Is Jesus the Son of Allah?

Date added: 29/05/2020

IS JESUS THE SON OF ALLAH?

Kneeling alone on the soft carpet

of a Mombasa mosque,

chandeliers above, galleries around,

stereo system stacked high in the corner,

the quiet question came to me -

is Jesus the Son of Allah?

The question is not about Jesus, but Allah:

The Arabic for God is more than a name

but is He the same

as our God and Father?

In Southern Sudan

a Christian will answer, militantly, 'No':

In Pakistan

a Christian may answer, philosophically, 'Yes':

In Saudi Arabia

a Muslim will answer, immediately, 'No':

So does it depend where we stand - or kneel?

El Shaddai of Abraham

Is revealed as Yahweh to Moses,

But not as Ba’al to Elijah:

What of ‘Almighty Allah’?

The crucial clue may lead us to

A Muslim now submitting

To the Ultimate Submitter,

Jesus the Messiah.

He does not change his God,

for God is One,

But discovers in the Son

That God is strangely, inconceivably great,

because He became so conceivably small;

That God, in the end, is mercifully just

since He has absorbed the evil of all.

We may, perhaps, then whisper

that Jesus is the Son of Allah:

But in this naked act of naming,

the active Word transforms the Name.

Prostrate upon the carpet of a Mombasa mosque,

Softly to Jesus, Son of Allah, I prayed;

Then rose again to slip outside

and join my wife and daughters,

who were waiting in the shade.

© Graham Kings, Nourishing Connections (Canterbury Press, 2020).

first published in the International Bulletin of Missionary Research 14. 1 January 1990, then published in Graham Kings, Signs and Seasons (Canterbury Press, 2008).