“My Lord and Your Lord” What Jesus Meant

The Qur’an repeats the same words five times in Jesus’ mouth: “Allah is my Lord and your Lord, so worship Him” (Al-Imran 3:51, Al-Maida 5:72, 5:117, Maryam 19:36, Al-Zukhruf 43:64). For many Muslim readers, these verses settle the matter. If Jesus had a Lord, He cannot be Lord. If He told people to worship God, He cannot be God.

The phrase deserves a closer look. Why does Jesus not simply say “our Lord”? Some will say it is ordinary speech, and the same wording appears on the lips of Moses (Ghafir 40:27, Al-Dukhan 44:20) and Hud (Hud 11:56). Meanwhile, Muhammad is told to say, “our Lord and your Lord” (Al-Baqara 2:139, Al-Shura 42:15), and in Al-Maida 5:114 Jesus Himself prays, “O Allah, our Lord.” That is true, but the question does not stop there, because the Qur’an itself tells us where to go when we want to understand Jesus more deeply.

The Qur’an tells Muhammad that if he is in doubt about what has been revealed, he should “ask those who read the Scripture before you” (Yunus 10:94). It also tells the Christians of Muhammad’s own day to “judge by what Allah has revealed” in the Gospel (Al-Maida 5:47). That command only makes sense if the Gospel (Injil) those Christians held was available, readable, and trustworthy enough to judge by.

We know what that Gospel said. Manuscripts of John’s Gospel long predate Islam. Papyrus 66 and Papyrus 75 date to around AD 200, and the great codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus to the fourth century. All of them contain the passage we are about to read. So, if we follow the Qur’an’s advice and ask the people of the Book, this is the answer they would have given in the seventh century, and the answer they give today.

“My Father and Your Father, My God and Your God”

On the morning of His resurrection, Jesus tells Mary Magdalene not to cling to him, and to go to his brothers with this message: “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God” (John 20:17).

Here is the same pattern the Qur’an records: “my” and “your.” But notice what Jesus does not say. He never says “our Father” in a way that places Himself alongside His disciples as one more child of God. Even the Lord’s Prayer is introduced with “When you pray, say: Our Father” (Luke 11:2; Matthew 6:9). Jesus gives the prayer to His followers; He does not pray it with them as an equal.

The early Church noticed this. Augustine, commenting on this verse around AD 400, observed that Jesus deliberately avoided saying “our Father.” God is His Father in one way and ours in another: His by nature, ours by grace. And God is “my God” to Jesus because Jesus truly became man, while God is “your God” to us as the One with whom Jesus mediates on our behalf.

The rest of the New Testament explains the difference. Jesus is the “only begotten” (monogenēs) Son, who is “in the bosom of the Father” (John 1:18). We, by contrast, receive “the right to become children of God” (John 1:12). We are adopted (Romans 8:15; Galatians 4:4–7). His sonship is eternal and natural; ours is given and received. So when Jesus says, “my Father and your Father,” He is not erasing the difference between Himself and us. He announces it and, at the same moment, invites us into a family we could never enter on our own. That is why, in the same breath, He calls the disciples “my brothers” (compare Hebrews 2:11).

Why “My God” Is Not a Problem for Christians

A Muslim friend may reply: “But Jesus said ‘my God.’ How can God have a God?”

This question assumes Christians believe something they do not. Christian faith does not teach that Jesus is only God, or that His humanity was a costume. It teaches that the eternal Son became fully human (John 1:14; Philippians 2:6–8). A real human being prays, obeys, worships, and calls upon God. The Gospels show Jesus doing all of these, and Hebrews says He offered up prayers “with loud cries and tears” (Hebrews 5:7).

So, when Jesus, in His humanity, calls the Father “my God,” He is doing exactly what the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation expects. Gregory of Nazianzus made this point in the fourth century: expressions of dependence on God belong to Christ’s human nature, while expressions of equality with God belong to His divine nature. The Qur’an’s “my Lord and your Lord” does not contradict the Christian creed. The creed already contains it.

One, Yet Distinct

This is why John 20:17 must be read together with John 10:30: “I and the Father are one.” In Greek, the word for “one” (hen) is neuter, not masculine. Jesus is not saying He and the Father are one person; John 20:17 plainly shows two persons, one speaking about the other. He is saying they are one in being. His hearers understood the claim, which is why they picked up stones, “because you, being a man, make yourself God” (John 10:33).

