The LORD is the Father of Jesus, the King
The scriptures inextricably link the terms King, Father, and Son together
Christ the King
The Christian year ends this week with Christ the King Sunday, a relatively recent addition to the liturgical calendar. Few pay notice to the redundancy of the day’s name, and this is the precise reason why revisionist alternatives to the term king/kingdom (e.g., “kin-dom,” “queen-dom”) fail to ameliorate the original. Christ is merely the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew mashiach of which caesar is the Latin term.
King.
The biblical ascription King, like Father and Son, is often judged to be offensively contextual, an artifact from a hierarchical and patriarchal past. This is true. And this is necessarily so for a faith which posits that one of the triune identity is Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim. To break from naming God in such incarnate terms is to depart from revelation into religion.
It is well-established that Father, in its biblical usage, is not a general term, but refers specifically to the relations of the triune identity. Less well-known is that the scriptures inextricably link the terms King, Father, and Son together; that is, they are coherent only in connection to one another.
Because Mary’s boy is King, God is the Father of this Son, Jesus.
You cannot call Jesus King without also simultaneously God Father.
As J.N.D Kelly writes in Early Christian Creeds:
“Patristic exegesis found that Father refers almost exclusively to the special relation of the First to the Second Person of the Trinity. The Father was the Father of the eternal Word. As early as the fourth century, St. Cyril of Jerusalem was explaining, in his discussion of the creed, that FATHER properly belongs to God in virtue of His relation to the Son, the very word suggesting the idea of a son to the mind; it could be taken as describing His fatherly relation to humankind, but only by a misuse of language.”
The terms King, Father, and Son are examples of the way biblical studies can provoke the fragmentation of the faith rather than provide a foundation for it. Rather than the norm which norms, scripture becomes a problem in need of a remedy; for instance, “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” becomes the (a-scriptural) “Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer.”
“It could be taken as describing His fatherly relation to humankind, but only by a misuse of language.”
If it is well-established that Father is not a general term for God in the scriptures but is one revealed only through Jesus calling God Abba and commanding his disciples to address his Father as our Father, the church seldom calls attention to the fact that the terms Father, Son, and King are interconnected in Israel’s scriptures.
As noted, address or description of the LORD as Father is exceedingly rare in the Old Testament; critically, the exceptions are found in Israel’s messianic passages. Israel’s royal tradition establishes the precedent for employing Father/Son language to speak of the King.
The terms Father, Son, and King are interconnected in Israel’s scriptures.
Four key examples:
II Samuel 7.14
1 Chronicles 17.13 and 22.7-10
Psalm 2.7
Psalm 89.26
In these passages, the LORD is addressed as Father exactly because the King is his Son (these passages appear in the New Testament, in places such as Nathan’s confession in John 1.49).
Israel’s royal tradition establishes the precedent for employing Father/Son language to speak of the King.
Just so—
Because Jesus is confessed as Christ, scriptural language appropriate to the King may be employed to speak of him and, by virtue of him, the LORD.
In at least three biblical passages critically important to the early church, the King is called God’s Son.
As my teacher Donald Juel puts it:
“Christians made use of the father/son designation as a way of attesting to the extraordinary authority Jesus commanded— the authority of Israel’s King, an authority vindicated when God raised him from the dead.”
The order of operations is quite opposite from what we suppose:
— Jesus is King, as the sign above his cross and stone rolled from his tomb both attest.
— Because Jesus is the Christ, he is God’s Son.
— Therefore, the LORD is the Father of Jesus, the King.
Given the redundancy in its name, Christ the King Sunday could just as easily be called God the Father Day or Jesus the Son Sunday.
Once again, those who argue that words like King, Father, and Son are contextual to a particular time and place and that they might offend some in other times and places are not wrong. In fact, the incarnation could not avoid such a problem even if God had taken flesh in a more “enlightened” time.
Nevertheless, as Juel suggests:
“The scriptures, the creeds, and the tradition of the church commend a particular way of speaking about God: God the Creator is first and foremost the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” That is the norming image from the scriptures and the tradition. How to deal with the offense in the hearing of it is the task of pastoral theology.”
