Why do we suffer? Why is there a pandemic? Why do bad things happen to good people? Why is it that babies sometimes die before they get a chance to live? Why is it that sometimes they are born blind, like the man in today’s Gospel?

Theologians know that God does not make death – that no evil comes from God – that God is the author of every good and only good. In other words, theologians know that God is not to blame for our suffering or for death or for blindness.

Whence come these things into the world, then? Well, the wages of sin is death, as St. Paul reveals (Rom 6:23). So, it would seem that sin, which is missing the mark, is somehow the origin of every injustice. Every instance of a good person suffering evil may be rightly blamed on sin – either on their own sin or on someone else’s sin.

It’s clear that it’s not always our own sin that causes us to suffer, though it often is. But if someone persecutes or abuses you, you suffer even though you have done nothing wrong. Everything that Jesus suffers is like this. Jesus is altogether sinless. Yet, he suffers greatly from the sins of others who persecute him and mock him and torture him and crucify him. When we suffer at the hands of others, we do well to remember that Jesus has identified with us in that – and has taught us also how to respond to it – with forgiveness.

Nonetheless, people usually do not respond that way to the injustices they suffer. Most people, when they get hurt, lash out and hurt others – often the ones they hurt aren’t even the same people that did them harm. Sometimes, for example, a boss will humiliate someone at work and, too fearful and cowardly to respond like a Christian to the one who has wronged him – with courage and honesty – and without animosity or resentment, instead they swallow the humiliation and shame and anger and resentment and bring that home to their spouse and their children – snapping at them and humiliating them, though they’re totally innocent and only want love and kindness.

Sometimes, we’re not even good at revenge. Revenge is a bad thing but taking it out on the innocent is even worse. Yet many times this is what we do.

In this way, our sin sends out ripples of hurt harm into the world. That’s clear. When one person gets hurt, it often leads to them hurting others. Hurt people hurt people. That’s not a justification, by the way. There is no justification for us to hurt each other – to be nasty to one another, or unforgiving, or judgmental. It’s not a justification, it’s just an observation. This can all be easily observed in our own lives.

Partly extrapolating from these experiences, some theologians have concluded that all suffering ultimately results from sin. There are the obvious ways in which this is the case, such as the examples I have described, but there are also hidden ways in which our sins hurt other people and ourselves.

We are spirits as well as bodies and so our sins have spiritual ramifications in the spiritual world as well as physical ramifications in the physical world. Sin is a break with our true created nature, which is both spiritual and material. We cannot even begin to imagine how much suffering each of our sins, voluntary and involuntary, brings into the world – into the whole cosmos. With our sin, which is unnatural, we disrupt the whole created order of nature.

So if we understand that sin is the cause of all human suffering, the disciples’ question to Jesus about the man blind since birth seems to be a reasonable one: “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2). You see, they understood that blindness results from sin. That’s true.  It’s true of both physical blindness and spiritual blindness. And they understood that we suffer from one another’s sins as well as from our own. In Exodus, the Lord says he will visit “the iniquity of the fathers upon the children” (Ex 20:5; 34:7). So they suggested that it might be the sins of his parents rather than his own sins that resulted in his blindness. Again, it’s not unreasonable, especially if we understand that this man’s parents include not only his mother and his father but even all his ancestors back to his first parents Adam and Eve. Surely the world is broken and sometimes people are born blind into this broken world because of sin.

We might also add the sins of demons to our consideration. Their sins too – and not only the sins of us humans – yield great suffering in the cosmos. They too are at war with God and with their own created nature.

In any case, despite all of this, Jesus once again confounds conventional theology. He says, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be made manifest in him” (John 9:3). Jesus later says the same thing about the illness of Lazarus, saying that “it is for God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it” (John 11:4).

I am left gasping at this explanation which confounds all my reason. I could dance around it with cleverness and point out that Jesus does not altogether deny the role of sin in the origin of blindness. He only says that it wasn’t the sins of this man or his parents. One could argue that perhaps the sins of others or the sins of demons are to blame. But Jesus doesn’t blame any sin at all in his etiology of the blindness. My reason wants to chirp, “If sin is not to blame, then what? If no sinner is at fault, then who? God?” I cannot blame God for this man’s blindness. But Jesus says that he is blind so that the works of God might be made manifest in him.

