The Same Father

Jesus said to her, "Stop clinging to Me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to My brethren and say to them, 'I ascend to My Father and your Father, and My God and your God.'" Mary Magdalene came, announcing to the disciples, "I have seen the Lord," and that He had said these things to her. (John 20:17-18)

As I ponder how Jesus might have felt when He spoke these words to Mary, I can't help but wonder if He didn't have a playful smile, almost like a child planning a surprise to spring on someone he loves. Clearly He did not immediately reveal Himself to Mary to relieve her sadness right away when she arrived. It is almost as if He planned an elaborate setup with the nearby angels to draw her into the place where He could spring the surprise on her to create the greatest reaction.

What was His tone of voice? His facial expressions? His body language? I am pretty sure it was not the austere, somber tones that religion so often imposes onto our perceptions of this event. Jesus had long taught His disciples that we must become like a little child if we are to enter the kingdom He had come to bring. That means that He too might have taken on the flavor of how a child might act when conspiring to spring a surprise on one of his siblings. I can see Jesus grinning with anticipation, maybe even suppressing some giggles as He can hardly contain His eagerness to see the shock of surprise one of his most loved friends is about to experience.

Remember, the last time she handled His feet she had been in a room full of skeptics who had been critical of both her and Jesus. When that had occurred, she had felt humiliated by nearly everyone except Jesus. But Jesus had stood up for her, had publicly defended her; He had openly affirmed her passionate expressions of affection for Him and had rescued her from her fears and the shame that had been intended to wound her even more deeply.

Up to this point she had still been afraid to really take hold His feet with the kind of passion she really longed to express. It was true that she had been compelled by her love to pour out her most expensive gift on His head and feet, but as the foul spirit of criticism exploded in the room she had again felt ashamed and began rushing to clumsily mop up the mess that was fueling all the dirty, hateful looks from those around her. Instead of enjoying a moment of intimate affection with Jesus as her heart had so longed to do, she had been forced to settle for a quick 'kiss' so to speak. She had been compelled to draw back from what her heart really longed for to try to find an exit from the deteriorating situation that had been created by the cold reception she had encountered from the other men in the room.

Last time she had looked at Jesus' feet they were fresh from the wounds of being nailed to the cross, bloody, distorted, and lifeless. She had watched in agony as the only man who had ever really loved her died a mysteriously agonizing death caused by something internal to Him that had sucked the very life out of His soul in just a few short hours, much quicker than crucifixion would normally have done. Maybe she had sensed, like few others could, that it was partly the heavy weight of her own sins that He had removed from her heart, that was now siphoning away the very life that had done so much to deliver her from condemnation and death. Nothing could effectively describe the feelings she must have experienced as she watched Him suffer alone on the cross and finally say that it was all finished.

I wonder if she had then wrestled all weekend trying to piece it all together to figure out just what it was that had been finished. Intense feelings of hopelessness likely overwhelmed her time and again as she emptied her heart in buckets of tears with no one able to console her effectively. Her Savior and best friend had died – now what? She was such an emotional person that looking for intellectual solace in the Scriptures was probably not much of an option for her. And even if it had been the confusion and incompleteness of everyone's understanding of what Jesus was all about had prevented anyone from having much idea of what was transpiring in these strange events.

Mary was the kind of person who followed her heart almost transparently. Because of this she had been exploited over and over as different people had seduced her into trusting them only to exploit her trust and abuse her natural beauty for their own pleasure. Then they would turn and publicly shame and condemn her for what they had done to her.

But in sharp contrast to all of that, the only real Friend who had ever given her hope, who had treated her with utmost pity, tenderness, respect and had fearlessly stood up to all the others in her defense was now suddenly absent from her life. Did she feel abandoned? Betrayed? Forsaken? Her emotions and brain could no longer sort things out; nothing fit together to make sense any more. All she knew was that nothing could ever take the place of this Man who had loved her so intensely, who had delivered her time and again, who had brought hope into her life and had shown her true love for the first time.

Now He had been falsely accused, condemned, viciously treated and was now dead. Her heart must have felt hopeless, afraid, alone, deserted, devastated. Yet she still could not stop following her heart and so she found herself again looking for her Jesus, her defender, her only real friend. Even though He was dead, somehow there seemed to be nothing else to do but to go back to be close to what was left of the only person who had brought life and hope into her soul.

