Lent 23 day 1

 Welcome to the tenth Lent Blog , and if you have been here for every one of those past nine years your medal is in the post!   It hardly seems ten minutes ago since we were wrapping up the Advent blog and now here we are approaching Easter and trying to focus on the important things whilst the unimportant things clamour for attention.

Im not quite sure how to tackle Lent this year but I have a notion that I might be being prompted to loosely hang things around the Lords prayer.  Which in many ways is so very very familiar, and yet in others is an unfathomable mystery. 😀   As ever I consider this to be a collaborative venture so please do feel free to add your contribution into the comments or to disagree, expand, share testimony or anything else you like.  And if you feel strongly that you would like to write a blog page yourself then do message me.  40 days is a long time and I usually run out of things to say well before the end 😁

So here we go - let's kick off theisLent with the opening words of the prayer Jesus gave us as an example of how to pray.  Our Father.  



Joachim Jeremias, the German New Testament scholar has done research on the prayers of the ancient Israelite people, and it is his conclusion that there is not a single example anywhere in extant Jewish literature, including the Old Testament, the Talmud, the Targums, and so on until the tenth century A.D. where a Jewish person addresses God directly as "Father." That is, it simply wasn't done. People would speak of the fatherhood of God among the Jewish people, but no one would address Him directly as, 'Father.' Jeremias says you don't find it until the tenth century A.D. in Italy. Yet in the New Testament we have the record of a Jew, a Jewish Rabbi, who has many many prayers recorded for posterity, and that in every prayer that he prayed, save one, He directly addressed God as 'Father.' And that is Jesus of Nazareth.

I wonder how the disciples and the people who listened to Jesus praying felt about Him addressing God as Father.   Maybe they were intrigued.  Maybe deeply offended.  Some were definitely drawn to the notion that God might be something other than they had traditionally understood.   We are used to thinking about God as Father, but in Jesus's day people weren't.  The role of fathers back then was different than we understand it today.  Fathers were not merely providers and protectors of their families.  They had specific duties to carry out under Jewish laws.  They specifically had to  circumcise, redeem, teach Torah to, acquire a wife for, and teach a craft to sons.  You'll notice the word 'redeem' there.  When the firstborn son was 30 days old the father had to pay a fee to a specific religious official to ' buy' the child ( redeem him) back from the priesthood.  When Jesus calls God His Father He ascribes the roles of an earthly Father to God.  He is saying, God you are the one who circumcises, redeems, teaches, acquires a spouse for and gives creative gifts to all of us, Your children.   Its not hard to see the relevance of this in the light of what Jesus came to do.

  Through Jesus, God circumcises our hearts, removing our stony spiritually dead ones and giving us hearts of flesh.  He redeems us from sin, fulfils the law and the prophets, makes us into the bride of Christ and introduces us to the family business of making disciples.

There's a slightly disputed additional duty that Jewish fathers were supposed to fulfil - and that is to teach their sons to swim. It seems a bit of an odd one but it is commonly added into the list of fatherly requirements and Id like to think that the spiritual parallel might be found in the scripture from Ezekiel 47 where the river of life is flowing so deeply that it can only be swum in 😀🏊

As we start our 40 day jaunt towards Easter let's pray that we discover more about what our Father in heaven has for each of us.  Let's approach this season with open ears, hearts and minds.  Let's be resolved to change where we need to change, stop when we need to rest,  be brave when we need to act.  Every Lent there is more to discover and deeper love to experience.   Come Holy Spirit.

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