Just as my waterfall serves as a metaphor for me, for how I experience my God-energy, Jesus used the metaphor Abba, Pappa, to express his experience.

By describing my experience of God – the relationship we developed in secret on my waterfall – I have to use words that make it sound more concrete than it was. It was experiential. No one had to explain it to me. The God I heard about in church and the God I experienced on my waterfall were two separate entities. One, I heard about, learned about. The other, I knew. 
 
Jesus’ use of Abba for his encounter with God is also experiential. He used it to express how he experienced his God-energy, not to describe who God is. The distinction is important if we are going to understand Jesus’ interior life. Everything he said flowed from this. Jesus spoke in metaphor so as to evoke in the listener an experience of the truth he was trying to share.

Jesus used Abba as an address to God, explains Joachim Jeremias in his New Testament Theology: The Proclamation of Jesus, only in his prayer life. Otherwise, it was too intimate a term, purposely not used in the Judaism of his era. Jeremias shows, drawing on the Palestinian culture in Jesus’ day, how the use of Abba describes the special relationship that existed between father and son: a father took on his son as favored apprentice, shared intimate secrets, not shared with anyone else.    

“What Jesus wants to convey in the guise of an everyday simile is this: Just as a father talks to his son, just as he teaches him the letters of the Torah, just as he initiates him into the well-prepared secrets of his craft, just as he hides nothing from him and opens his heart to him as to no one else, so God has granted me knowledge of himself.” (Jeremias, 60)

Jesus expresses, with the use of this metaphor, Abba, that he finds God to be trustworthy. He bases his whole life on this relationship, this trust. He believed he had received everything he needed from God to deal with anything that came his way. It wasn’t the “Papa, take care of me!” of a dependent child. It was, “I can overcome the darkest of fears, for I know my father’s secrets and can use these in my own life.”

This trust, this relationship, allowed Jesus to remain open in times of terror and crisis; he could call on this power within. In remaining open, Jesus could learn from every experience, find the gold in them, allow them to stretch him into the person he was called to be. There was no retreating into his shell like a turtle with the first sign of threat. He stepped in and through it.

Jesus could respond to the threat, remain open from the start, as his father’s presence in him was greater than the darkness and fear in him. This presence in him gave him the assurance that, no matter what happens, Papa knows, for Papa is within. Jesus felt safe. Even in the face of death, he reminds Pilate that they can kill his body, but they can not rob Jesus of who he is.

Because of this trust, Jesus learned not to cling. “In my father’s house, there is enough.”  This allowed Jesus to be generous with himself, to hold nothing back, for there was more than enough to his father’s love. The metaphor of the eucharistic banquet colors all of Jesus interactions.

Everything, for him – no matter how much or how little in the way of money, possessions, power – were all gifts only temporarily entrusted to his care by a God who intended him to use them with those less fortunate, as God himself would do. Jesus saw this as God’s intention – to share everything, to free captives of any kind, to heal suffering – so it became his intention.

Jesus came to proclaim, to heal, to save people by reminding them they were more than their jobs, more than their riches, more than their religion. He knew his father wanted his people to be healed now, in their present circumstance, not in some distant future. That is what Jesus’ proclamation was all about, the rainbow color out of which he lived his life.

Because Jesus could experience, in his lifetime, the healing hand of God, he wanted others to experience this. This is Kingdom – God’s presence – spread out upon the earth, already among us, yet hidden to those with no spiritual eyes. Jesus’ relationship with God was so strong and so complete, he felt empowered to speak in God’s name, to do God’s work. It happened through Jesus. He became, at that point in time, the Center, the Stillpoint, divine energy incarnate.

Jesus lived his life out of this experience of God as Abba, Papa, in such a way that there was a slow whittling away of the person of Jesus until those around him could only see before them the God that Jesus proclaimed.

As my friend Bob has so beautifully said: “Upon reflection afterwards (after the death of Jesus), the community of his followers was unable to delineate clearly where Jesus left off and God began. In their recollection of him, to have seen Jesus was to have seen the God of their fathers. To have known him was to have known the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. To have been in his presence was to have been in the presence of the holy one of Israel.”

Whether we consider Jesus to be God’s son, to be God himself, to be a great prophet, or to be a man who experienced in his lifetime the person of God in such a way that when Jesus spoke, God spoke – Jesus’ entire life released into our universe a model of love and truth and beauty  we have never fully absorbed.