Let the Scriptures Speak

Mary Mother of God

As proof that you are children, God sent the spirit of
his Son into our hearts, crying out, “Abba, Father”!
So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child
then also an heir, through God. (Gal 4: 6-7)

If we take seriously the incarnation, along with the full divine “emptying out” it entails (Phil 2:7), we can wonder at how the child Jesus was nurtured in his Jewish faith. Given the culture of that time and place, where the child was first nurtured in the mother’s world and then initiated by the father into the world of men, Jesus most likely learned to pray in Mary’s lap.

It is not too great a speculative leap to conjecture that Jesus’ striking way of addressing the Creator with the intimate term Abba was also something he learned from his mother. What a powerful testimony to the power of a mother’s intimate moments with her child that Paul, decades later, could refer to that Abba-prayer as something the Gentile Christians of Galatia would recognize as their usual way of praying. Thinking of this may enrich our own recitation of the Lord’s Prayer.

Dennis Hamm, SJ

**From Saint Louis University