Our God is the Father of Jesus.

We Christians worship God.

Which god is that? Well, we point out he’s the One God, יהוה/YHWH, “Jehovah” or “the LORD” (in all capitals, customarily), the God of Abraham, Isaac, Israel, Moses, David, and the Hebrew prophets. But both Jews and Muslims figure they worship that god too, so what makes us Christians any different from them?

Simple: Christians believe God’s a trinity—whereas they don’t. And we believe God’s uniquely the Father of Christ Jesus.

Uniquely the Father of Jesus. Because monotheists are generally agreed that God’s the Father of humanity. He created us, so he’s our Father. Duh. Says so in the bible. Moses, once when he was yelling at the Hebrews, said as much:

Deuteronomy 32.6 ESV

“Do you thus repay the LORD,

you foolish and senseless people?

Is not he your father, who created you,

who made you and established you?”

Throughout the Old Testament, God’s called the Hebrews’ father—and really everyone’s father, ’cause he made everyone. Jesus likewise calls him “your heavenly Father,” Mt 5.48 and compares our relationship with him like that of fathers with their kids. Lk 11.13 The whole point of his Prodigal Son Story Lk 15.11-32 is to describe our heavenly Father’s fatherly forgiveness.

Monotheists figure by the very same reasoning, of course God’s the Father of Jesus; he created Jesus same as he created you or me. But that’s where we Christians will say, “Wait; hold the phone; no he didn’t create Jesus. Jesus always existed. He’s God.”

Which’ll confuse them. Heck, it confuses Christians! If God’s the Father of Jesus, yet Jesus himself is God, we’ve got a paradox brewing, don’t we? Well, kinda. So we gotta explain how God’s a trinity: One God, three persons, one person’s the Father, another person’s the Son, and both of them are the one Being who is God.

When Jesus described his relationship to our heavenly Father, there’s something way different going on than we see between us and our Father. ’Cause Jesus describes himself as the Father’s only Son. You know how John 3.16 goes:

John 3.16 ESV

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”

Jesus is our Father’s only Son, his unique Son, his Son in a way that I’m not. ’Cause you know the Lord’s Prayer; he’s our Father. Mt 6.9 Yet Jesus is the one and only Son.

Another paradox? Not really.

Jesus appears to Mary the Magdalene, in 𝘑𝘰𝘩𝘯.

John 20.11-18.

When we last saw Mary the Magdalene—well, in my previous article anyway—she was weeping outside Jesus’s sepulcher because she didn’t know where his body was. Had no idea he was alive. Even though he’d told his students more than once he’d rise again, she probably assumed this was just a metaphor, or figured he’d rise on the last day; certainly not millennia before the last day. (Pretty sure nobody in bible times realized Jesus would wait millennia before his second coming!)

Anyway Peter and John had come to check it out; they found nothing but the linen strips his corpse had been wrapped in. It was reallyunlikely anybody would unwrap the corpse, so that had to make ’em wonder. John said he believed, Jn 20.8 which probably means he believed Jesus is alive; but in the other gospels none of the Eleven appears to have believed it until Jesus himself showed up. In any event they left, and left Mary behind to weep in confusion.

Then she bothered to look into the sepulcher, as Peter and John had… and saw angels.

John 20.11-13 KWL

11…and Mary stood outside the sepulcher, weeping.

So as she’s weeping, she bends down

to look into the sepulcher.

12Mary sees two angels in white,

sitting where Jesus’s corpse had been laid;

one at the head and one at the feet.

13These angels tell her, “Woman, why do you weep?”

She tells them, “Because they took my Master,

and I don’t know where they put him.”

I’ve been in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which has the slab they placed Jesus’s corpse on… hidden beneath another slab. Too many pilgrims kept kissing it, and knowing the way the pilgrims in my tour group behaved, likely they kept trying to chisel souvenirs off it. The erosion would’ve whittled it away entirely, so the churches in charge of the sepulcher decided to cover it with marble. Meh; the slab’s hidden in there somewhere. Anyway it’s a nice long slab. Plenty of room for two human-sized angels to sit at either end, and not look like they were sitting right next to one another.

In the other gospels, the angels tell the women, “He is risen; he is not here,” Mk 16.6 but in John, Mary doesn’t give them a chance to reply. She turns round because she notices someone else is there.

Jewish Christians don’t need to become gentile. And vice versa.

1 Corinthians 7.18-20.

Just after Paul and Sosthenes instruct the Corinthians to not separate from their pagan spouses—unless, obviously, they demand it—they add a few more things which new Christians shouldn’t change about ourselves now that we’re Christian. Namely if they’re circumcised, and if they’re slaves. I’ll discuss the slaves another time. Circumcision first—and if you have any hangups about penises, you probably won’t wanna read any further.