Yet now, after a string of very confusing discoveries one right after the other that made no sense to her, she found herself confronted by a stranger that she assumed might be the culprit who had removed the body of her only true friend. Maybe putting Jesus into a nearby tomb that was not His own in their hurry to finish before Sabbath had violated yet another rule that someone was going to enforce. Maybe they had taken Him to the dump where the trash smoldered day and night where they put all the other victims of crucifixion because they thought He did not deserve a proper burial. In response to His question about who she was searching for, she asked to please have access to His body so she could do whatever she could to show how much she loved Him still.

Of course this was all a setup. This encounter had been carefully planned and coordinated with the angels in the nearby tomb. Jesus knew Mary's heart far better than even she herself and arranged this whole sequence of events to strategically poise her for the most intense reunion possible. Jesus knew the intense pain that was driving Mary to search for His body, but I think He wanted to create the optimum moment to enhance the intensity of their joy when she finally caught sight of reality. He also did not forget all the other hurting disciples who also needed comfort and chose her as His witness to give them opportunity to engage in the kind of faith that millions would need to experience in future generations who would not have the same opportunity to see Him physically like they did.

I ponder how each person in this story related to their need to move into real belief as Jesus wanted them to have. Ideally the optimal kind of belief would have been to embrace the truth as had already been recorded by the prophets in Scripture, not needing to see or touch Him in person in order to believe. But no one was prepared to believe in Him on that basis at this point, so Jesus had to go to whatever lengths necessary for each person in order to induce living faith in their hearts. They then could in turn become witnesses to encourage others to believe. In these stories we find that each person had different levels of evidence required to bring them into saving belief.

Belief as John constantly seeks to show us in his writings, is not just a head knowledge, an assent that some fact is true. It is a very dangerous assumption that far too many people hold and teach today, that when the Bible speaks of belief or faith, that all we need to do is to agree to some fact or doctrine or creed. This is a counterfeit of true, saving faith as presented in the Bible. Real faith/belief always involves a relationship of trust that in turn not only results in actions in harmony with it, but involves an inner healing of the soul. What the disciples needed more than anything at that time was a belief that could counteract the intense pain and fears they were feeling inside. While it is true that they needed to believe certain facts about Jesus in order to be 'saved', what they needed most was to be restored to proper perceptions of what was real, who Jesus really was and most of all how God felt about them. This is the kind of healing, unifying, restorative kind of faith that saves us both now and for eternity.

In Mary's situation, it appears that even though her heart was more intensely emotionally attached to Jesus than possibly anyone else, her need for evidence seemed to be very high. The hints Jesus had provided along her way to encourage belief were passed by, for her emotions had so blinded her ability to think and reason that she could not fit it all together. Any person who had followed Jesus for very long could have recalled the repeated times He had spoken about His impending death on a cross, and she seemed to have picked up on that previously. But He had also mentioned more than once that He was going to rise again on the third day. But that part seems to have become lost for all of them.

Interestingly, one of the main reasons that had compelled Mary to anoint Jesus with her perfume was because she was about the only person who had actually been paying attention when Jesus spoke about these things. All the other disciples had been very resistant to any such scenario because it clashed with everything they had ever believed about the Jewish Messiah. They had thus ignored these references and settled themselves in unbelief. But Mary had been very alarmed by Jesus' references about a soon-coming death and had decided to take Him seriously. That is why she had come to anoint Him at the feast of Simon, and Jesus had affirmed that in His response to her outpouring of affection at that time.

Now the foretold events had actually taken place. The death He had spoken of that had compelled Mary to anoint Him had just happened. All of Mary's worst fears seem to have been realized – Jesus was gone out of her life. But she could have not only recalled His words about His impending death but could also have remembered that He had also spoken openly of His subsequent resurrection from that death. Mary could have stopped to consider carefully His past words and thus could have been strategically poised to welcome His resurrection if she had chosen that option. But even though she had accepted His warnings about His death, she had overlooked those related admonitions to be conscious of the outcome of these events and His promise to return to life.