I understand very well that Jesus heals him – and that this is a work of God that reveals the divinity of Jesus. I understand very well that the Lord uses the man’s blindness to teach the world to see. This is what the Lord does again and again. Out of the darkness, he brings light – as on the first day of creation. He says, “Let there be light.” And there is light. I see that, out of death, the Lord brings life. By death, he tramples death. And so, how fitting that through the blindness of one man, he gives eyes of faith to many. The man whose eyes are opened is brought before those who deny that Jesus is from God and he testifies to the healing, and that Jesus is of God, and he believes and worships Jesus (John 9:11, 13, 16, 25, 30-33, 38).

The Lord brings good out of evil. That’s what the Lord does. But he is the origin of no evil. So today, when he says that the man is blind so that God can heal him, I don’t understand. That’s a mystery to me. It’s rather like the mystery of the cross.

I want to ask Jesus after he gives his explanation, “Yeah, but, had it not been for sin in the world, surely this man would not have been born blind?” But that’s not the kind of question we’re going to hear from Jesus or his disciples. That’s the kind of speculative theology they don’t get into. Maybe that kind of thinking is more Greek than Hebrew – or maybe it’s more a curse of this age than that to be vexed by such questions. You won’t hear them saying things like, “Well, if reality were other than it is, what then would this or that be?” That’s not their shtick – not at all. Jesus is much more interested in healing this man than in theoretically analyzing his condition.

We ought to be like Jesus in this. Simply love, show compassion, heal, deliver, all to the glory of God, rather than trying to subject everything to our finite analytical human understanding, as if reality, or even God, were subject to us. If, instead, we seek to glorify God, then God blesses us beyond all understanding.

The mystery of good and evil is beyond our comprehension. And there comes a time to accept that we cannot understand everything – and that every answer we can give is a lie. The Truth is a Person, not an answer. Perhaps we can understand best in silent contemplation of the awesome mystery when we stop trying to figure everything out and abandon ourselves completely to God.

Jesus shines his light into the life of the Samaritan woman (John 4:5-42).

He comes to the well of their mutual father Jacob in the middle of the day – at the sixth hour, that is, at the height of noon – when the sun is at its highest in the sky and the day is at its hottest and brightest point. Given these conditions, it’s no wonder that Jesus was weary at this time and that he sat down beside the well to rest (John 4:6).

That’s no wonder, but here is a wonder: a woman comes to draw water from the well at the sixth hour. A sane woman would come to the well early in the morning, during the cool of the day, to draw the day’s water. These are desert conditions, don’t forget. Many have suggested that this Samaritan woman chooses this time to come to the well, in all this heat and brightness, because of a darkness in her life. That is, she comes at noon because no one else comes at noon. We can understand that a woman who had gone through five husbands and was now living with a man not her husband was perhaps outcast among the women of her community.  We don’t really know this, but it may be that a woman so popular with the men was rather unpopular with the women. And so she wants to avoid them. Small wonder. That’s understandable.

To escape the judgments, criticisms, and harassment of the other women, she comes to the well at the least popular time, when it’s at its hottest and brightest and most physically uncomfortable. Better to be physically uncomfortable than to endure the judgmental looks of others – you know that’s true. Better the staring eye of the noonday sun than the scornful eye of an enemy.

So to keep herself in the dark, she comes to the well in the light and finds sitting there by the well the one who is light himself, weary from his journey and asking her for water.

They speak of water and eternal life, of Samaritans and Jews, and of worship. Jesus reveals to her the true worship, which is worship in spirit and truth. And he tells her everything she’d ever done, as she puts it (John 4:39). He shines his light into her life.

Trying to hide, she finds herself exposed – but not exposed by her judgmental rivals – rather, exposed to the light by her merciful and loving Lord.

Sin festers in the dark and dies in the light. We are healed from sin, which is really a disease, by exposing in to the light. This is why confession is a sacrament of healing. When we sin, it’s as though we’ve been bitten by a poisonous creature and our choice is to leave the poison in the wound to do its work killing us or to draw the poison out into the light where it can do us no harm.