1 Corinthians 7.18-20 KWL

18Were you circumcised when God called?

Don’t get a “pullover.”

Were you one of the “foreskins” when God called?

Don’t get circumcised.

19The circumcision doesn’t matter.

The foreskin doesn’t matter.

But keeping God’s commands does matter.

20In whatever calling you’re called,

remain in this.

I should remind you: Jews had an unfortunate habit of calling gentiles “foreskins,” as we see in verse 18. It was originally meant to be a slur; it still kinda is. But, same as when nonwhites call me a cracker, I’m quite sure the “foreskins” usually laughed it off. When you’re not an oppressed minority, slurs simply aren’t the same implied threat as they are when you are a minority.

Okay. I translated the word ἐπισπάσθω/epispástho in verse 18 as “pullover,” because that’s what ἐπισπάω/epispáo literally means: ἐπι/epi, “over,” and σπάω/spáo, “pull, draw, drag.” If “pullover” makes you think of what Americans call a “sweater,” that’s exactly the idea I was going for.

Nowadays if you go to the gym, people are only gonna see you nude in the locker room. But for ancient Greeks, you were nude the whole time. They exercised nude. Couldn’t get away from the nudity. Guaranteed men were gonna see your penis. And if you were circumcised, in a room full of uncircumcised Greeks, your penis was gonna look weird and wrong to everyone else. It’s not like the United States, where more than two-thirds of us are circumcised, and foreskins stand out: You were gonna stand out.

So someone came up with a procedure to “restore” one’s foreskin: Basically you pull the remaining skin of your penis over the glans as best you can, and get it to stay there. It’ll look enough like a foreskin. And yep, they called it an ἐπίσπασις/epíspasis, a “pullover.” (Although some Greek dictionaries will define epíspasis as “pulling in,” like when you suck into a straw… which is also kind of an apt description of what was going on here.)

Obviously some Pharisees, who already had a problem with Jews going to the gym and hanging out with buck naked gentiles, thought this was awful. Ritual circumcision signifies a formal relationship with God… and you’re hiding your circumcision? Hiding your relationship with God? You may as well be pagan!

I’m actually with the Pharisees on this one. As are, you notice, the apostles: Don’t get a “pullover.” Don’t try to undo the parts of your past which might embarrass you, but don’t actually matter in the long run. Just follow Jesus.

God doesn’t want angry worshipers.

Matthew 5.23-24.

No doubt you’re familiar with angry Christians. There sure are a lot of them. Too many of them. So many of them, certain pagans are pretty sure we’re all that way; it’s the only kind of Christian they’ve ever met. They grew up around angry Christians, and as far as they can tell, it’s our default setting.

Since anger is a pretty obvious work of the flesh—whether you call it wrath, ill temper, fury, rage, or “a brutal temper” as The Message puts it Ga 5.20 —why is this? In my experience angry Christians go out of their way to justify their anger as best they can. It’s “righteous anger,” directed against sin or injustice. Of course, in practice it’s never just directed towards those abstract concepts; it’s directed towards the people who commit ’em. And since everybody sins, and most people are unjust, it’s directed towards a lot of people. Particularly political opponents.

And in practice, it’s never all that righteous. Jesus forgives sinners, and orders us to forgive sinners, and love our enemies. Do angry Christians do this? Nope! At best, they’ll shun their enemies, and be apathetic towards them, but too often they do this passive-aggressive, “I’m fighting you because your defeat is ultimately what’s best for you, and ultimately that’s love,” only it’s not.

Not only does Jesus not want his followers to live in anger, he orders us to be rid of it, and make peace with our enemies, before we worship. Yep, that’s in the Sermon on the Mount too.

Matthew 5.23-24 KWL

23“So when you offer your gift on the altar,

if you remember, right there,

your sibling has something against you,

24leave your gift there before the altar

and first go be reconciled with your sibling.

Then come back and offer your gift.”

Christians tend to skim over this teaching because we don’t do the same sort of ritual offerings as the ancient Hebrews. Usually we do good deeds, or contribute to our churches, and figure we’re doing ’em for Jesus, and that’s our offering. This “gift on the altar” thingy—lots of us don’t even know what that is.

What it is, is an act of love. The Law commanded the Hebrews to perform certain ritual sacrifices throughout the year, which represented their continual formal relationship with the LORD, and his forgiveness of their sins. But gift offerings weren’t required at all. You didn’t have to do them. They were spelled out in the bible because people wanted to do them—they loved the LORD and wanted to do more for him. So the LORD spelled out to Moses what acts he considered appropriate and appreciated, and these are the gift offerings. They’re not done for show; God’ll ignore those. They’re not done so God will owe us a favor; he’s not a petty pagan god who does that sort of thing. They’re purely done out of people’s love of God.

