Why do we address God as “Father,” instead of “Mother”?
Well, because that is what Jesus did, and as
Christians we don’t have an independent relationship with God; we participate
in Jesus’ relationship.
Over the years I have heard a number of people object,
“But Jesus only did that because of the patriarchal nature of
ancient cultures” – the underlying assumption being that Jesus’ word
choice was culturally conditioned.
The difficulty with that assumption is the freedom
Jesus demonstrated throughout his ministry in breaking with the gender
conventions of the time: meeting with women privately, welcoming them to
travel with him independent of their husbands, and his selection of
women (unable to testify in courts of law at that point in history!) as
the first witnesses to His resurrection. His decision to name only males
as apostles and address God with the masculine “Father” was not circumscribed
by the outside culture. In fact, priestesses and female deities existed
throughout the Middle East as well as among the Greeks and Romans. As the
Word made flesh, Jesus’ revelation of God as Father was both free and
deliberate. But why?
In Hebrew and Christian thought God is bigger than
gender. Both male
and female are reflections of the Deity (Gen.1:27). Scripture compares God
to a mother (Is.49:15; Hos.11:3-4). And yet, throughout the
whole of Scripture, God is never addressed as “Mother.”
There is something about fatherhood that is more analogous than motherhood for
describing God’s relationship to us. Scripture does not come out and
explain it, but I would suggest that male and female have been invested by God
with an “iconic character.” By this I mean that the differences we
observe between male and female can give us insight into spiritual realities.
Think about the complementary roles the mother and
father play in the conception of the child. The father comes from the
“outside,” and the mother welcomes the father into herself. The
ovum produced by the mother awaits the father’s sperm cell, and the union of
the two produces the child’s body. The child then grows within her
mother, unable to see her father’s face until birth.
God also plays a “Fatherly” role in every
conception – coming from outside of all creation to breathe a
spirit, an intellectual soul, into the child at the instant of his/her physical
conception. All of God’s actions come from “the outside” so to speak, and
in this way are Fatherly. The Church on the other hand – and the
individual souls that make it up – is the part of creation that has received
God into itself and allowed him to bring forth new supernatural life.
In this analogy, whether biologically male or female, each human soul
resembles the feminine. This explains why Scripture refers to the
Church as Christ’s Bride (Eph.5:22-23), and the Mother of the faithful
(Rev.12:17).
As members of Christ’s Body we approach God the Father through, with, and in Jesus. In union with him we pray “Our Father, who art in heaven …”
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This article was adapted from Through, With, and In Him: The Prayer Life of Jesus and How to Make It Our Own (Angelico Press, 2014).
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