In the amnesia produced by her emotions dominating her awareness, Mary found herself looking for a dead body that no longer existed. Jesus was now living in a new glorified body, one like all will receive when the final glorious mass resurrection occurs for all who choose to trust in the power of God's love. It was love that brought Jesus to life and gave Him a glorious body, and that same love will give all of us a similar body if we will accept and believe in the truth about God that Jesus came to show us.

All of this chapter near the end of John's gospel seems intent on drawing us into this kind of saving faith. There are multiple references about our need to believe, just as each person in this incredible story also needed to believe. And while there were other stupendous issues involved in this event, the need for each person to come into belief is central to the whole story as John presents it. The question I have had for many years has been, 'believe what?' It is not enough to just keep insisting that we must believe. Belief is not an end in itself like it has all too often been presented by religion. There always has to be an object for belief to anchor itself on. Otherwise it turns into something more like a magic spell in which we illogically engage in mental gymnastics thinking that by doing so we can trigger some supernatural effect that supercedes the natural principles of God's universe.

Much of what is promoted about saving faith or belief today is more reflective of concepts of magic than based on truth and reality. Yet this whole system of 'magical' faith is actually a decoy in Satan's system, for it really displaces true faith and even insulates those trusting in it from perceiving their true need for the kind of transforming faith that can prepare them to live in God's presence. This notion is Satan's response to the glorious truth about God's love that Jesus revealed in His death and resurrection. In the intervening centuries Satan has masked over and diluted the potent power of the gospel by replacing it with a counterfeit gospel that now infects nearly every presentation about the cross and the resurrection. What is referred to today as faith is a very different thing from what Mary and John and Peter and all the others experienced as they came to believe in what Jesus had come to show them.

While it was very important that Mary needed to come to believe that Jesus was alive and not still dead, that was not the only thing her faith needed to grasp. Yes, she needed to begin with that, but as that seed of faith would begin to mature inside her heart, she needed to see how all the other pieces fit together as she began to grasp the much larger picture of why Jesus had come to live and die and raise Himself up again. Without this bigger context coming into view, these events become just disconnected pieces used to promote confusing views of God like what we see all around us today.

The core issue of salvation does not involve some supposed appeasement of an offended deity by the shedding of the blood of an innocent victim. That is the counterfeit scenario promoted by religion today and directly descended from ancient Baal worship. Rather, what we must begin to grasp in these stories is the central issue of our need for a restored relationship that has been ruptured by myriads of lies promoted by God's enemy to keep us afraid of Him, distrustful of His intentions towards us. This fear of God actually puts us in grave danger of being consumed by the very love meant to bring us life.

The great tragedy in the distortions of the real gospel by counterfeit gospels so many now have embraced is that they continue to promote the very attitudes of distrust about the heart of God that brought about the death of Jesus in the first place. Jesus was crucified by men defending what they believed was God's truth. Yet it was for the purpose of reconciliation that God sent Jesus to this earth, to make it plain to everyone that our problem with sin has nothing to do with how God feels about us but rather has everything to do with how we feel about God rooted in what we believe about Him.

Each person involved in this story of the resurrection had many false ideas and beliefs embedded in their heart and mind about how God felt about them. In each instance, God worked to convince each one, but designed to address their uniqueness in order to attract them to begin seeing God radically different than they had previously thought about Him before. The whole purpose of Jesus coming to this earth was to change all of our thinking about how God feels towards us as sinners. It was not to take some beating that God intended to inflict on us that Jesus came to die; rather it was to explicitly demonstrate under most severe conditions and treatment that it is sin that behind violence, not God.

Mary had lived all her life under similar delusions that permeated most of the religious culture of her day. God had been presented as being harsh, severe, exacting and waiting to harshly punish all infractions of His demands. In addition, she had experienced in her own life repeated exploitation, betrayal, shame and condemnation from the very people who claimed to represent God as His authority on earth. Mary's heart had been severely wounded by many lies about God that had been used to justify violence committed against her, so she needed the revelations of God by Jesus at least as much as anyone else. Wandering about in a graveyard in the darkness of the early morning that day, she was still looking for love just as the whole world has been looking for it since Adam and Eve.

It was in this context that Jesus was planning the surprise of a lifetime for her. She had passed up sign after sign like billboards marking out hints of life, failing each time to comprehend the truth that each one pointed to. But at each point along her way, Jesus was preparing her for the moment when her sorrow would be instantly transformed into irrepressible joy that could never be taken away from her again. She would come to see that not only did Jesus love her with an irrepressible, passionate love that would never stop, but more importantly God in heaven felt exactly the same about her as did Jesus.