Now, that’s something Christians can relate to: There are plenty of things we do for God that are done purely out of love for him. We’ll sing to him more. We’ll do more good works for him. We’ll put extra money in the offering plate. We’ll create art for him—good art, not those kitschy paintings of Jesus hugging people. We’ll write music for him—good music, not pop songs that are actually meant to give us a music career. We’ll ask him what more we can do, and the Holy Spirit will give us some ideas.

But before we do anything extra for God—before we go above and beyond our usual Christian obligations—Jesus instructs us to go be reconciled with your sibling. And lest you think Jesus only means our Christian sisters and brothers, remember the Sermon on the Mount was originally preached to an audience of Jews, not Christians, and their “siblings” were their fellow Jews—religious or not. Go restore your relationship with your neighbor—and then come back and give your love-gift.

Otherwise God doesn’t want our love-gifts. Because if we refuse to love others like Jesus tells us to, we clearly don’t love him enough to obey him.

Mary the Magdalene discovers Jesus’s empty sepulcher.

John 20.1-11.

The gospels manage to give slightly different accounts of Jesus’s resurrection. Even the synoptic gospels, which are usually in sync, aren’t. Thus creating “bible difficulties” which many Christians kinda drive themselves bonkers trying to unjumble. I don’t, because as any cops can tell you: Sometimes eyewitnesses, who were there and totally saw everything, won’t all say the exact same thing. If they do, it means they got together to get their story straight—which now means their testimonies are compromised. Whereas what we have in the gospels are uncompromised testimonies. So don’t worry about ’em!

Anyway one of the facts they do get straight is Mary the Magdalene was there. In Mark and John, she was the only one there—and the first to see Jesus. In Matthew she’s with “the other Mary,” Mt 28.1 who’s probably Jesus’s aunt Mary, or “Mary of James,” Lk 24.10 meaning James’s mom; the wife of Zebedee. In Luke she’s with Joanna as well. Lk 24.10 But in Mark and John she appears to be alone. The long ending of Mark has her see Jesus right away; John has her see nothing yet.

John 20.1-2 KWL

1On the first day of the week,

in the dark part of the morning,

Mary the Magdalene comes to the sepulcher,

and sees the stone was taken away from the sepulcher.

2So Mary runs away.

She comes to Simon Peter,

and to the other student whom Jesus loves,

and tell them, “They took the Master out of the sepulcher!

We couldn’t figure out where they put him!”

The “we” in verse 2 reveals other people were with Mary at that time, and no doubt these women speculated where Jesus’s corpse might be. I translated οὐκ οἴδαμεν/uk ídamen, “we haven’t known” as “we couldn’t figure out,” because it’s better English.

Yeah, Matthew and Luke depict the women going to wherever the Eleven were staying, and telling them what the angel(s) had told them. John—written by John, who’s this “student whom Jesus loves” in verse 2—recalls it differently. He and Peter were together in some other place. Neither bothers to go inform the other nine what’s going on; they run to the sepulcher themselves… as if they can figure out what happened where the women couldn’t. Men, I tell ya.

Easter.

On 5 April 33, before the sun rose at 5:23 a.m. in Jerusalem, Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead. Executed less than 48 hours before, he became the first human on earth to be resurrected.

Jesus died the day before Passover. This was deliberate. This way his death fulfilled many of the Passover rituals. Because of this relationship to Passover, many Christians actually call this day some variation of the Hebrew פֶּסַח/Pesákh, “Passover.” In Greek and Latin (and Russian), it’s Pascha; in Danish Påske, Dutch Pasen, French Pâques, Italian Pasqua, Spanish Pascua, Swedish Påsk.

But in many Germanic-speaking countries, including English, we use the ancient pagan word for April, Eostur. In German this becomes Ostern; in English Easter. Because of the pagan origins of this word, certain Christians avoid it and just call the day “Resurrection Sunday.” Which is fine, but confuses non-Christians who don’t realize why we’re acting like a bunch of snowflakes.

Easter is our most important holiday. Christmas tends to get the world’s focus (and certainly that of merchants), but it’s only because Christmas doesn’t stretch their beliefs too far. Everybody agrees Jesus was born; we only differ on details. But Easter is about how Jesus rose from the dead, and that’s a sticking point for a whole lot of pagans. They don’t buy it.

They don’t even like it: When they die, they wanna go to heaven and stay there. Resurrection? Coming back? In a body? No no no. And we’ll even find Christians who agree with them: They’ll claim Jesus didn’t literally return from death, but exists in some super-spiritual ghostly form which returned to heaven. And that’s where we’ll go too: Heaven. No resurrection; not necessary. Yes it’s a heretic idea, but a popular one.

