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

Creed

Politics

9 September 2025

5 min read

In praise of nuance

Life is complicated. The early Christians had a much better way than a dramatic headline

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A typewriter holds a piece or paper reading 'truth'

Markus Winkler on Unsplash.

Seventeen hundred years ago this year, the early Christians inched their way towards a landmark statement. The Nicene Creed was the result of 300 years of wrestling with a question at the heart of this new movement: if the Jesus they worshipped was in some sense the ‘Son of God’, what did that mean? Was he a human prophet, better than most, but fundamentally just like the rest of us? Was he God in human disguise? Or a kind of half-breed, like a centaur - half human and half divine? Bishops and theologians spilt blood, sweat and tears (literally) over these questions. Simplistic answers were put forward and found wanting. Treatises were written, synods met, opponents were castigated and excommunicated. Even riots broke out as the debates waxed fiercely across the Roman world.

Eventually, in 325 AD, the Council of Nicaea issued a carefully worded and hard-won statement. It said that Jesus was ‘God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father.' Every word was carefully chosen and the fruit of long debate, deep prayer and thought. It didn’t solve all the problems, but it has stood the test of time, and is still recited in churches across the world today.

I have been pondering all this during the summer as our political debates have raged.

Take the issue of immigration. On one side, there are the ‘refugees welcome’ banners, the suspicion that fixing a flag of St George on a lamp post is a sign of incipient fascism, and that claiming we have a problem with immigration is inherently racist.

On the other side, it is ‘stop the boats’, calls for mass deportations, protests outside hostels for frightened immigrants, the implication that all immigrants are scroungers, destroying the soul of Britain (or the USA) and the need to rapidly close our borders.

But it’s complicated. There are significant differences between the claims of legal migrants, asylum seekers and illegal immigrants. Most would probably agree that offering welcome to people escaping warfare, persecution and famine in their homelands is right, proper, and in line with a long tradition of wealthy countries offering a refuge for others in need. People will always be on the move, and to close all borders is unrealistic and unjust. The moderate, fertile British climate, our historic economic and political stability, our well-regulated legal system, the Christian faith which shaped our culture, even the relative tidiness of our streets and countryside, are gifts we inherit from the past and should be generous with them.

Yet these are blessings that can’t be taken for granted. They need protecting, not just for our sakes but for those with a legitimate claim to make a home here.

So, most would also agree that illegal immigration is a scourge, with the ruthless villains enticing desperate migrants to climb on their flimsy boats across the channel deserving little else but criminal sentences. Yet even mass ‘legal’ migration will change the character of the nation. In 1990, net migration was around 20,000 a year. In 2024 it was 430,000. When 40% of primary age children have at least one foreign-born parent, and for one in five, English is not their first language, that can't fail to have an impact on the character of the nation, especially in areas where housing is cheaper and newcomers to the country find it easier to find accommodation.

But this complexity gets lost in the need for a punchy headline. Neither ‘send them home’ or ‘all migrants welcome’ capture the dilemma. It needs nuance. It needs careful, patient working towards the right balance between differing claims – compassion towards the stranger and the preservation of the very things that draw the refugees and the restless here.

The same is true of Israel and Gaza. For the pro-Israel lobby, just to draw attention to the suffering in Gaza is to be anti-Semitic. To urge restraint on Israel’s determination to destroy Hamas, even if it means destroying Gaza and much of its population in the meantime is to echo the death camps and to bring down Zionist wrath. Yet for Palestine Action and its supporters, Israel’s legitimate need to live in peace without a neighbouring state dedicated to its destruction seems to count for nothing. How can it be expected to live alongside a regime that brutally murdered 1,400 of its citizens in one day?

Even assisted dying – on which I and others on Seen & Unseen take the strong view that it is a bad idea – is not simple. The cries of those facing a long and painful death need hearing and people like me, who argue against assisted dying, need to promote solutions that will alleviate such suffering without crossing the red line of encouraging a culture of death.

The truth and the resolution of our dilemmas – on immigration, or Gaza, or even assisted dying, are seldom simple. They require nuance. They need forbearance.

It’s complicated. Most important things are. Anyone who has tried to lead a large organisation will know that it’s often a delicate matter of trying to chart a path forward while keeping competing interests and perspectives on board. You lose some people along the way, but you can’t afford to lose everyone, especially if both sides of the argument have some legitimacy.

The early church’s long struggle to define orthodoxy took time, patience, careful thought and restraint – even though at times it wasn’t very good at doing it. The result was a nuanced statement that steered between one pole – that Jesus was simply a very good human being – and the other – that he was God dressed up in human clothes. The truth eventually glimpsed and embraced was not at one extreme or the other, nor even a limp compromise, but the carefully crafted, unlikely and counter-intuitive idea that held together the best insights of both sides - that he was not ‘only human’ or ‘only divine’, or 50% of each, like semi-skimmed milk, but 100% human and 100% divine, and that this (for reasons too involved to go into here) was not a contradiction in terms.

The truth and the resolution of our dilemmas – on immigration, or Gaza, or even assisted dying, are seldom simple. They require nuance. They need forbearance. They need careful attention and listening to the people you instinctively disagree with to arrive at the truth. Yet our longing for a dramatic headline, our hunger for simple solutions, our algorithms that promote the most extreme opinions, all militate against this kind of patient, watchful political and social culture that would help us arrive at better solutions.

Life is complicated. People are complicated. Solutions to vexed questions are rarely simple. We need nuance.

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