I don’t know from preterism, or whether the “kingdom come” in Jesus’ prayer is more imminent than in the Kaddish. To the Jews who heard Jesus’s rendering of the Kaddish, though, what would stand out as particularly startling would be the first two words: Our Father. The Kaddish refers to God as lord and creator but not as father. Jesus starts off his prayer with a bang.

Well-versed in the New Testament, we don’t realize how few are the Old Testament passages that proclaim God’s fatherhood. Often he is called “the God of our fathers;” rarely is he “our Father.” God is a father metaphorically in Psalm 68:5 and 103:13, Proverbs 3:12 and Jeremiah 3:19. There are a few passages with explicitly messianic connotations: Psalm 2:7 (Thou art My Son, today I have begotten Thee), Psalm 89:26-27 (I also shall make him My firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth), Isaiah 9:6 (For a child will be born to us… and His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace).

There are 3 passages I know of where the fatherhood of God is front and center. The context of each might be helpful, since in all likelihood Jesus’s prayer would have called these passages to mind.

Deuteronomy 32:6ff. Moses is an old man, barred by God from entering the Promised Land. He assembles the elders of the tribes in order to testify against them, knowing that even after he dies and they cross the Jordan they will continue to act corruptly. He assembles all Israel and speaks to them the words of his Song.

Do you thus repay Yahweh, O foolish and unwise people? Is not He your Father who has bought you? He has made you and established you. Remember the days of old, consider the years of all generations. Ask your father, and He will inform you, your elders, and they will tell you. When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, when He separated the sons of man, He set the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the sons of Israel. For the Lord’s portion is His people; Jacob is the allotment of His inheritance.

Moses goes on to describe how God cared for His people, guiding them through the desert, carrying them on His wings, feeding them honey from the rock. But they forsook Him for strange gods, provoking Him to anger.

You neglected the Rock who begot you, and forgot the God who gave you birth. And the Lord saw, and spurned them because of the provocation of His sons and daughters. Then he said, ‘I will hide My face from them, I will see what their end shall be. For they are a perverse generation, sons in whom there is no faithfulness. They have made me jealous with what is not God; they have provoked me to anger with their vanities. So I will make them jealous with those who are not a people; I will provoke them to anger with a foolish nation. Vengeance is Yahweh’s, and retribution: the day of calamity is near. But Yahweh will vindicate His people and have compassion when He sees that their strength is gone. Moses comes to the end of his song:Rejoice, O nations, with His people; for He will avenge the blood of His servants, and will render vengeance on His adversaries, and will atone for His land and His people.

Isaiah 63:16 and 64:8. Over and again Isaiah repeats the seemingly perpetual oscillation: God’s people rebel, bringing His vengeance; they call upon Him and He relents. Here Isaiah calls upon God:

Look down from heaven, and see from Thy holy and glorious habitation; where are Thy zeal and Thy mighty deeds? The stirrings of Thy heart and Thy compassion are restrained toward me. For Thou art our Father, though Abraham does not know us, and Israel does not recognize us. Thou, O Yahweh, art our Father. Our Redeemer from of old is Thy name… We have become like those over whom Thou hast never ruled, like those who were not called by Thy name. O that Thou wouldst rend the heavens and come down… to make Thy name known to Thine adversaries, that the nations may tremble at Thy presence!… But now, O Yahweh, Thou art our Father, we are the clay, and Thou the potter; and all of us are the work of Thy hand. Do not be angry beyond measure, O Yahweh, neither remember iniquity forever; behold, look now, all of us are Thy people. Thy holy cities have become a wilderness, Zion has become a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation. Our holy and beautiful house, where our fathers praised Thee, has been burned by fire.

Malachi 1:6 and 2:10. God is reminding His people of His partiality toward them. Esau was Jacob’s brother – seemingly not much difference between the two of them – Yet I have loved Jacob, says Yahweh, but I have hated Esau… A son honors his father, and a servant his master. Then if I am a father, where is My honor? Malachi proclaims God’s word: change your ways, honor the covenant He made with Levi, or be prepared for the worst.

Do we not all have one father? Has not one God created us? Why do we deal treacherously each against his brother, so as to profane the covenant of our fathers? Judah has dealt treacherously, and an abomination has been committed in Israel and in Jerusalem; for Judah has profaned the sanctuary of Yahweh which He loves, and has married the daughter of a foreign god. As for the man who does this, may Yahweh cut off from the tents of Jacob everyone who awakes and answers, or who presents an offering to Yahweh of hosts.

In each of the three Old Testament fatherhood passages the context is similar: a prophetic voice condemns the rebellion of the people of God, who will profane the Promised Land as soon as they set foot in it, who bring desolation upon Jerusalem, who profane the covenant and God’s sanctuary. And yet, say the prophets, God is our father and we are His children, brothers to one another. To rebel against a Lord is one thing; to be disloyal to your Father quite another. And yet, because God is our Father, his loyalty is far greater than it would be to mere subjects or covenantal partners.

The prayer of Jesus follows in the tradition of the Song of Moses and the prophecies of Isaiah and Malachi. Note also the reference to the “sons of man” in the Song of Moses and the imprecation by Isaiah for our Father to come down from the heavens. The historical circumstance of Israel in Jesus’ time seemingly repeats the old pattern of judgment and foreign domination. And yet Jesus explicitly invokes the fatherhood of God not in the context of repentance and a call for deliverance, but in the moral teachings of the Sermon on the Mount, teachings that seemingly describe a way of life rather than a crisis. Would those who heard this speech sense an undertone of menace and coming judgment when Jesus invoked the name of the Father? Or would it signal a new way of relating to God on an ongoing basis, a way of relating to one another as brothers who forgive one another, a sitting down to table together to eat their daily bread? Personally I think the call to a particular kind of ongoing godly life dominates the discourse, a life that can and should be lived even while Jesus lives out his mortal life. But surely the context of prophetic crisis would not have been lost on those who heard Jesus pray to “our Father.”