Easter tells us that we are missed

Our best relationships hint at what we are really missing.

Nathan Betts

Nathan is a speaker and writer on topics related to faith, life and God. He lives near Seattle, Washington. His writing is featured frequently in The Seattle Times. nathanbetts.com

A persons stands, holding a net curtain aside to gaze out.

Max Harlynking on Unsplash.

I never thought that God could miss me, but recently I’ve begun to wonder if he does.

Is there a person in your life that you just love spending time with? Maybe this person is a family member, a friend, colleague, neighbor, or maybe your spouse. As time has gone on in your life you now realize how special that person is to you. You think of the ease, the peace, the low heartbeat, lightheartedness, and depth of feeling that you’ve experienced all in simply being with that person and spending time with them.

As you think of that person, can you remember a time when there was a longer-than-usual gap between your visits? Maybe weeks, months, years. What was it like when you met up or talked to this special friend of yours after the hiatus? What did it feel like?

I have someone like this. His name is Andrew. He is my cousin, but I’ve generally thought of him as the brother I never had. We grew up together separated by only one year in age. My childhood is filled with memories of playing with him in different sports, games, wrestling, arguing, disagreeing, pranking each other, late-night fast-food runs, (which I no longer recommend), and eventually working long shifts on low sleep together. We were in each other’s wedding parties. We have experienced a lot of life together.

As time has gone on, and I now live on the other side of the continent, we have not been able to see each other as often as we would like.

But recently, he had a special work trip close to the Pacific Northwest, so he made time for a short stay with us near Seattle. On one day, I took him out for street tacos near the ocean and we were able to get some unhurried time to catch up. Throughout his visit I just kept thinking how much I had missed spending time with Andrew. He and I both expressed as much.

If you have just one of those friendships in life, you have hit the ball out of the park. And if you have two or three of those friendships, you’ve hit a grand slam. These friendships are unique.

For me, one of the most striking and poignant questions throughout the Bible is when God asks Adam “Where are you?”

As a theologian by education, I often think of these relational traits when it comes to God. Fundamental to Christian belief is that we can, despite how infinitely different he is to us, relate to God. There is a great deal of mystery to this idea, to be sure, but I’ve wondered long and hard what this looks like. In the long history of Christian thought, scholars, pastors, and theologians have pointed to Jesus Christ to help make sense of this massive, otherworldly concept.

The Hebrew Scriptures reveal what God is like in creation, miracles, acts of grace, displays of power and many other aspects. But when we are searching to understand how God relates to us as human beings, it is Jesus Christ who gives us the primary lens through which we can understand that quality of relationship. The interactions he has with his friends, leaders, children, and teachers are especially revealing. The way he heals people, enjoys meals with others, gives time to the outsiders, and speaks to the uptight religious types is all very instructive in how God relates to us as human beings.

Over the last few years, I have become increasingly interested in the questions that Jesus asks people. Jesus’s questions reveal to us what he is like.

“Why do you call me good?”

“Who do you say that I am?”

“Whose image is on this coin?”

“Will you also leave me?”

“What do you want me to do for you?”

These and many more have caused me to explore further the questions that God asks people because maybe his questions, sometimes more than his statements, reveal what makes him different.

For me, one of the most striking and poignant questions throughout the Bible is when God asks Adam “Where are you?” Since childhood I’ve wondered what God was doing in asking that question. God was not asking a geographical question; it’s not as though his internal GPS was confused in the garden of Eden. But if not a geography question, was God then playing an intellectual game with Adam and Eve? Perhaps, but that is increasingly doubtful, given the enormous stakes in that narrative (brokenness had just entered the world) as well as the message we read throughout the rest of the Bible: God takes people seriously.

Recently I wrote to my friend and leading Old Testament scholar Bruce Waltke to see what he thought about God’s question to Adam. Perhaps you’ll find an excerpt of his answer as enlightening as I have:

The omniscient God is not asking because he does not know. He is asking a real question -- this is not a charade -- to show his involvement with Adam--both an historical and archetype of humanity -- to provoke him to engage with him in dialogue. In short, God misses his fellowship.

God is asking Adam where he is because he misses him.

Waltke’s answer to my question makes God’s question to Adam into a sign of his love for Adam, and he goes further to explain that this dialogue is “an historical and archetype of humanity”. If nothing else, it means that this is the way in which God views his relationship with us. God enjoys being with us and interacting with us. And when the relationship grows cold, he misses us.

Could it be possible that when we move away from God, he notices? He misses us?

The British writer Julian Barnes begins his poignant memoir Nothing to Be Frightened Of with the words, “I do not believe in God, but I miss him.” Those words set the tone for a book in which Barnes writes about his complicated and fraught relationship with the transcendent. In his book, Barnes expresses his curiosity about what God is like. And amidst the deep and rich thoughts woven throughout the book, the reader never encounters the idea that while Barnes misses God, it might also be true that the God on the other side of the equation misses him.

To be honest, in all my thinking about God, it is just now that I am beginning to ponder the thought that when I move away from God on some level, he misses me. Could it really be possible that the God of creation misses me?

Could it be possible that when we move away from God, he notices? He misses us? God’s question to Adam, punctuated by Christ the Lord restoring the severed relationship through his death on the cross and resurrection, demonstrates God’s great capacity to love us.

As we approach Easter, wherever we might find ourselves on the spectrum of belief: whether we attend church, synagogue, temple, mosque or none; whether we have faith -- a little faith, beleaguered faith, or no faith -- the story of God asking that penetrating question to Adam and ultimately coming to us in Christ is the supreme portrait of what God is like. Easter reminds us that the nature of God’s love is such that when we walk away, God feels that loss, he misses us, and he comes looking for us.