Distinction without division, unity without confusion: that is the biblical picture. The Father is not the Son, yet the Son shares the Father’s nature.

Eleven Verses Later

The most striking answer to the question sits in the same chapter. Only eleven verses after Jesus says “my God and your God,” Thomas sees the risen Jesus, touches His wounds, and cries out: “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28).

The phrase “my Lord” comes back, but now it is addressed to Jesus. And Jesus does not rebuke Thomas. He does not say, “Worship Allah, my Lord and your Lord.” Instead, He blesses those who will believe the same thing without seeing (John 20:29). John then tells us the whole purpose of his book: that we may believe Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and have life in His name (John 20:31).

A prophet who was only a prophet would have corrected Thomas immediately, as angels and apostles do elsewhere in Scripture when people try to worship them (Acts 14:14–15; Revelation 22:8–9). Jesus accepts it.

What the Qur’an Rejects and What Christians Believe

Al-Maida 5:72 condemns those who say “Allah is the Messiah, son of Mary.” It is worth saying clearly: Christians do not confess that sentence in the sense it seems to reject. The Church does not teach that God is only the Messiah, as though the Father ceased to exist when the Son became man. That idea, known as modalism, was condemned by the Church itself. Likewise, Al-Maida 5:116 describes a trinity including Mary, which no Christian creed has ever taught. The Qur’an’s criticism targets beliefs the Church also rejects, while the actual Christian teaching, as John 20 lays it out, remains untouched.

The Straight Path

In every one of these qur’anic verses, Jesus ends with the same words: “This is the Straight Path.” In the Gospel the Qur’an commends, Jesus names that path Himself: “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).

“My Father and your Father” is not a sentence of separation. It is the announcement of a door. The one who is Son by nature has come so that we might become sons and daughters by grace. If we follow the Qur’an’s own advice and ask the people of the Book, this is the answer we will hear.

Answering the Objections

A careful Muslim reader will not be persuaded simply by quoting John 20. He will raise serious objections, and they deserve serious answers.

Objection 1: “Jesus said ‘my God.’ Whoever has a God is not God.”

This is the heart of the matter, and the answer lies in what Christians mean by the Incarnation.

The Christian claim is not that a man was promoted to divinity, nor that God merely appeared to be human. It is that the eternal Word, who “was God” (John 1:1), “became flesh” (John 1:14). He did not stop being God, and He did not pretend to be human. He took to Himself a complete human nature, with a human body, a human mind, and a human will. From that moment, the one person of the Son has two natures: divine and human.

Once this is understood, the question changes. It is no longer “Can God have a God?” but “Does a real human being relate to God as his God?” And the answer is obviously yes. A true man prays, trusts, obeys, and worships. If Jesus had never called the Father “my God,” that would be a problem for Christianity, because it would suggest His humanity was not real.

The New Testament is full of statements that belong to Christ’s humanity. He grew in wisdom (Luke 2:52). He was tired and sat by a well (John 4:6). He wept (John 11:35). He “learned obedience” through suffering (Hebrews 5:8). On the cross He cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46), praying the words of Psalm 22 as every faithful Israelite could. Paul calls Him “the man Christ Jesus,” the mediator between God and humanity (1 Timothy 2:5), and a mediator must truly stand on the human side of that relationship.

Yet the same Gospels place alongside these statements claims that no mere man could make. “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). He forgives sins in his own name (Mark 2:5–7) and receives worship (Matthew 14:33; John 20:28).

The key point is that the New Testament authors themselves hold both together, sometimes in a single sentence. The clearest example is Hebrews 1:8–9, quoting Psalm 45. The Father addresses the Son: “Your throne, O God, is forever and ever.” Then the very next line says: “Therefore God, your God, has anointed you.” The Son is called God and is said to have a God in the same passage. The author did not see a contradiction, because he understood what John 20:17 also shows: the Son is God by nature, and as the anointed man, the Messiah, He has a God.

Paul gives the pattern its fullest expression in Philippians 2:6–8. Christ was “in the form of God” and equal with God, yet He “took the form of a servant” and became “obedient to the point of death.” A servant has a master; an obedient man has a God to obey. Paul does not say Christ ceased to be in the form of God. He says Christ added the form of a servant. “My God” is the language of the servant form, spoken by the one who never lost the divine form.