Truly, Jesus is the physician of our souls and bodies. And today, he heals the Samaritan woman by drawing the poison of her secret sin out into the light. She doesn’t quite confess it, though what she says is true when she says, ‘I have no husband” (4:17). Nonetheless, when Jesus exposes the true meaning of her words to her she recognizes and admits the truth of them by confessing that Jesus is a prophet (4:19), that is, that his words of the words of God and are the truth.

Hearing all that Jesus says and recognizing that he speaks the word of God, she leaves behind her water jar and hastens back to the very community she had been avoiding to tell them all that the long-expected Christ is sitting by their father’s well. How can she, an outcast, go among those who have despised her to preach to them the gospel? But that is what she does. Like the apostles who leave their nets when they are called by Jesus, she leaves behind her water jar to go and preach the gospel to the whole city.[i] She is called by our tradition equal-to-the-apostles.

She is no longer afraid of what other people think of her. Christ frees her from her fear of others’ judgment. I’m quite sure he doesn’t free her from others’ judgment. When this outcast woman of poor reputation comes into the city proclaiming that she has encountered the Christ, I’m sure she received more than one stink eye and suspicious glare. “Why should we trust a woman like you?” I expect many thought or even said. But she is freed from her fear of that judgment. She leaves that fear behind with her water jar at the well, because she has been freed from the darkness in her life by the light of the world, and no worldly power can stop the power of her God-given conviction. And so through her, many come to believe. She brings many into the light – to Christ – because Jesus is the light. She is like the first evangelist, bringing people to Christ even before he dies and rises from the dead.

By tradition, we know that she was baptized and brought her five sisters and her two sons into the faith and they all continued to evangelize. After the martyrdom of Peter and Paul, she and her family traveled to Carthage to preach the gospel there until they too were martyred.

And we also know the name she received in her baptism: Photini, the enlightened one, for she received the light of Christ and let it shine before all with neither fear nor shame again until the end of her life.

In some ways, Photini is the quintessential baptismal name. Some of the fathers of the Church regarded all the mysteries of initiation into the Church and into the body of Christ – baptism, chrismation, and eucharist – to be a single mystery, which they name illumination or enlightenment. The one thus received is therefore Photini and Photini becomes for us all an image of our baptism. Like Photini, we are all subject to death in our sins when Christ encounters us at the well, or at the font of our baptism, through which he shines his light into our darkness and illumines us. May we all, like Photini, having been filled with grace through the holy mysteries, live out our whole lives with evangelical fervor. Like her, let us proclaim to everyone we meet without fear of what they might think of us, the good news of Christ’s coming into the world and saving us from sin and death by his death and resurrection.

Christ is risen!

 

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[i] Chrysostom: As the apostles left their nets on being called, so she leaves her water jar to do the work of an evangelist by calling not one or two people, as Andrew and Philip did, but a whole city. (Homilies on the Gospel of John 34.1).

The sheep pool by which Jesus heals the paralytic man (John 5:1-15) is an image of baptism. This connection is made at Matins for the Sunday of the Paralytic during the first ode of the Canon. The reader chants, “Once in the pool at the Sheepgate, an angel descended from time to time, healing one person at a time; but Christ now purifies an innumerable multitude by divine baptism.”

We’ve been talking a lot about baptism, lately. Perhaps you’ve noticed. Many of the readings and hymns these days focus on baptism. And this makes sense. We are in the midst of Pascha, which is the greatest baptismal feast.

It would help us to remember our baptism every day. Baptism makes us who we are in Christ. I’m not exaggerating. We are baptized into Christ. We become – by baptism – members of his body, which is the Church. We remain the Church, and members of his body, even when we cannot assemble in these days, by virtue of baptism. It’s easy to forget that we are a baptismal people if we do not often think about baptism. Baptism is our primary business. It’s what we’re all about.

And so, throughout Pascha, the liturgies and readings turn our minds again and again to baptism. Let us meditate throughout this time on what baptism means for us, where it comes from, and how it shapes our lives.

Today’s gospel offers us another chance to do this. But it’s not readily apparent, at least not to me. When I read this passage, my thoughts do not go first to baptism – but rather to the miraculous healing the Lord works – or perhaps to the man’s thirty-eight year long wait for this healing – or even to other themes. Underneath these, however, the story is about baptism. And John’s gospel is often like this – his references are often oblique.

