Jesus and Abba in Gethsemane: A Center in Filial Cooperation
What motivated and empowered Jesus to go, willingly, to Jerusalem to undergo suffering and death? He could have chosen to avoid the fatal confrontation in Jerusalem, but he intended to endure it, despite its tragic end. This situation calls for an explanation in terms of what empowered him in carryi...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
2021
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| In: |
Journal of theological interpretation
Year: 2021, Volume: 15, Issue: 1, Pages: 63-78 |
| Further subjects: | B
Obedience
B "religious experience" B Jesus B Gethsemane (motif) B "filial responsiveness" B Cooperation B "filial relationship" B Abba |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | What motivated and empowered Jesus to go, willingly, to Jerusalem to undergo suffering and death? He could have chosen to avoid the fatal confrontation in Jerusalem, but he intended to endure it, despite its tragic end. This situation calls for an explanation in terms of what empowered him in carrying out his intention while facing suffering and death. Such an explanation takes us beyond the periphery to the center of Jesus’s self-understanding and mission. Jesus understood God as "Abba, Father," in the light of the Hebrew Bible, but he factored in his own experience of God as Abba. This article uses the Gethsemane narrative of the Gospel of Mark to identify Jesus’s Abba relationship, asking whether Jesus’s obedience in Gethsemane was a means to a more basic end rather than an end in itself. We shall see that obedience is not sufficient for this relationship, because obedient actions fall short of a cooperatively responsive filial relationship with God. Cooperative filial responsiveness to God is central to Jesus’s self-understanding. Religious experience of a filial sort plays a key role in the identity of Jesus. In neglecting this experience and the accompanying filial relationship, we fail to understand Jesus and his mission. |
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| ISSN: | 2576-7933 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Journal of theological interpretation
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.5325/jtheointe.15.1.0063 |