It might be easy to dwell at length on the intensity of the emotional reaction that Mary felt when it finally soaked in that this man in front of her was actually Jesus and not just some stranger/garden caretaker. It is important to soak in this glorious moment with Mary and let our imagination marinate in the flavors of Jesus' presence. But we must go even farther if we want to enter into the kind of belief that John intended for us to find in this story. It is not enough to simply believe that Jesus rose from the dead, for indeed this level of belief can leave us vulnerable to the lies of the enemy that have since that time blinded the world to the real significance of the resurrection.. What Jesus wanted Mary to come to experience and pass on to others was embedded in words that we often skim over in this passage.

I ascend to My Father and your Father, and My God and your God.

No doubt Mary had every reason to be delirious with joy when she was reunited with the One who had done so much to save her from all the evil she had experienced. But Jesus was eager to move her to a deeper level of intimacy with Him by assuring her that His Father was also her Father; that His God was the same as her God. The whole reason Jesus came to this world was to reveal the real truth about His Father, and if we overlook this central truth we will not be able to enter into the deeper kind of belief urged throughout the entire gospel of John.

This statement to Mary must have had enormous emotional significance, for there is evidence that Mary likely had been orphaned possibly early on in her life. Living in a home with her brother Lazarus and sister Martha with no parents, she had possibly become an easy target for exploitation by male relatives seeking to replace her father. The natural effects of sexual abuse are shame, condemnation and humiliation which seriously compromise feelings about men in general and especially men purporting to act as father figures. With no loving father of her own and anyone pretending to love her, only to take advantage of her for their own selfish pleasure, her concepts and feelings about father figures would have been far less than affectionate or endearing.

This is one of Satan' strategies, to so darken our perceptions of the true meaning of a father that we react in fear rather than affection when we are told that God is our true Father. I wouldn't be surprised if Jesus didn't wait until this point in time before bringing up this issue of God as Father to Mary. In addition to all the abuse she had suffered, it is also normal for a young person to experience strong feelings of abandonment whenever a father dies prematurely, even though it is not really true. They can then develop resistance to bonding with other men because intuitively they are afraid that they will be abandoned by them as well.

Mary had finally come to allow her heart to become deeply attached to Jesus, the only man she had ever met who was really worthy of her trust. This is exactly what God desires for all of us. Yet after publicly risking her heart by displaying her deepest affections to Him in public, He too had soon after died and was no longer around to love her, reminding her of what had happened with her own father some years previous. This reminder of early and intense feelings of abandonment may have played strongly into Mary's reactions during these events surrounding Jesus' death, and it may also help explain why Jesus wanted to explicitly assure her, along with all His other friends, that they all had a common Father who would never abandon them.

Jesus was demonstrating that He was stronger than even death itself and that He was now strategically positioned as a fellow human in such a way that all humanity could rely on Him to deliver them from death as well as view God with new eyes. Everyone could now see Him as their brother as well as perceiving and relating to God as their ultimate Father that we all have been desperately longing for.

Jesus accomplished what was mirrored in the story of Ruth when she and her mother-in-law lost all the important men in their lives. By becoming a brother to us and reconnecting us with our heavenly far who will never abandon us, even in death, Jesus demonstrates the attitude revealed in the words of Ruth, that great example of love from the Old Testament.

But Ruth said, "Do not urge me to leave you or turn back from following you; for where you go, I will go, and where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God."

(Ruth 1:16)

In the story of Ruth and Naomi, it is very clear that what was most important were the bonds of love and relationship between them, not any artificial relationship based on rules or demands. Thus we must also come to see Jesus, for He did not come to show us how to keep rules better in order to make God happy with us, but rather He demonstrated how to live in such intimate connection with His Father that His life naturally revealed what love looks like in relation to everyone around Him. Now He offers that same relationship to everyone willing to believe in what He revealed about the love of God for each of us.

Mary, like Thomas, seemed to need an extended amount of evidence in order to bring her to believe more deeply in Jesus at this point. It has been pointed out that even though Thomas had his doubts and stubborn streak, he was still the first disciple to ever confess that Jesus was his own God. I find that significant parallel to what Jesus says to Mary.

