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.

Article

Culture

Death & life

Digital

Easter

17 April 2025

4 min read

Do you have a right to be remembered?

Our desire to be in control might not survive our demise.

Jack Nicholson

Jack is a graduate of Peterhouse, University of Cambridge and Blackfriars, University of Oxford. He writes, and also works in local government.

A composite show a smiling woman next to a small illustrate of someone walking off into the distance.

Kristyna Squared.one on Unsplash .

“Madam, those that are about to die salute you.”

Words attributed to Roman captives and criminals fated to die before the emperor, were used (ironically) by Councillor Kieron Mallon at the last Council meeting of this term of Oxfordshire County Council last week. ‘Madam’ was the Council’s Chair, wishing everyone well. Elections are on the way.

Easter is also on the way, and in the period leading up to the commemoration of the resurrection of Christ from the dead, nearly 2,000 years ago, Christians are invited to think about their own mortality. ‘Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return’ were words my priest intoned to me as he marked a cross with ashes on my forehead on 5 March, Ash Wednesday.

Ash already emblemizes a belief in rebirth, even before the power of the story of the Christ’s resurrection is considered. I for one felt immensely hopeful on Ash Wednesday this year. Having just secured a new place to call home, and one year into my job as Democratic Services Officer to Oxfordshire County Council, looking after the likes of Councillor Mallon, life felt pretty swell.

My priest and I spoke about the ways in which death and hope are joined at the hip. The ancient Greeks believed that a phoenix obtains new life by rising from the ashes of the one before it. So do we. I have found myself, so far this year, visiting people and places I strongly associate with former lives, from friends I lived with as an undergraduate to a town I went on holiday as a child to the beach where my late Granny’s ashes were scattered. ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’

More specifically, the Christian believes that ‘whoever loses their life for [Christ’s] sake will find it’, in the sense that true self-discovery arises when we let go of the ego, when we allow ourselves to be changed. Thinking about mortality, therefore, changes life, in so far as we are better equipped to surrender and salute the Saviour. That worldview has shaped public servants in years gone-by.

An overwhelming majority of people in the course of human history have been forgotten.

I recently heard Dr Ian McGilchrist, the psychiatrist, describe the desire to control everything in life as the ‘besetting sin’ of the age in which we live. The desire to be remembered, rather than reborn, captures it better in my mind. Mankind has always wanted to remain in control. Souls will always be reluctant to surrender. However, what we have now is a world in which people feel uniquely entitled to make impact.

People feel that they have a right to be remembered, but it is not so. An overwhelming majority of people in the course of human history have been forgotten. Moreover, the past can be especially compelling when we have a window into a world in which people did not necessarily expect to make any kind of worldly impact whatsoever. Theirs was a happier place.

The twentieth century was described by Philip Rieff in 1966 in terms of the ‘Triumph of the Therapeutic’. He wrote, ‘Religious man was born to be saved’, but ‘psychological man is born to be pleased.’ ‘Psychological man may be going nowhere, but he aims to achieve a certain speed and certainty in going’. Therapy enables that objective. But therapy to what end?

Counselling can be construed as a device to regain control. The counselled, if fixed, can go about trying to change the world, trying to make an impact, resuming the rather pleasing but never-ending mission to be remembered. For anyone of a religious sensibility, however, that is not the objective. Rather, new life is given only for the whole resurrection story in our own lives to be repeated.

Around the time that Rieff wrote his book, the historian Herbert Butterfield, a Christian, wrote this. ‘Those who lived when the world was static – when the silhouette of the ploughman against the horizon hardly changed in the passage of a thousand years – may have something to teach us, who only know a breathless, rapidly changing world and who seem to be having to pluck what we can from life while running at full speed.’

Social media has surely exacerbated this condition because it connects us to others at the cost of contemplation about what life – and death – really entails. It is a place where we try to evidence to others the impact we are having, where we write our own eulogies and our own epitaphs and have access to the whole world whom we expect to read the same.

Life changes to a much greater extent these days, in this place, than it did for the ploughman in the passage of a thousand years, or captives and criminals in the Roman world, including Jesus Christ who was identified as one such. However, if we can somehow create conditions to focus less on having impact in and on a volatile world, and being someone who ought to be remembered, we will find that we have more hope.

In turn, we will change the world for the better, but despite ourselves, and for me that is what this period leading up to Easter is all about. We may find that others who are about to die salute us too, for the good deeds we have done that may well be forgot.

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