It’s rare that I post on something I encounter that I have almost nothing to say about, but I was just catching up on Mark Heath’s blog, and this post struck me as brilliant. Mark notices all the slave language and son language in the New Testament for believers and wonders what’s going on with followers of Jesus being adopted into God’s family but then called slaves of Christ. How can believers be both adopted members of the family and slaves to the master?
Mark wonders which is more fundamental or which is the way we should more strongly think of ourselves. But then he notices something that makes such a question seem completely in the wrong direction. He observes that the primary way God is addressed is as Father, and the primary way Jesus is addressed is as Lord. He thus suggests that we should think of ourselves primarily as sons* with respect to the Father and slaves with respect to the Son.
What’s striking to me about this is that I think most Christians think of the Father as sort of a more distant figure to respect and pray more formally to, whereas the Son is more down-to-earth (literally; pun intended) and brotherly. The way the first two persons of the Trinity are addressed in the scriptures, however, is backwards from that. Now of course the very fact that we are told to address the Father as Father is a lot more significant than most of us reflect on. The immense privilege implicit in the first two words of the Lord’s Prayer means we’ve been told outright how we should see God the Father, at least in terms of our praying, and it’s not so much as a master as as a parent*. That tells us something about God and his attitude toward us.
OK, so I didn’t have nothing to say about this. That’s something. But I think Mark’s observation is pretty interesting, and I didn’t intend to have anything to add myself.
[*Note on inclusive language: I deliberately use the masculine here, because “sons” in NT usage would culturally have included far more in terms of inheritance and status than “daughters” or “children”. That this term is applied, in my view, suggests that women who are children of the Father are treated fully as sons would have been expected to be treated, and I think something gets lost if it is translated more inclusively, at least for readers who understand this about the ancient Hebrew and Greco-Roman cultures. So I prefer to keep the gender-inclusive “sons” that is jarring in contemporary English if meant inclusively, since pretty much no one talks that way outside uber-traditionalist hyper-formal-equivalence translation circles.]
[Note on apparent typo: Yes, I know there’s an extra “as” there, but it’s actually correct with it and incorrect without it. I couldn’t resist.]
