Posted on: 21st April 2025

God sends Jesus to invite us all to seek life in the way of God’s far-reaching love. Some refuse the invitation, object to its intrusion, harass Jesus in his service and outreach, crucify him and seal his tomb. Others stand and watch, impotently grieving, as God’s project in Jesus peters out. The cross of Jesus symbolises massive negation of God’s grace and hope in the world.

How is God to respond to our human refusal which plays out in so much of our human living?

God could choose to ‘just take a pass’ - to retreat into heavenly immunity. Sometimes we worship God as though that is what He has done, but it can’t be so for God who creates, who comes in His Son Jesus. God in Jesus is not like the holy, self-concerned men who passed by the mugged man on the thief-infested road. God is seen in the Samaritan who put his life, his stuff, his skill, his future into saving the man.

God is faithful. God wants the sending of Jesus to go on until God’s purpose in creation is fully realised and His "will is done on earth as in heaven".

God cannot raise Jesus to glory in heaven, treating the hurtful incarnation of God in history as a trivial hiccup. The negation of God, in the rejection of Jesus, requires sufficient contradiction and correction. What sort of resurrection will achieve that? 

Once, God regretted having made humankind, so swept them away in the Flood (Gen. 6.5-7). God was angered by the people in the wilderness and swore none of them would enter His rest (Ps. 95.7-11). And vineyard workers climaxed their wickedness by killing the owner’s son when he came to collect the rent (Matt. 21.33-44), so the owner killed the workers and found other tenants. All these stories have the moral plausibility through their ‘eye for an eye’ reciprocity
(Exod 21.22-27). We feel they make practical sense in the short term.

But neither on resurrection day, nor ever after, could God respond to the crucifixion of His Son by working on this principle. When God’s mission in Jesus (Father and Son are one, the Father well-pleased with His Son) is cut short on earth, the only adequate response is to reaffirm, restart and broaden it after this reversal. God must glorify the Son as teacher and light of the world. God cannot exalt the Son as victor by disregarding what his Son said and did. Jesus said, when they strike you on one cheek, turn the other also. In resurrection, God does that. There is not any kind of victory that involves smiting down ‘horrible people’, but rather, the God of all grace renews the invitation Jesus lived with sinners and called us all to share in actively (II Cor 1.3; Eph 2.4,5; Ps 103.8).

Resurrection says, Live with Jesus, in the way of Jesus, today on earth – don’t stand looking up toward heaven… go on living with the spirit of God in Jesus (Acts 1.6-11).