Imagine yourself a disciple of Jesus Christ. Reared in a culture centered around a long history and belief in its unique relationship to the One True God. Growing up attending a synagogue each week, with exciting trips to Jerusalem for special feast days. Sacrifices and messages and rituals and laws all designed to remind every person of the nation’s special place as God’s chosen people; a temple as a national reminder that God Himself dwelt among you, where a veil separated a most holy chamber where the high priest was said to enter the very presence of God on one special day each year.

This was not a nation like modern nations, where we have politics and religion and business and family life neatly segregated; where one’s religion can actually be a hindrance to a business or political career. No, this was a nation where religion and politics, where business and family life were completely integrated and inseparable. If you didn’t circumcise your male baby, you were declaring your rebellion to the law and religion of the nation. If you didn’t attend synagogue, you couldn’t be a local political leader. The priests were the national politicians.

And this entire culture, this whole nation, was waiting for the Messiah; the promised King who would lead the nation to international prominence and bring all the world into subjection to Israel’s God.
Jesus’ disciples were drawn to Jesus because he represented himself as the Messiah. From his first message (“The Kingdom of God is at hand.” Mark 1:15) to his trial (“My kingdom is not of this world.” John 18:36), Jesus’ message was that he was the Messiah. His actions, from initial temple cleansing to entering Jerusalem on a donkey, were fulfillments of Old Testament prophecies of the Messiah. And when Peter said, “Thou art the Christ,” (“Christ” is Greek for the Hebrew “Messiah”), Jesus assured Peter that this understanding was correct, since it was from God Himself. (Matthew 16:17)

So, as disciples of Jesus the Messiah, how would you and I respond to the arrest, the trial, the crucifixion and death of our Messiah? Probably, just like his disciples did. They ran. They hid. They denied they even knew Jesus. Everything they believed, everything they thought they understood, everything they had seen and experienced and felt and dreamed – not just for the three short years they had been with Jesus, but everything they had been taught all their lives – was wrong!

The question I propose today is, What is our relation to God if we believe wrong things? Just this week, I’ve read a book, listened to a podcast, and read a blog, each by a different leading Christian spokesperson, but each teaching that the others are wrong on significant matters of the Christian faith. To be sure, each teacher acknowledges Jesus as God come in the flesh and the Bible as the written word of God, and each teacher is calling for men and women to surrender to Jesus Christ and live lives pleasing to God. But each is saying that the others are wrong about just what the message of Jesus is.

Amidst all the confusion, I gain much peace and great joy from the words of Jesus himself.
When the women went to the tomb to do the burial rituals to Jesus’ body, they were the first to learn that Jesus was, in fact, alive again. They were tasked with the duty to deliver the unbelievable message to the disciples that Jesus has risen from the dead. But Mary was told, by Jesus, to take an even more incredible message to the disciples:

…go to my brethren, and say to them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God. (John 20:17)

“Mary,” Jesus is saying, “go to those men who fled for their lives, the same men who in word and action denied they even knew me, the men who are even now huddled in fear behind locked doors, dreading discovery by the authorities who put me to death. Yes, go to those confused, unbelieving, faithless men who were my closest companions for the past three years. And when you see those men, let them know that I am still working on their behalf. I’m going to the Father to complete my task. But my Father is also their Father. The God I know? He is also their God. Nothing has changed. Everything is OK. He – and I – still acknowledge them. I still love them. Our intimate loving relationship has not changed. Go, Mary. Find them. Remind them. I will never forsake them.”

A relationship does not depend on what we know, what we believe, what we doubt, or what we understand. It is simply that. A relationship.

Is his Father your Father? His God, your God?