Don’t Take Calling God “Father” for Granted:
Gregory of Nyssa on the Lord’s Prayer
By J. Warren Smith
Today when we hear the term “theologian” people tend to think of a professor in a seminary or in the religion department of a college or university in contrast with the pastor of a local congregation. Yet, in the world of early Christianity, that period between the death of the apostles and the rise of Islam, the men whose theological writings shaped the Church’s fundamental understanding of the Gospel and the God who revealed himself in it were bishops. In antiquity, bishops were not primarily administrators but pastors. Not the least among their duties was preaching. Therefore, some of their most important theological writings that the Church has preserved over a thousand years hence are collections of sermons. One set of sermons that has been preserved was a series on the Lord’s Prayer written by a fourth century bishop from the Roman province of Cappadocia in modern day Türkiye. The bishop’s name was Gregory of Nyssa.
Gregory was from an old Christian family whose ancestors had been converted in the previous century by a missionary named Gregory the Wonderworker from the region of Palestine. Among their ancestors were the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste, a group of Christian soldiers who, for their refusal to offer sacrifices to pagan deities, were thrown into a lake overnight in the cold of winter. Gregory’s father, Basil the Elder, was a teacher of rhetoric and saw to it that his sons were also educated in the arts of oratory and philosophy so that they could follow after him. However, Gregory and his older brother, Basil, known as Basil the Great, entered the priesthood. In time, they became leaders of the Church and defended the Nicene Creed against those preachers – often called “Arians” – who denied that Christ shared the same divine nature as God the Father who begat him. Gregory gained a reputation both for eloquence of his preaching and wisdom of his theology. Eventually, along with his brother Basil and their sister, Macrina, a holy woman who established a religious community and family for women who otherwise would have been homeless, Gregory was canonized as a saint in the Orthodox Church.
In many churches today, it is common for the Lord’s Prayer to be introduced with the words, “And now with the confidence of children we are bold to pray, ‘Our Father…’” In his opening sermons on the Lord’s Prayer, Gregory highlights the paradoxical character of the confident boldness with which we address God. He recognized that, because the words of the Lord’s Prayer have become so common place, we often forget how truly bold it is to address the God and author of the universe with the familiar address “Father.” As Gregory knew, only Jesus, the Father’s coeternal Son, rightly can call God “Father”. Christ alone is Son of God by nature whereas you and I are children of God by grace. Jesus is, as John puts it in his prologue, “the only begotten who is in the bosom of the Father [who] has made him known,” (Jn 1:1). When the Church confesses Jesus to be “the Son of God,” we mean, in the words of the Nicene Creed, that he is “eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, True God of True God, of the same nature with the Father, begotten not made.” Whereas a table is not “begotten” but “made” out of wood and nails and so is of a different nature than the carpenter who made it, by contrast a child, who comes from the egg and seed of her mother and father, is not “made” but “begotten” from her parents. Therefore, she is of the same nature as her parents. Christ, who is begotten by the Father, so shares the same divine nature as the Father. Therefore, he can reveal the Father’s divine glory and goodness to us. This is why, in answer to Philip’s request, “Show us the Father,” Jesus could answer, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father. For I am in the Father and the Father is in me,” (Jn 14:11); for, “I and the Father are one [in nature],” (Jn 10:30).
We, on the other hand, are not begotten from God but made. Therefore, John says of Christ the Word, “Through him all things [i.e., we] were made and without him was not anything that was made,” (Jn 1:3). All of us are God’s creatures, made in love. But John makes an important but often overlooked distinction between being God’s creatures and being “children of God.” For he goes on to describe the tragic condition of sinful humanity, “[Christ] came to his own and his own received him not…but to everyone who received him he gave the power to become children of God,” (Jn 1:12). In other words, we are not made a child of God by virtue of our creation, but subsequently become children of God by receiving Christ and being born again of water and the Spirit (Jn 3:5). Through the new birth of our baptism, we become children of God; then, as Paul writes to the church at Rome, we receive the Spirit of adoption who reveals that we are children of God by giving our spirit the boldness to cry out in prayer, “Abba, Father,” (Rom 8:15). Because Christ the only Begotten became our brother in the Incarnation and gave us his Spirit, he gives us the privileged of calling his eternal Father, “Our Father.” This is the robustly Biblical foundation of Gregory’s sermons.
