Given our historical evidence, Jesus is rightly known for his probing and challenging teachings about God, but he has left us with a difficult question: What, according to the synoptic Gospels, motivated and empowered him to go, willingly, to Jerusalem to undergo suffering and death? So far as we know, he could have chosen to avoid the fatal confrontation in Jerusalem, but he resolved to endure it, despite its tragic end. This situation calls for an explanation in terms of what empowered him to carry out his intention while facing suffering and death. Our explanation will take us to the center of Jesus’s self-understanding in relation to God and of his redemptive mission. Jesus understood God as “Abba, Father” in the light of the Jewish Bible, but, as we shall see, he factored in his own distinctive experience of God as Abba.