Our Father

We are all God’s children

You’ll notice that the prayer begins Our Father, not My Father.  This is because he is just as much the Father of other people as he is of us.  So the plural is kept all the way through: “Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses”.  In the Lord’s Prayer, therefore, we pray for others as well as for ourselves, for the people we don’t like as well as for the people we like.  For, as God is the Father of all, so we are all his children.  And as he is good to all, he desires all his children to be friends with one another.  As Jesus said, “…pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good…Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (NRSV, Matthew 5:44,45,48).

So people of other races are also his children along with us, and for that reason are our brothers and sisters and we should treat them as such.  It is just as wrong and stupid for white people to look down on black people because they are black, as it is for black people to look down on white people because they are white.

A Mexican fable!

There is an old Mexican fable which shows how silly this sort of thing is.  It tells that when God made the first man, he put him in an oven to bake him.  Unfortunately, God left him in too long and when he took him out he was burnt black.  That is why there are black people.  So he made another man and put him in the oven, but this time he took him out too soon and he was pale and underdone.  That is why there are white people.  Then God tried once again and this time the man came out a beautiful golden brown, a perfect man, in fact a Mexican!

We laugh at that, but we are just as silly if we think that we are better than someone else because that person has a different coloured skin.  The colour of people’s skin makes no more difference to their value than does the colour of their eyes.  People who have a different coloured skin are worth just as much to God as we are, because he is the God, not of one race, but of all humankind.

Jesus died for us all

Indeed there is an even greater reason why they are worth as much to God as we are, and it’s this: Jesus became a human being and died on the Cross to save them no less than us.  As you know, Jesus was a Jew but, because he truly belongs to all the human race, we represent him in different ways on crucifixes.  In Britain he is usually represented as a white Christ.  And because he belongs equally to Africans, they have a black Christ on their crucifixes.  So the Indians picture him as an Indian and the Chinese as a Chinaman.  And all of us are right because, whoever we may be, Jesus took our human nature when he became a human being, and we are his brothers and sisters and should look on each other as such.