In his opening homily, Gregory reminds his congregation that we can address God as “our Father” because Jesus the Only Begotten has become our “Great High Priest” (Heb 4:14-16). He compares prayer to Moses’s ascent of Mt. Sinai. For, prayer is nothing less than ascending to God and coming into his presence even as Moses came into his presence when he encountered God in the impenetrably dark cloud (Ex 19:16-20). Gregory compares the cloud to the Temple containing the Holy of Holies with the Ark of the Covenant, the throne of the Almighty. Yet, Gregory points out, there is a critical difference. Moses ascended Sinai to make intercession for Israel but left the Israelites behind at the foot of the mountain. By contrast, Jesus ascended but did not leave us behind. For, our High Priest ascended on high to intercede for us at the right hand of his Father. But, whereas Moses left the Israelites behind, Christ who unites us to himself in baptism carries us with him into the Holy of Holies on high.
How do we ascend in this life coming into God’s presence and presume to address him with the familial term, “Father”? Afterall when Isiah had his vision of God enthroned in majesty, his reaction was not one of rejoicing but of terror, “Woe is me for I am a man of unclean lips dwelling among a people of unclean lips,” (Is 6:5). Gregory’s answer was that we can enter into fellowship with God because Christ our High Priest has not only taken us up with him but has purified us so that we might be worthy to come into God’s presence. As Jesus told the disciples, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” So Christ has, by his sacrifice, purified our affections turning our hearts from the vanities of the world to the true glories of the world’s Creator. As a result, although we are but adopted children, through Christ and the gift of his Spirit we actually become partakers of Christ’s divine nature (II Pt 1:4) so that we might be in a sense kin to God. Thus, we fulfill God’s will that we might “be holy as I [the Lord] am holy,” (I Pt 1:16). As children of God, we can be confident that God will hear and answer our prayers according to his wisdom.
Gregory the preacher, however, exhorts his congregation reminding them that they cannot take calling God “Father” lightly. It is a gift, but one that we cannot take for granted. We must receive it in a just manner. In other words, we cannot forget the conditions for that privilege. As a child’s actions reveal the character of her parents, so too, Gregory reminds his listeners, our actions reveal who our true father is. Jesus rebuked the Jews, who rejected him and called him a blasphemer, telling them that his Father was not their father – their father was the Devil, the father of lies,” (Jn 8:44). So too, unless our works reflect the holiness of God, then our father too is the devil. Then our prayers turn out to be addressed, not to God, but to “the father of lies.”
Gregory does not leave his people with that dreadful warning. Instead, he shifts tone reminding his congregants that when we cry out “Father,” we should see ourselves in the position of the prodigal son who approached his father with the words, “Father, I have sinned against you and against heaven, and am no longer worthy to be called your son…”(Lk 15:21). So too, when we pray, “Our Father…” we, like the prodigal, recognize our unworthiness but nonetheless are bold enough to believe that God is quick to forgive and receive us the repentant sinner with mercy (cf. Ps 86:5, 15).
For Gregory, the Christian lives in the tension between confidence and boldness. We are bold because we sinful creatures presume to call the holy God Father and expect him to receive us as his children. At the same time, we can have a childlike confidence in the love of our heavenly Father because of his grace revealed in the Son who claims us as his sisters and brothers, forgives our sins, and sanctifies us that we might be worthy of the title, “children of God.”
Gregory of Nyssa’s Homilies on the Lord’s Prayer can be found at https://www.paulistpress.com/Products/0255-2/18-st-gregory-of-nyssa.aspx?srsltid=AfmBOoqNMabTcGqh1dSenLrkp2LtRMmom_emMbNHA9xY84_Tu2QddMu2
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