Did you know that the Gospel of John never directly describes the baptism of Jesus by John?  But the Baptist does refer to the theophany when he gives witness, saying “I saw the Spirit descend as a dove from heaven and remain on him” (1:32). And only in the gospel of John does the Baptist, seeing Jesus, cry out “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.” This is a pattern with John – he both tells us something we could not know otherwise and also refers only obliquely to the central events we know so well from the other gospels.

For another example, did you know that John never tells of Jesus taking bread and wine, and saying that they are his body and blood? … But it is only in John that Jesus says “I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst” and “he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.”(6:35, 54). And only in John do we hear of the washing of the apostle’s feet at the last supper. So, once again, John says both less and more than the other evangelists.

Why does John write in this way? I think it may be because he knows full well that he is speaking of a great mystery – a mystery that – like the stars sometimes will – disappears from view if you look at it directly.

I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this optical phenomenon or not, but it’s not a deficiency in the stars – It’s a deficiency in our eyes. When there is very little light, only our rod cells do the work of seeing. Now, the center of our eye is made up mostly of cone cells. So, if we look directly at a dim star on a dark night, it will sometimes vanish from our view. Whereas, if we look off to the side of it, we will see it with our rod-cell-rich peripheral vision. The star is there whether we can see it or not, but we can only see it when we look at it obliquely.

Now we see as through a glass, darkly. The mysteries are like this. They are ineffable. We cannot speak of them. Not really. Not directly. So, sometimes we have to use our peripheral vision to see the mystery that the gospel of John is teaching us about. And it is in this way that today’s gospel speaks of baptism.

Today, a healing takes place by a pool of water. Our holy father John Chrysostom says of this: “A baptism purging all sins and making people alive instead of dead… [is] foreshown as in a picture by the pool.”[i]

How so? Well here is a pool of water where, time and time again, the sick and suffering have found healing. Often enough that it has become a place famous for healing. The sick who crowd its porticoes are a multitude. This, in fact, is the reason the paralytic man has not been able to enter the pool when the waters are troubled – which is the time of healing – because the others have crowded him out time and time again. The point is, the water is known by this perennial miracle to bring healing.

Chrysostom says that “this miracle was done so that those [at the pool] who had learned over and over for such a long time how it is possible to heal the diseases of the body by water might more easily believe that water can also heal the diseases of the soul.”[ii]

Jesus heals the man not only physically, but he also forgives the man’s sins. We live in two worlds at the same time. We are bodies and spirits at once and the Lord brings us healing in full to our whole being. When Jesus says to the man “See, you are well!” I don’t think he means “well” only in body, for he continues to tell the man, “Sin no more, that nothing worse may befall you.” A worse fate than 38 years of paralysis would be the wages of sin – death and the long death of damnation. Jesus both heals paralysis and tramples death by death – he dies for our sins. Sin and death, you see, go hand in hand – just as do grace and life.

Through baptism, we turn our backs on sin and death and we receive grace and life. We act this out in the rite of baptism itself: Facing West, we reject Satan and sin and death, then, we turn our backs on that and face East and commit ourselves to Christ and grace and life.

Baptism is our way of entering into the resurrection of Christ through the death of Christ. We go down into the water as into a tomb, and we rise out of the water to new life. This is the way Christ has given us to enter into the life in Christ – to be clothed in Christ – to be healed of our infirmities in a truly lasting way – to be forgiven of our sins – to begin life everlasting. And he was already showing us this way when he healed the paralytic man by the sheep pool.

Meaningfully, that sheep pool, according to some ancient authorities,[iii] was so called because it was the place where sheep were washed before being sacrificed in the temple. By entering into this water, then, those who sought healing there were, knowingly or unknowingly, identifying themselves with the sacrifice, which is just what Christ, who the Lamb of God, will do upon the Cross – which is just what we do when we are baptized. This sheep pool prefigures the baptismal font in which we become the sheep of the Good Shepherd.

Another parallel: the water is troubled before the sick, the blind, and the lame enter it for healing (5:7). By whom is it troubled? This gospel passage does not tell us (unless your Bible contains verse 4 of chapter 5. Verse four was almost certainly not written by John, which is why it is omitted from today’s reading). It’s not contained in any of the oldest manuscripts and it contains at least 4 words that John uses nowhere else in his writings.[iv] But I mention it because Chrysostom certainly regarded it as scripture nonetheless – as did other early fathers. And also because I do not believe that just because it was written later by a different author necessarily means that it is not scripture, or that it is not true, or that it is not inspired by God. It reads as follows: “For an angel of the Lord went down at certain times into the pool, and troubled the water; whoever stepped in first after the troubling of the water was healed of whatever diseases he had.”

