To listen to a young child babbling as children love to do, wanting to be heard, needing and learning to speak, is to hear the oft-repeated words: mama, dada (or baba).

And we recall: “Unless you change and become like a little child, you will never enter the kingdom of Heaven” (Matthew 18:3).

Why must we become like children to enter the kingdom of heaven? We might hear it’s because children are innocent and pure. No, we don’t have to somehow make ourselves innocent and pure to enter God’s dwelling-place. If we did, we’d be lost already. Then why is Jesus talking about being childlike? What does he mean?

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Danny has no trouble understanding these words. As a child, he’d needed to make sure his parents and siblings were all right. As an adult, he became a high achiever, but never slept well. Father meant “anger,” and mother “sorrow.” 

Perhaps, Jesus is being descriptive as much as prescriptive, simply showing us things as they are. For Jesus himself says “Abba!” when He prays, talks, heals or teaches, when He eats or works, and when He picks up the Cross. As a child before his Abba. So He teaches us, too, the necessity of becoming as a little child if we are to belong in God’s kingdom.

‘Abba’—‘Father,’ we translate it (a little awkwardly). This is who Jesus beholds when He looks at the one who calls him “my beloved son,” the one of whom Jesus is the icon (image). This is how Jesus approaches the one to whom he cries out in joy and pain, in fear and petition. ‘Abba’ is one of a few words the Gospels do not translate, but render just as Jesus spoke it.

This is the relationship with God into which he invites us. With a certain urgency.

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Does Jesus use ‘Abba’ because God is actually male? Or because He wants us to think of our fathers as so wonderful we project them onto God, or so horrible that we need to escape them and project the opposite onto God? No, it’s not about male and female, or any other human categorization.

The one Jesus loves to address as Father is so beyond us humans, so transcendent, that we say He is hidden, unknowable. But to claim Abba, to become children of God and so enter the kingdom of Heaven, can happen only through Jesus Christ, who reveals this and shares it. He makes it available to all to become sons of God by adoption.

St. Athanasius says that Christ is so completely one with the Father that the only thing you can’t say about the Son is Father, and the only thing you can’t say about the Father is Son. It’s not a way of saying that females aren’t children of God equally to men; it’s not a way of ranking humans into higher and lower. It’s a way of revealing and inviting us into intimate, personal relationship with God. These are words by which we receive this life-giving relationship. Imperfect, like all words, they keep us reaching and questioning, even while giving us a place to stand, the only standing-place there is.

They are not human words attributed to an imagined god, but words given to us that reveal something of who God is. In that sense, the word ‘Father’ reveals to us—exactly because it is imperfect—the humility of God; in this word, God incarnates Himself for our sake. We’re not asked to devise a better word, but to seek and live its mystery and reality.

It’s a truth so profound and vast that all the minds working, discovering, studying, and practicing it throughout human history haven’t come to the end of it. They have hardly gotten to the beginning of it. And it’s so real that the small child learning her first words can hold it in her mouth and be thrilled by it.

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The great, hidden, revealed truth we can never get to the end of, we can hold in the two words given us by Jesus, in answer to a question about how to pray: “Our Father.”

The Gospel at its core reveals that God is Father, and so has no need of anything from us. All is therefore unconditional love poured out to us in total gratuity. It’s the fulcrum of revelation. With our lever of faith, we can move the world.