God’s small big rescue plan

So we’re a week or so out of the Easter weekend itself and into the season of Easter, which actually lasts until Pentecost.
Remember: an Easter is for six weeks, not just for the weekend.

To describe the events that we commemorate and celebrate as “astonishing” is to do them a massive disservice: Jesus shares bread and wine with and washes the feet of his disciples, including one who will betray him and one who will deny ever having known him. He is then arrested, refuses to fight back, and condemned by a potentially illegal trial. After that, he’s brought before the Roman governor Pilate, who refuses to convict him but sentences him to be crucified anyway, because it’s more convenient. Jesus dies on the cross (the Romans were good at that) and then is buried.

Then a couple of days later, on the third day, he isn’t in the tomb. The women who come to see him are told by one or more angels that he has risen from the dead, just as he said he would (duh!). What happens next depends on which gospel you read; but between them they take us from scenes of great triumph, to ones of fear and mystery, to ones of very personal, intimate reunions and reconciliations.

And what strikes me about all these events is how small they are, as well as how big they are. This is a big, huge, cosmic-scale operation, carried out on a seemingly small scale.

Huh?

The Big Picture

Well, what I mean is this: the Bible sees all this as something to do with salvation: God’s work to rescue His people, the whole of humanity and the whole of the world. Somehow, Jesus’ death and resurrection are world-changing, cosmos-shaking events that bring about the possibility of change, transformation and freedom from everything that enslaves and works against us humans and which brings about death instead of life. Sin isn’t just forgiven, it’s overcome; and its great partner-in-crime, death, is defeated as well. The way is opened for the great vision at the end of the Bible, Revelation 21-22, to become a reality: no tears, no pain, no death, humans and the whole of creation being made new and right and good.

That’s big picture, IMAX-scale stuff, right there: awesome!

So you’d think that such a huge rescue operation would need acting out on a huge scale, right? If the stakes are that high, if the job is that big, then this is going to need something spectacular, something, as I said earlier, that goes beyond “astonishing”.

The Small Picture

So how does God do it?

By making it look like a failure: His Son, the supposed Messiah (meaning God’s anointed one – the one many thought would rescue Israel from the Romans) goes and gets crucified by the very people he’s supposed to be defeating.

And yes, he is raised from the dead on the third day. But does he make a triumphant return, showing himself to the whole of Jerusalem and putting the wind up those who crucified him?

He does not.

In fact, none of the gospels tell us of the moment when he rises again and leaves the tomb. We’re only taken to the tomb once he’s gone from it, when the women arrive and start trying to make sense of what’s happened. His resurrection appears to be a mystery, something that happened out of sight and something that no one can quite get a hold on. By the end of the gospels, only a few people even know he’s alive, although there are hints that the news will become a lot more widely known when these witnesses go and spread the news. And that’s interesting in itself: this all-important message is entrusted to a bunch of people who still can’t quite decide whether they believe that Jesus is alive and who certainly didn’t understand why Jesus had to die in the first place.

(Unlike us 21st century western Christians. We totally get it. All of it. All the time.)

And all this in a (at the time) rather obscure part of the world that wasn’t known for Really Important, World-Changing Stuff happening in it.

So, there you have it: God’s small big rescue plan, ladies and gentlemen.

God decides to save the world in the way that’s possibly the easiest to overlook, misunderstand, deny, ridicule, ignore and denounce. Even/especially¹ by Christians.

And…?

A perfectly reasonbly question. What’s the point of this beyond mildly interesting (I hope) theological speculation?

Well, just this: is this God’s normal way of doing things?
I mean, if this is how God undertakes the greatest and most urgent act of God ever (at least in our world; I can’t speculate about other possible acts of God in other worlds) then it seems to me it’s at least possible that that’s the way God tends to work all the time.

I’m not saying that God isn’t capable of doing mighty miracles or great acts of power or anything like that. And I’m definitely not trying to dictate how God should work; He will be relieved to know, I’m sure, that I’ll leave that for Him to decide.

But I do mean that if we always associate “God intervening” with something spectacular, then maybe we’re looking for the wrong things, or we’ve got the wrong idea about God.
What if God is the kind of supreme divine being who likes to work as much in unusual, quiet, easily-missed ways, ways we might write off as just human kindness, or people doing the “right thing”, or that we might miss altogether, or that we might point to as failure?

After all, God spoke to the prophet Elijah, not through earthquake, wind and fire, but through the “still small voice“², a voice that was so quietly powerful that it could only have been God.

And yes, the church began at Pentecost with the sound of rushing wind, tongues of fire and a multitude of languages given by the Spirit. But that was easily mistaken by much of the crowd at the time as people being drunk.

When we ask God to work, to intervene, to act in a particular situation or a particular person’s life or whatever it might be, perhaps we need to look for the answer, not in a spectacular sign or spectacular act which cannot be mistaken for God, but in something small, overlooked, easily attributed to someone or something else. Perhaps our job is to highlight those things and learn to see them as true “acts of God”. Because the insurance companies had it wrong from the start: those “acts of God” aren’t earthquakes, tornadoes, floods and general devastation; they’re a man dying on the cross and the world-changing news of His resurrection being revealed to a bunch of people who won’t fully understand it or even believe it at first.

Notes

¹Delete as appropriate
² Most translations seem to prefer “gentle whisper” or something; but “still small voice” still seems more poetic, more evocative to me.