Interview

Belief

Creed

18 September 2025

5 min read

Water from the well: a moment with Rowan Williams on Nicaea

A chance encounter with the former Archbishop led to a profound reflection

Hal St John

Hal is a theologian and writer based in London.

Students sit on the grass in front of a fountain.

Pontifical University garden.

Pontifical University.

The gardens of the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas near to the Vatican are a place of quiet reason, where the mind is trained to seek the fundamental truths of existence. But on a sweltering day approaching summer, the temperature was 31 degrees, and reason had given way to a more immediate need: a glass of water.

It was by the water-cooler, tucked behind a shade-giving tree, that I found him: Lord Rowan Williams of Oystermouth, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, a man whose theological depth is matched only by a palpable, gentle presence. Perhaps it was the heat, or a moment of recklessness, but I asked him for an interview. To my delight, he agreed.

The following day, we met. His recent keynote address, ‘Nicaea, the New Creation, and the Body of Christ,’ had laid the groundwork. What followed was not a simple Q&A, but a deep, meandering conversation—a drawing from the well of a tradition that is both ancient and startlingly immediate.

The grammar of divinity

How do you prepare to speak on a Council with 1,700 years of commentary? For Williams, the entry point is not the what, but the why.

“I started by asking - what was the question Nicaea was trying to answer?” he began. “This is the question Nicaea was trying to resolve: How do we say, at the same time, that Jesus really is the embodiment of the eternalism of God… and that he genuinely opens up for us a new relationship with the Father?”

This is what Williams calls the “deep grammar” of the Council—a phrase he embraces with enthusiasm. The Creed, he suggests, sketches a grammar for divinity itself. It asserts a belief in one God, “but the kind of oneness that God is, is a oneness that's always fertile or productive.”

This productive, self-giving life—kenosis—is not just who God is, but the kind of life we are called to participate in. “God is always reflecting itself in word and spirit… boiling over into creation - that's what God is!... a life that is both self-giving (kenotic) and productive… a life that brings others alive.”

The saints, in their radical openness to this “kenotic presence,” become conduits of this new creation. “Rather mysterious things happen,” Williams notes, “when you allow the act of God to go through you.”

The magnetic quiver

But how do we, in our everyday lives, tune into this deep grammar? Williams points not to the esoteric, but to the ordinary acts of faith that structure our existence.

“We’re called on, first of all, to wake up to the fact that in our ordinary lives we're in fact all the time making acts of faith - the faith that what I say to you and what you say to me can be more or less understood... the faith that human commitment and love are significant and worth investing in.”

This trust, this “connectedness,” is a slow “peeling open of human identity to its depths.” It is a universal experience, a “magnetic needle” in creation that “quivers northwards... quivers Godwards. We can't quite keep it quiet.”

He offers a wry, characteristically British illustration: “one of the great mysteries in British society is that British people are much nicer than the Daily Mail thinks they are!”

This inherent pull, this quiver, is what the doctrines of the Creed are meant to protect and describe. The dense, pub-unfriendly language of “consubstantial with the Father” is not an abstract puzzle but a map of a reality we are already, however faintly, experiencing. “The Holy Spirit draws us into the flow of life,” Williams says. “The Creed keeps us aware of it… it's the shape and form we’re growing into.”

The breath of the Spirit

This brings us to the ancient rift of the filioque clause—the Western addition to the Creed stating the Spirit proceeds from the Father “and the Son.” Is it a fatal block to unity or a matter of semantics?

For Williams, the scriptural reality is paramount. “Jesus says to his disciples I will send you the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father. Jesus is saying - you will be receiving a gift from me, which is given me by the Father, to give to you.”

The key, he suggests, is in the tangible action: in John’s Gospel, the resurrected Jesus breathes on his disciples. “Jesus brings the Spirit into action, into full tangible action in human history.” The Spirit proceeds through the Son into the world. At this point, theology reaches its limit. “I’m quite happy to grin feebly and shrug my shoulders...I dunno!” he laughs. “What matters is that the energy of new life and vision is given.”

And this energy, he insists, “goes with the grain of our humanity.” One can almost imagine a divine sigh: “For Heaven’s sake... just wake up to what you are.”

He finds the perfect image in the parable of the Prodigal Son, who, in the depths of his exile, “came to himself.” It is a “paradigm moment” of das Ereignis—a Heideggerian concept for an event of appropriating, of “coming into one’s own.” “There is a self to come to,” Williams affirms, “and a home to go to.”

A unity already given

Will the divided churches ever find structural unity? At times, he admits, we seem to be drifting further apart. But Williams’ focus is on a deeper, prior reality.

“It helps to be aware that there's a unity given already. We're not quite sure how to embody it. We're not quite sure how to organise it. But there's something there.”

Finally, reflecting on the Council itself, he dismisses any notion of Nicaea as a merely political project for a fractious empire, though Constantine’s desire for harmony was a factor. He paints a visceral picture of the attending bishops, as described by Eusebius: men with missing hands, gouged eyes, and the scars of persecution. When Constantine greeted them, “he kneels down and kisses their wounds.”

“They're not just purple cassocked prelates sitting in armchairs! Their faith has been through the fire!”

This is the well from which this Creed was drawn. It is a creed of the persecuted, a truth forged in fire. A truth, as Williams learned from Pakistani Christians this year who heard the story of Nicaea and simply said, “we know about that,” that is known in the bones before it is understood in the mind. It is the water that waits, cool and deep, for any who come thirsty.

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