Why Does Jesus Call the Father “My God”?

“My Father and your Father; my God and your God”

The risen Jesus speaks to Mary about ascending to His Father and God. He distinguishes His relationship from that of the disciples by saying “my” and “your,” rather than merging all Sonship into one undifferentiated relationship. The same chapter receives Thomas’s confession of Jesus as Lord and God. John apparently sees no contradiction between the two declarations.

Resurrection does not mean the Son discards humanity. His embodied life is transformed and glorified; He remains the mediator who brings humans to the Father. Revelation 3:12’s repeated “my God” comes from the exalted Christ, so an explanation confined to a temporary pre-resurrection weakness is insufficient. The enduring incarnate Son belongs in real relation to the Father even in glory.

Hebrews likewise calls the Son God and describes God as His God in the anointing clause. Historic theology understands this through His messianic office, genuine humanity, and eternal filial relation. It does not identify Him as an unrelated second god who happens to worship the first. The one divine nature and the one incarnate person must be held together.

The cry of abandonment

Jesus’ cry “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” invokes Psalm 22. The psalm gives voice to real anguish while moving toward vindication and praise. Its fuller trajectory matters, but should not be used to make the suffering merely theatrical. The incarnate Son truly undergoes rejection, torment, and death.

Christians differ in how they describe the relationship between His sin-bearing and this cry. No responsible Trinitarian explanation should turn it into a literal rupture of the divine nature or an end to the Father’s eternal love for the Son. Nor should it deny His experienced abandonment. The text takes us into the depth of His human suffering and trust, not into a simple diagram of God splitting apart.

Philippians joins His prior divine form to His taking a servant’s form and obeying to death. The Son’s self-humbling is not a subtraction of deity. He does not stop being who He is in order to save; He assumes the human condition in which obedience, pain, and death become genuinely His.

“The Father is greater than I”

Jesus speaks as He approaches departure, suffering, and return to the Father. Some interpreters understand “greater” primarily through His humbled human condition; others stress the Father as source within the eternal relation or His order in the saving mission. These explanations overlap but should not be presented as identical grammatical observations.

Augustine’s interpretation distinguishes Christ’s servant form from His divine equality: the Father is greater with respect to the assumed humanity, while the Son is equal in divinity. That is a historical theological reading of the passage, not a phrase John inserts into the verse. Its strength is that it accounts for both the departure context and John’s assertions of shared pre-world glory and divine life.

A reading that makes the Son less divine must also explain the Word being God, His universal creation, Thomas’s confession, and equal honor. Nicene theology refuses to settle one verse by discarding these other statements. It recognizes relational order and genuine human humility without concluding that there are different grades of divine nature.

The Son’s submission at the end

Paul describes resurrection, the destruction of death, Christ’s reign, and the handing over of the kingdom to God the Father. The Father is explicitly excepted from the “all things” subjected to the Son. Finally the Son Himself is subjected to the one who subjected all things to Him, so that God may be all in all. The relationship is not temporary confusion about who rules.

The passage concerns the completion of Christ’s victorious mediatorial reign. Historic interpreters connect His submission with His enduring humanity and the ordered relation of Son to Father. They do not read it as the cancellation of His deity or the collapse of His kingship into nothing. The text has real exegetical questions: how precisely the completed reign relates to His eternal reign and how the filial submission is described. It deserves explanation, not dismissal.

Submission is a relationship, not a dictionary synonym for created nature. In Scripture the incarnate Son freely obeys, defeats death, and brings redeemed humanity into the Father’s purpose. The Nicene conclusion is that the eternal Son fulfills this mission as truly God and truly human. The unchanging divine nature is not degraded by the saving act, and His humanity is not erased when it is completed.

Neither split Christ nor flatten His humanity

The subject of these acts is one Son, not a divine person watching a separate human person pray. Nor is His humanity a shell without a human mind or will. Later Christological language guards the unity of the person and the reality of both divinity and humanity. When Jesus says “my God,” the statement belongs to His actual incarnate relationship with the Father.

This distinction does not solve the mystery by making God ordinary. It makes our claims coherent with the testimony: the Savior shares our life, trusts the Father, and brings us to Him, while remaining the eternal Son through whom creation exists. The difficult verses belong inside the doctrine’s explanation rather than outside its evidence.