It is vital that we embrace the reality that God really is our Father and that Jesus wants us to consider Him as our brother while all of heaven longs for us to see ourselves as family. We are not just subjects involved in an impersonal political relationship to others like our governments operate here; we must begin to appreciate the importance of knowing that God is the only source of hope and life and love that exists anywhere. Not only is God and heaven our true family but this is the only option for embracing eternal life with all the richness and joy we were meant to experience from the beginning.

Bonding and intimacy with God is the whole point of a true relationship with Him and is His greatest desire for us. Religion has far too long misled us into thinking that what God wants is compliance and blind obedience to His demands. But Jesus made it clear to the disciples early on that He longs to take us far past the mindset of a servant or slave into a relationship of intimate friendship, a relationship of living like family. While it is true that in a healthy, loving family there will be synchronization with the way things are done in that family, the motives for loving cooperation have nothing in common with forced obedience, sullen submission or unthinking obedience to the desires of the parents. Rather, when true love is the motivation behind every action, it becomes a joy to live in interaction with wise, caring parents who have only the best interests of the children at heart in every situation. This is the kind of relationship God desires for all of us to have, both in our own families here on earth but especially in our connection to the family of heaven.

For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future." (Jeremiah 29:11 NIV)

So I see in these carefully chosen words of Jesus to Mary an invitation to alter what each of us thinks and feels about both Jesus and His Father. To live in the family relationship Jesus talked about so often as the model of the kingdom He was setting up, He urges everyone to turn away from the misapprehensions about Him that have so poisoned our hearts so we can begin to enter into joyful trust in our real Father. He is eager to provide for all of our needs and longs to transform us with His unfailing love that heals us and restores us to the original design He had in mind when He created us.

Likely other disciples may also have had triggers from unfortunate history related to what the idea of father meant to them. This relationship is so often damaged by the malfunctions of our earthly fathers, myself included. For most of my life I have struggled with fears and distortions and deep resistance to love because of the weaknesses of my own father and the mistaken notions he had about how to raise a child. Inevitably my feelings about God were largely shaped by the experience of how my father treated me. Now any assertion that God is my Father has to confront all the reactions and triggers associated with the dysfunctions in my heart received from my earthly father.

So I too need to embrace healing from these words of Jesus to Mary and experience more healing in my own heart as well. I know that I need much remediation in the area of what a father is supposed to look like and act and feel towards his children. My own children are infected with similar fears and triggers about the concept of father as I received, for sadly I passed on a great deal of the negativity I received from my father in his misrepresentation of God. But that is what God's grace is all about, right? ... but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more. (Romans 5:20)

Jesus came to so identify with the human race that He could challenge their mistaken ideas about their identity coming from the character of Satan. By usurping the dominion of this world from Adam, Satan immediately infected humanity's sense of identity to reflect his false principles and attitudes. Now Jesus brings to us a new awareness of our true identity, for now all humanity is now 'in Christ'. For Christ did not die just for all who might believe in Him but for the whole world.

For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.

But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life. (Romans 5:6, 8, 10)

For to this end Christ died and lived again, that He might be Lord both of the dead and of the living. (Romans 14:9)

For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive. (1 Corinthians 15:22)

Christ displaced Satan as the representative of this world in the heavenly councils and when He encountered Mary just after His resurrection He was on His way to heaven to confirm that this transition would be accepted. But because His deep compassion and love and tenderness, He postponed His own desires to wait and reveal Himself to His distraught Mary and then send her off joyfully to become His first ordained apostle to announce His victory over Satan's system, His new kingdom of family where all are welcomed to live in the healing, transforming atmosphere of His irrepressible love.

When we embrace the reality that Christ embraced all of us whether or not we believe it, our very belief moves us into a far deeper level of being 'in Christ' where the transformation really begins to happen. This is why John is so urgent to help us to move into the saving kind of belief that the disciples experienced along with Mary. It is the saving faith in a God who loves unconditionally before we even know Him or even like Him. It is the faith that responds to encountering His love by reflecting it more and more in all of our relationships to those around us.

Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come. Now all these things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and He has committed to us the word of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were making an appeal through us; we beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. (2 Corinthians 5:17-20)