Now this becomes interesting if we continue to see baptism in this story. Chrysostom says, “The water, however did not heal by virtue of its own natural properties…, but by the descent of an Angel: For an Angel went down at a certain time into the pool, and troubled the water. In the same way, in Baptism, water does not act simply as water, but receives first the grace of the Holy Spirit, by means of which it cleanses us from all our sins.”[v]

Significantly, when the priest calls down the grace and blessing of the Holy Spirit upon the baptismal water, he troubles the water both with his fingers and with his breath. In this way, it evokes the healings at the Sheep Pool.

But notice something else: the paralytic man never enters the Sheep Pool! He had been hoping for healing in the pool but he received instead healing from a direct personal encounter with Jesus Christ. The pool and its healings are an image of baptism, but they are not baptism itself. Baptism, rather, is what brings us – like the paralytic man – into relationship and union with Christ. By it we are identified with Him, and nothing can take that away from us. Let us remember and contemplate our baptisms and give thanks to God for his grace, by which he unites us to himself and saves us from sin and death.

 

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[i] John Chrysostom. Homilies on the Gospel of John 36.1.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] e.g. Augustine

[iv] ταραχή, δήποτε, νόσημα, κατέχω. Raymond Brown says there are 7 “non-Johannine” words, 207.

[v] John Chrysostom. Homilies on the Gospel of John 36.1.

on Mark 15:43-16:8

In our church, just before Great and Holy Friday begins with Strasti (Matins with the 12 gospels of the Passion of Jesus Christ), we set up the tomb. Behind it, we set up the cross. Then, at Burial Vespers, like Joseph of Arimathea, we fill the tomb with the icon of Christ’s corpse on his burial shroud. At this tomb, we keep vigil and pray Jerusalem Matins, which is the triumphant funeral of Christ, as he is in Hades and is there defeating death and hell. As Great and Holy Saturday comes to an end and the glorious Pascha begins, we empty the tomb of the burial shroud and carry it into the holy place, for Christ is risen! And his body no longer occupies the grave. Now, the tomb is empty. Today, we stand next to the empty tomb with the myrrh-bearing women.

Note that the myrrh bearing women go very early before the dawn while it is still dark to the tomb. Our Triodion ends by telling us to begin the celebration of Resurrection Matins and Divine Liturgy for Pascha at midnight. According to the Gospel of Mark, the approach to the tomb was much later on as the sun was about to rise. But it was still in the dark as day was about to break. We begin in the dark, and that is deeply significant, for out of the black darkness of Hades, Christ rises like the rising of the sun. His name is the rising of the sun.

As the sun is rising, the myrrh-bearing women come to the tomb and find the stone already rolled back and, entering, they find a young man in a white robe. Mark calls him a “young man,” not an angel, and I imagine that this is what he at first seemed to be. He proclaims the resurrection of Jesus and shows them the empty tomb.

The first response of the to this empty tomb and to the gospel of the young man they meet there, is… silence. That is, they tell no one, for they are afraid. In the most ancient manuscripts, this is in fact the last verse of the Gospel of Mark. They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

Let’s think about the trembling fear of the women in this moment. Is this the fear of cowardice or is this something else? It may be tempting, upon hearing that the women told nothing to anyone because they were afraid, to suspect them of cowardice.

But remember, these were not cowardly women. These were the only disciples who stayed with Jesus until the end, according to Mark. It was the other disciples who ran away – not these women. These are the women who watched from afar while Jesus was tortured and killed. They did not avert their eyes. Their love for him compelled them to be present to him even in his agony and now even in his tomb they come to care for him. Knowing this about them, perhaps we should hesitate now to interpret their fear as cowardice. There is a kind of fear other than cowardice. There is also the fear of the Lord.

These women are experiencing the first glimpses of the mystery of the Resurrection. And it is being shown to them as emptiness. As nothing. Here look, says the young man, he is not here. Here is nothing.

