cannot empower us to become children of God, with God’s “DNA” in us.
It would be wrong to assert that the identification of God as parental toward God’s people was totally absent from Judaism. But Jesus clearly revealed something special about that parental relationship. “Abba, Father! For you everything is possible. Take this cup away from me. Yet not what I want but what you want.” That heartfelt plea in Gethsemane Jesus must have shared with his first disciples, for it was handed down to Paul who later wrote to the Galatians, “God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.”
In Jesus’s time, the common language of his fellow Jews wasn’t Hebrew but Aramaic, from which came Abba, not the band, but the Aramaic for “Father.” But Jesus’s use of the Aramaic Abba made it important enough for authors of the New Testament to occasionally use it alongside the Greek Pater, perhaps like calling God “Dad.” That is the relationship that God’s Only Begotten had with his Abba, and wants us to have as well.
The problem is that “Father,” then and now, also connotes power, particularly masculine power. And in the ancient world, it was assumed that the Father alone created life, So, many of the early Church “fathers” analogized, just as our earthly fathers were the sole source of our physical lives, so The Father was the sole source of our spiritual life. Just as the ancients weren’t aware of DNA, neither were they aware that human females also had eggs. And since all human language about the divine is metaphorical, individual experiences of parental relationships can color our usage of parental metaphors about God, not to mention conflating masculine power with divine power.
But we are part of a 2,000 year old family, the first generation of which received the revelation that God is one, but God is never alone: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That revelation has been handed down to us: God the Creator of all that is and loving Abba of all who can respond to their parental love: God the only begotten Word that gave shape to all creation, and then shaped himself into our humanity that we might be shaped into divinity: and God the Spirit who breathes life into all living things. God is one, but God is never alone, for God is love. And as, in that love, God is never alone, then neither are we.
December 28th, 2025
The 1st Sunday after Christmas
The Rev. David Kendrick