God Our Father!

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Is 49:8-15; Jn 5:17-30

In today’s Gospel, we find Jesus calling God his Father. 

But the Jews are angry with Jesus, even to the extent of killing him. 

But what was their anger really directed at? Was it toward Jesus calling God his father and thus claiming equality with God? Or is there anything more than what the eye meets? 

I think there is something more to their opposition toward Jesus. 

Jesus makes direct references to God as his Father at least eight times. 

Jesus seems to follow a different strategy here. 

If enemies of God oppose something, what they oppose may have been intended by God. 

By deliberately calling God his Father, Jesus puts forward a relational spirituality.

Through his invocation of God as Father, Jesus challenges the rigidity that has been carefully constructed around religion. That is what is unsettling to them. 

Secondly, Jesus’ practice of calling God Father had practical implications for the stratified society. In that sense, Jesus’ practice challenges our societal constructions too.

The relational term called for relationality without any bias or discrimination. For those living with a clear hierarchy like the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Scribes and distinction like Gentiles, Tax Collectors, and sinners, the practical implications of Jesus’ statement were enormous. 

Abolishing such categories and establishing an equal society as children of God was unthinkable for them. 

Therefore, it is the unimaginable radicality of Jesus’ practice of calling God his Father that turns them against him. 

St. Paul recapitulated the same in Gal 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one.”

Jesus not only called God his Father. He taught us to call God ‘Our Father’ too. 

It is this relational spirituality that should alter our everyday lives.

If we truly practice and live by calling God ‘Our Father,’ then we cannot have stratifications based on race, color, caste, and class. We cannot tolerate or perpetuate them.

Let the practice of calling God ‘Our Father’ shape our faith and life. 

Fr. Dhinakaran Savariyar