This also explains the timing of John 20:17. Jesus says “my God” after the resurrection. That is not evidence against His divinity; it is evidence that the Incarnation is permanent. The risen Christ is still truly human, and a human being still speaks of God as “my God.” That is precisely why, eleven verses later, Thomas can touch that risen human body and confess to the person within it, “My Lord and my God.”

The early Church read the verse exactly this way. Gregory of Nazianzus, in the fourth century, gave a simple rule: statements of lowliness and dependence belong to Christ’s humanity, statements of glory and equality to his divinity, and both are true of the one Christ. Leo the Great, whose letter the Council of Chalcedon affirmed in AD 451, wrote that each nature does what is proper to it, in communion with the other. This was not a later invention to escape a Muslim objection. It was the Church’s reading of John 20:17 centuries before Islam existed.

Objection 2: “This is a convenient trick. Every awkward verse gets assigned to the human nature.”

The charge would be fair if Christians invented the two natures to rescue difficult texts. But the two natures are not an escape hatch; they are the conclusion forced by the texts themselves. The New Testament presents one person who is tired and upholds the universe (Hebrews 1:3), who is born and existed before Abraham, who prays and receives prayer. Any reading that keeps only one set of verses must explain away the other. The two-natures doctrine is the only view that takes all of them seriously.

It is also important to be clear that Christians do not split Jesus into two persons, one human and one divine, who take turns speaking. There is one person, the eternal Son. Everything Jesus says, he says as that one person. When He says, “my God,” it is truly the Son who speaks, speaking according to the human nature He has made His own. When He says, “before Abraham was, I am,” it is the same Son, speaking according to the nature He has always had.

Objection 3: “Moses and Hud also say ‘my Lord and your Lord,’ so the phrase proves nothing unique.”

Agreed, and this article does not claim otherwise. On its own, the qur’anic phrase shows only that Jesus worshipped God, something Christians gladly affirm about Jesus in His humanity. The question is not whether Jesus called God “my Lord,” but who Jesus was when He said it. For that, the Qur’an itself directs us to the Gospel, and the Gospel shows that the One who said “my God” also accepted “my God” from Thomas. Moses never accepted worship, and Hud never said, “before Abraham was, I am.”

Objection 4: “Son of God is used of Israel and the righteous. ‘My Father and your Father’ means nothing special.”

It is true that Israel is called God’s son (Exodus 4:22) and that believers are called children of God. But that is exactly the contrast John draws. Believers become children of God (John 1:12); Jesus is the only begotten Son (John 1:18, 3:16). If Jesus were one son among many, His avoidance of “our Father” would make no sense, and His hearers would not have tried to stone Him for “making himself equal with God” by calling God His own Father (John 5:18). Ordinary sonship does not provoke a charge of blasphemy.

Objection 5: “The Gospel was corrupted, and the Qur’an only affirms the original Injil given to Jesus.”

This brings us back to the Qur’an’s own words. Al-Maida 5:47 tells the Christians of Muhammad’s time to judge by what God revealed in the Gospel. That instruction assumes they had it. Al-Maida 5:48 calls the Qur’an a guardian (muhaymin) over the earlier scriptures, and Al-Anaam 6:115 insists that no one can change God’s words. If the Gospel had been lost or corrupted before the seventh century, the command to judge by it would be meaningless.

The manuscript evidence makes the point concrete. The text of John 20 in Papyrus 66, copied around AD 200, is the same text Christians read today. No manuscript, early or late, reads differently on the points this article depends on. And there is no manuscript anywhere of a different “original Injil” in which Jesus teaches Islamic doctrine. If the Gospel was corrupted, it happened before AD 200, which would mean the Qur’an commanded Christians to judge by a book that had already been corrupted for four centuries. This is often called the “Islamic dilemma”: either the Gospel was reliable in Muhammad’s time, in which case it is reliable now, or it was not, in which case the Qur’an’s command makes no sense.

Objection 6: “Yunus 10:94 is hypothetical. Muhammad never actually doubted.”

Many classical commentators do read it that way, and the argument here does not depend on Muhammad having had doubts. The point is simpler: the verse treats the people of the Book as a reliable reference point for testing revelation. Whether the doubt is real or hypothetical, the Qur’an assumes their Scripture can answer the question. We are simply taking that assumption at its word.