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

Easter

16 April 2025

5 min read

The compassion of Easter's tears

There’s complexity and beauty behind crying.

Simon Cansdale

Simon is a vicar in Winchester, Hampshire.

A stone statue's face depicts a falling tear.

Ohlsdorf Cemetery, Hamburg.

Marek Studzinski on Unsplash.

The great English metaphysical playboy poet, John Donne, became Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1621. During Lent a year later he preached a majestic sermon entitled ‘To speake of Tears’. I first read it 30 years ago and it has prodded and challenged me ever since. This hyper-bright poet and reformed Lothario brought to the pulpit all his astonishing rhetorical skill, and a deep learning, combined with an overriding sense of God’s mercy and the wonder of new beginnings. His sermons were as thick as treacle and as rich as chocolate mousse, but built on a profound religious sympathy and a pastor’s ear for the yearnings of his listeners.

In his 1622 sermon, Donne highlights the different kinds of tears shed by Jesus in the last weeks of his life.

He speaks of Jesus’ ‘humane tears’ - tears he shed alongside Mary and Martha at the grave of his dear friend Lazarus - so surprising, Donne suggests, that the scholars charged with the chapter and verse divisions of the New Testament stopped in wonder at the two words ‘Jesus wept’ and made it a complete (and the shortest) verse in the Bible.

He speaks of Jesus’ ‘prophetic tears’ on Palm Sunday, as Jesus looks down over the city of Jerusalem, foreseeing the people’s rejection of God and the judgement that would come upon this city he loved. These tears are again surprising - Jesus had been borne into the city on the excited adulation of the crowds - so why does he weep?

Donne speaks of Jesus’ ‘pontifical’ or ‘sacrificial tears’ on the Cross - forsaken, despairing tears, encapsulated in Jesus’ agonisingly seizing a line of dereliction from the Psalms and hurling it at the dark sky - ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’

Donne was hardly the first theologian to wonder at these tears. But he is compelling in separating them out, wondering how different they are, and plotting the complexity of Jesus becoming a Man of Sorrows, for people who know so much sorrow. And he has the pastor’s touch as well as the preacher’s flourish to help us understand that we see ourselves most clearly through the tears of Jesus, or as C.S. Lewis would put it in the Problem of Pain, ‘the tears of God are the meaning of history.’

Tears, like snowflakes, are unique. Donne started to tease them apart 400 years ago, and we can see this even more clearly today, though it is always a challenge to do so because of the emotional intensity and maelstrom they spring from.

We now know there are physically three kinds of tears; basal tears, which lubricate the eye, irritant tears, which flush out bugs or specks of dirt and emotional tears, agreed by most to be unique to humans (though newborn babies don’t normally cry tears for the first month or more). Rose-Lynn Fisher poignantly deepened this understanding of different kinds of tears in her ground-breaking work on The Topography of Tears. As an artist, she captured some of her own tears and placed them on a microscope slide. She then took close-up pictures of the tears with a digital microscopy camera mounted on a 1960’s Zeiss standard light microscope;

‘The microscope provided the means to examine my tears and visually evoke the unseen realm of my emotions.’

She discovered that no two tears look the same, much as another hero of mine, Snowflake Bentley, had discovered, using a similar method in a frostier setting, the same is true for snowflakes. Tears of grief, even if shed at the same time, are all uniquely different; each one subtly changed by air temperature, and the proteins, minerals, hormones, antibodies and enzymes in an individual tear.

This knowledge brings a new weight to Jesus’ searching question to Mary on Easter morning - ‘Woman, why are you crying?’ These tears that I’m shedding, today, what kind of tears are these? Angry, grieving, frustrated, fearful? Fisher gives astonishing names to her close-ups of tears - ‘Compassion’, ‘Tears of Change’, ‘Overwhelm’, ‘Redemption.’ And it opens up the question of what tears am I not shedding? If there are so many different kinds of tears, are there some I am avoiding, or closing my heart to?

Richard Rohr has just published a long-awaited book on the Minor Prophets called The Tears of Things. I cannot possibly summarise it here, but Rohr includes an argument for the necessity of tears to soften our anger and outrage, the defining emotions of our age. He charts the prophet’s journey from outrage at the lawlessness of the world, through tears for the greed and cruelty of the world, to a settled but fiercer love and mercy. The prophetic tears of Jesus - tears of love, not for ourselves, but an expression of compassion for others - are the ultimate expression of this. This is a compelling vision - I would prefer the people who mould our world to be less shouty and angry, and more tearful and compassionate, people who live near enough to the pain of others to have cried with them and for them before making a plan.

The Psalms offer us a second discipline for our tears. As well as knowing them, that is understanding them, naming them, placing them, we can sow them:

‘Those who sow in tears

Will reap with songs of joy.’

This is an ancient invitation to give weight to our tears. To take them to God, to share them with others, and not just to see them as a way to get things of our chest.

Our human tears can deepen our sense of frailty and dependence on others and God.

Our prophetic tears can invigorate our fight for justice and peace, without destroying our spirit or making us worse than the people we criticise.

Our forsaken tears, the ones shed quietly, without hope, without even the hope that God sees them, can prepare the way for God’s new beginnings.

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