So to pagans, Easter’s a myth. It’s a nice story about how we Christians think Jesus came back from the dead, but they insist it comes from ancient times, back when people believed anyone could come back from the dead if they knew the right magic spell. Really it’s just a metaphor for spring, new life, rebirth; just like eggs and baby chicks and bunnies. They’ll celebrate that. With chocolate, fancy hats, brunch, and maybe an egg hunt.

But to us Christians, Easter happened. It validates Jesus; without his resurrection we’d have no clue whether he was just one of many great moral teachers, or someone to seriously bet our lives upon. It proves he’s everything he said he is. Proved it for the first Christians, who risked (and suffered) fearful deaths for him. Proves it for today’s Christians, some of whom do likewise.

Jesus dies. And takes our sin with him.

Mark 15.33-39, Matthew 27.45-54, Luke 23.44-48, John 19.28-37.

Around noon on 3 April 33, it got dark, and stayed that way till Jesus died. Obviously God was behind it, but we don’t know how. No solar eclipses in that part of the world, that time of year, so that’s out. Volcanoes have been known to darken the sky. So has weather. Regardless of how he pulled it off, God decided he wanted his Son’s death to happen in the dark.

As Jesus was hanging on the cross, various folks were taunting him, and Matthew describes the head priests, scribes, and elders even taunting him with a bit of Psalm 22:

Matthew 27.43 KWL

“He follows God?

God has to rescue him now, if he wants him

—for he said ‘I’m God’s son.’ ”

Psalm 22.8 LXX (KWL)

He hopes for the Lord, who has to release him,

who has to save him because he wants him.

Considering this psalm was so obviously getting fulfilled by Jesus’s death, taunting him with it just showed how far the Judean leaders’ unbelief went. They really didn’t think the psalm applied to Jesus any. It absolutely did.

This is why, round the ninth hour after sunrise (roughly 2:30 PM) Jesus shouted out the first line of that psalm: Elí Elí, lamá azavettáni?/“My God my God, for what reason do you abandon me?” Ps 22.1 I know; it sounds different after the gospels’ authors converted it to Greek characters.

Problem is, by this point the scribes seem to have left, ’cause nobody understood a word he said. Jesus was quoting the original Hebrew, but only scribes knew Hebrew; the Judeans spoke Aramaic, and the Romans spoke Greek. Since Elo’í sounds a little like Eliyáhu, “Elijah,” that’s the conclusion they leapt to: He must be calling for Elijah. So they added that to their mocking. “Wait; let’s see whether Elijah rescues him.”

In our day many Christians have leapt to a different conclusion—a heretic one. They might know Jesus was quoting scripture, but think he quoted it ’cause the Father literally, just then, did abandon him. Seriously.

Here’s the theory. When the lights went out, this was the point when Jesus became the world’s scapegoat: The sins of the entire world were placed upon his head, Lv 16.20-22 so that when he died, our sin died with him. Which is totally possible, ’cause that’s how the scapegoat ritual was meant to work in Leviticus. Thing is, the scriptures never spell out just how Jesus substitutionarily atoned for our sins, nor when the transfer was made. The world going dark just feels like a good, dramatic time for such an event to happen.

Here’s where the theory goes wonky: After this sin-transfer was made to a scapegoat, someone was supposed to turn this goat loose in the wilderness to die. In Jesus’s case, he could hardly wander off; his wrists and ankles were nailed to a cross. He could hardly wander off… so these Christians figure the Father must’ve removed himself. Others insist the Father removed himself because he finds sin so very offensive. He couldn’t bear to watch, so he dimmed the lights (as if God can’t see in the dark) and turned his face away from his beloved, but defiled, Son.

Here’s why it’s all heresy: God is One, and the trinity is indivisible. You can’t separate the Son from the Father. They’re not two seperate beings; they’re One. The rest of us humans are separate beings from the Father, yet Paul stated nothing can separate us from his love. Ro 8.38-39 So if that’s the case, how in creation could anything, even sin, separate God the Son from God the Father? Nope; not gonna work.

The idea of the Father turning his face away is popular—especially since it’s wormed its way into Christian worship music—but there’s no biblical basis for it. Just a lot of Christians who hate sin, who kinda like the idea God hating it so much he’d leave… so don’t you sin, or God’ll quit on you. It’s a great way to scare the dickens out of sinners. But if it were that easy to drive God away, you’d think the devil’s work would’ve driven God entirely off the planet. Ironically I find a lot of Calvinists, folks fond of insisting nothing’s mightier than God, likewise teaching the idea that the Father turned his face away from his innocent Son—instead of meeting the defeated enemy of sin head-on.

I could rant on, but let’s step away from the really bad theology, and quote what the gospels did say happened when the lights went out.