Abba - Heart of Love

Across the 4 Gospels, Jesus is recorded as using a number of different titles to refer to God, including: The Great King, my God and your God, The One who sent me, The Most High, Lord of Heaven and Earth, The Lord, The Vinegrower, The Lord of the Harvest, The One Who is Good. And today, on this Father’s Day, I invite us to pause and reflect on the most loving and intimate word that Jesus used to refer to God, a word that speaks to the heart of love, trust, and relationship. That word is Abba.

We find Abba in a few key places in Scripture. One is in the Garden of Gethsemane, just before Jesus is arrested. In Mark 14:36, he prays, “Abba, Father, all things are possible for you; take this cup from me, yet not what I will, but what you will.” It’s also found in Paul’s letters (in Romans 8 and Galatians 4) where Paul tells us that the Spirit within us cries out Abba, Father as a sign of our deep connection with the Divine.

But what does Abba mean?

In Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, Abba was the word young children used for their father. It’s close in feeling to Papa or Dada, not childish, but deeply tender. Over time, adults also used it to address their fathers with love and respect. It held both intimacy and reverence. So when Jesus called God Abba, he was not using a distant, formal word. He was speaking as a child might speak to someone they trust completely, someone who knows them fully and loves them unconditionally.

In many traditions, God has been seen as all-powerful, distant, or even fearsome. But Abba invites a different relationship, one rooted in nearness, vulnerability, and love.

The word Abba also represents the first sounds that a baby makes.  There is something primal or primordial about the sound… pointing us to the sense that God as Abba is the primordial reality or primordial source of all existence, the intimate source and origin of every soul, the nameless one within all names. 

And so the title Abba  doesn’t erase the mystery of the Divine but it tells us that beyond all mystery is relationship. We are not meant to approach life alone. We are invited to trust, to lean into something greater, something kind, something that knows our name.

And perhaps this word, Abba, can also help us heal some of the images of fatherhood that have been distorted by human failing. Not everyone has had a father they could trust. But the word Abba, as Jesus uses it, invites us to imagine what true fathering might be not about power or control, but about compassion, guidance, and presence.

For us today, whether we believe in a personal God or understand the Divine in broader terms, Abba can be a symbol, or a a doorway into relationship. It reminds us that the spiritual life is not a rulebook or a ladder, but a living connection to the sacred heart of life itself.

And so today, as we remember and honour those who have fathered us, in body or in spirit, may we also open our hearts to the Abba presence,  that deep well of love that holds us, guides us, and calls each of us beloved.

Amen.