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.

Column

Creed

Monsters

23 June 2025

5 min read

The short road from normality to evil

The Liverpool’s parade ramming reveals society’s watermark

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

Aerial view of a yellow-jacketed police forming a cordon within a crowd.

Aftermath of the Liverpool parade incident.

ITN.

Sometimes football is interrupted by real life, and you remember how trivial it ultimately is.

On 26 May, the city of Liverpool was gearing up to do what it does best: celebrating. Specifically, celebrating the parade for Liverpool’s lifting of the Premier League trophy the day before. I’ve written before about the day it was confirmed that Liverpool would win the league. The joy, the relief, the tears; the community of it all. Cody Gakpo with his top off.

Here the whole city would be involved, and many more besides who had travelled just to be there. Not even torrential rain can dampen scouse joie de vivre. The city alive in red, joined in adulation of its team as the Premier League Champions’ bus paraded across the city. What a day.

And then, an interruption. Reports begin to emerge that someone had driven a car into people on the parade route. You fear the worst. And then it’s confirmed, and you fear even more.

Suddenly the parade feels trivial; football feels trivial. You’re just waiting for news that everyone is okay. 109 people are injured and it’s a miracle that no-one is killed, although you imagine many more will live with the trauma of the day for years to come.

The immediate and (quite literally) uninformed commentary and misinformation spread by many on the far right was as predictable as it was racist. The same people seemed genuinely disappointed when the perpetrator turned out to be, not an immigrant or an asylum seeker driven by ‘non-British’ values, but a 53-year-old white British man from the city. As ever, the far right demonstrating once again that the first reaction is very rarely the right reaction.

We still don’t know the full details of what happened and why, but the man’s neighbours described him as “normal” and expressed their surprise at him being caught up in something like this.

I was surprised by how surprised everyone was at this.

The Christian Bible is full – full – of ‘normal’ people committing abnormally evil acts. David, Israel’s most beloved and highly praised king, rapes a woman called Bathsheba resulting in her getting pregnant. He then tries to convince the woman’s husband to sleep with her so people will think the baby is his. He doesn’t, so David has him killed. Israel’s most beloved and highly praised king.

David may be one of the starkest examples from the Christian Bible, but he’s certainly not the only instance of a normal, or even seemingly ‘good’ person performing unspeakable acts of violence and evil. Time would fail me if I tried to recount them all here.

People are fundamentally good. I will die on this hill. People are fundamentally good. But the road from normality to evil is shorter than we often care to admit.

The Slovenian philosopher and professional eccentric Slavoj Žižek tells a joke in his helpful little book Violence. Workers are suspected of stealing from a factory and so have their wheelbarrows checked every day at their shift’s end. Only when it’s too late do the factory owners realise they’re stealing wheelbarrows.

We have so many frameworks and watermarks for identifying what constitutes ‘violence’ in society. And yet Žižek’s point is that these frameworks and watermarks are themselves upheld by violence. There’s violence inherent in the system.

This is one of the central points in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, too. In one memorable scene, the Joker is talking to Harvey Dent while strapped to a hospital bed. He says:

“Nobody panics when things go ‘according to plan’, even if the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I tell the press that a gangbanger will get shot or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, no one panics, because it’s all ‘part of the plan.’ But when I say that one little old Mayor will die? Well then everyone loses their minds!”

But the Joker’s point is that none of this is normal. Not really.

This is the true crime of the world we live in today, that it has convinced us of the normality of evil while undermining the normality of loving one another.

But they are all symptoms of the same sickness. The repulsion we feel towards the ‘normalcy’ of the driver at the Liverpool parade is the repulsion we ought to feel towards any act of violence, be it the violent persecution of immigrants and asylum seekers, the enforced annexation of sovereign territories, or the attempted genocide of unwanted people groups (to conjure up some obviously hypothetical situations …).

To be surprised at the violence seen in Liverpool on 26 May at the hands of a ‘normal’ man is to miss the fact that society’s very norms and standards are, themselves, deeply violent. Fashion business built on modern slavery and child labour; banking corporations paying their bosses obscene bonus wrung from the pockets of people barely able to make ends meet; at least 354,000 people homeless in England alone by the end of 2024.

All these things are acts of violence. All these things are normal. They are the norms and standards against which we look for violence in our world today. But they themselves are deeply violent evils. They are the violence inherent in the system. They are the workers’ wheelbarrows. They are the Joker’s truckload of soldiers.

We live in a society that functions precisely because of deeply unjust and violent systems and structures. The violence is necessary for the functioning of the system.

But while Liverpool’s Champions League parade demonstrates this, it also shows us the correct response to the normality of evil: love.

In the aftermath of the incident, people took to social media to offer beds for the night, lifts home, food, drink. Anything and everything that anyone might need. And do you know what the most remarkable thing about this was? It was all so … normal.

Of course this is what you do in situations like this. You love, and you care, and then you love, and then you care. What else is there to do? It’s the most normal things in the world. People are fundamentally good. I will die on this hill.

And this is the true crime of the world we live in today, that it has convinced us of the normality of evil while undermining the normality of loving one another. In such a world, to love one another, to care deeply and meaningfully for those around, is nothing short of an act of resistance to the violent established order.

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