Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

THE MISSION OF JESUS §14.2
14.2. Children of the Father
Jesus' call for repentance corresponded to his kingdom preaching: to repent was
to acknowledge previous failure to obey as a subject of the King should. In a similar
way Jesus' teaching on God as Father corresponded to his call for belief and
trust. This brings us to one of the most striking features of Jesus' teaching. For
whereas Jesus is remembered as saying little or nothing explicitly about God as
King, the memory of Jesus' teaching on God as Father is deeply embedded in the
Jesus tradition.
The subject has been needlessly slanted in the history of its treatment, principally
because successive scholars thought that they could find in it the most
distinctive and most enduring (universal) element in Jesus' teaching, easily distinguished
from the particularities of his native Judaism. The nineteenth-century
Liberal treatments of Renan and Harnack were right to bring it to centre stage in
their characterisations of Jesus' teaching, but they idealized and sentimentalized
the theme (§4.3). Bultmann's recognition of the place of the emphasis was overshadowed
by his stronger emphasis on Jesus' teaching on God as 'near' in contrast
to the remoteness of God assumed to characterize Jewish thought of the
time. 28 And Jeremias's characteristic treatment was too much dominated by his
understanding of the term abba ('Father', as personal address) as a feature of Jesus'
prayer life and teaching which marked an unprecedented intimacy with God
in the Judaism of his time. 29
We will return to the particular issue of Jesus' sonship below (§16.2). Here
it needs to be stressed that the understanding of God as Father was nothing new
to the Judaism of Jesus' time. The thought of God as Father of Israel, or of the
king in particular, was long familiar in Jewish thought. 30 More recent in expression
was the thought of individual Israelites, particularly the righteous, as sons of
God. 31 Jeremias's claims need to be qualified by the recognition that the same
'righteous man' tradition was not unaccustomed to addressing God with a
in however radical a form, must be explained on the basis of Israel's covenant ethics, that is, on
the basis of God's holiness' (New Vision 33).
28. Bultmann, Jesus and the Word ch. 4, particularly 137-41, 151.
29. Jeremias, Prayers ch. 1; Proclamation 178-84.
30. Israel in Exod. 4.22; Deut. 14.1; 32.6; Ps. 73.15; Isa. 1.2-3; 43.6; 45.11; 63.16; 64.8;
Jer. 3.4, 19, 22; 31.9, 20; Hos. 1.10; 11.1; Mai. 2.10; Jub. 1.24-25; 19.29; Pss. Sol. 17.27. The
king in 2 Sam. 7.14; 1 Chron. 17.13; 22.10; 28.6; Pss. 2.7; 89.26-27. See also R. Hamerton-
Kelly, God the Father: Theology and Patriarchy in the Teaching of Jesus (Philadelphia: Fortress,
1979) 20-51; Vermes, Religion 173-80; M. M. Thompson, The Promise of the Father: Jesus
and God in the New Testament (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2000) 35-55.
31. Pss. 68.5 ('father of the fatherless and protector of widows'); Ps. 103.13; Prov. 3.12;
Sir. 4.10; 23.1; 51.10; Wis. 2.13, 16, 18; 5.5; 14.3; Pss. Sol. 13.9; 1QH 17[= 9].35-36 (see further
G. Quell, pater, TDNT 5.970-74; Jeremias, Prayers 11-29).
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