The women surely perceive this emptiness rightly – as full of significance. But as the power of the mystery it signifies is dawning in their hearts as the sun is dawning in the East, they find that no words can come to their lips. No words form on their lips equal to the mystery.

The Lord has told his disciples at another time, “Do not worry about what you will say. God will give you the words.” Here, these women (who may well be filled with fear of God and awe at his holy mystery) obey the word of the word of God to wait for the words he will give them. Their fear is not the fear of worry about what they will say. I think their fear is of God. I think it is a holy fear.

Note an interesting contrast: Throughout the gospels, Jesus commands people to be silent about the great works he has accomplished for them. But they cannot keep silent and they go and tell everybody. Now, these women are commanded go and speak, and they cannot speak but keep silent.

These women were devoted and obedient to the Lord, who had so often commanded silence. Are they going to obey an unknown young man or are they going to obey the Lord? Remember, according to Mark, they see him at first as a young man, and not yet as an angel. I imagine that they realize he was an angel only after the fact, in the light of the resurrection. So, are they going to obey this young man? These women are devoted to the Lord. It is him they will obey.

And anyway, didn’t the young man also prophesy that the Lord was going ahead of them to Galilee? The most ancient manuscripts of Mark do not include any description of what these later appearances of the Lord were to be like – only this reference that in fact the Lord was going to appear to his disciples later. And that’s where it ends. Later manuscripts of Mark include the appearance of the Risen Lord first to Mary Magdalene and then to his other disciples. In fact, we read this passage from Mark at Matins this morning. And all of the other gospels describe the encounters of various disciples with the Risen Lord, and the effect of that encounter is always radically different than what we see here at the shorter end of Mark. I think that’s because here at the end the Mark, there is not yet any encounter with the Risen Lord, there is only the empty tomb.

A message here for us is that those who have not actually encountered the Risen Lord, could not dare to shout, Christ is risen!

How then, can we shout it? We have been shouting it now for two weeks! How do we dare? Because we have encountered the risen Lord Jesus Christ by grace. We are baptized into his resurrection. And, like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, in the breaking of the bread, we see him!

And so now we shout, while standing next to the empty tomb, Christ is risen!

The Judeans sought to kill Jesus also because he “called God his own Father, making himself equal to God.” (John 5:18). Jesus had just said, “My Father is working right up to the present moment, and I am working too.” (John 5:17). Later, after his resurrection, Thomas will say plainly to Jesus, “My Lord and my God.”

The Judeans were right in one sense. Jesus understood himself to be equal to God – because he is God. And His Apostles come to understand him this way also. The Judeans come to this accurate conclusion about Jesus’s self-understanding when they hear him refer to God as, “My father.”

Bear this in mind when you pray the Lord’s Prayer. We know that the Lord has taught us to call God “Our Father.” Both the similarities and the differences between this and the way Jesus addresses his Father are deeply significant.

First a difference: Jesus teaches us to call God, “Our Father.” Meanwhile, he calls God, “My Father.” The difference is in the plural versus the singular. God is our Father in as much as we are the Church, the body of Christ, which we never are all by ourselves. The Church is the community of all true believers. It is not us all on our own with our own ideas. We are baptized into Christ and clothed with Christ by the Church and in the Church. Inasmuch as we are made one with Jesus Christ by his grace, God is also our Father – because he is the Father of Jesus Christ, with whom we are one.

Let us think on this when we pray – I hope many times each day – to our Father. Lately, I have been praying the Our Father every time I wash my hands. And the Our Father is a part of the usual beginning to our prayer every evening and morning and also throughout the day.

Even those first two words – “Our Father” – contain infinite meaning for our contemplation. They are both a petition and the proclamation. A proclamation that we are living in Christ, the only Son of the Father. It is only in him that God is our Father. And a petition also that we grow in unity with Jesus Christ. Because when we say “Our Father,” we can’t help but remember that we’re not there yet, that we have growing to do, as the rest of the prayer makes clear.

And remember also that the audacity of these words were enough to make men seek to kill Jesus. We ought to be a bit shocked ourselves every time we say it. It proclaims nothing less than theosis – unity with God himself. It is a bold thing for us to say to God, “Our Father.” For Jesus to call God his Father was, as Thomas later recognizes in the light of the Resurrection, simply the truth.