On Sunday morning following Jesus’ passion—not at the breaking of the dawn when they discovered the tomb to be empty, but later after Peter and John had been informed and had themselves come to the tomb to see it was empty and then left—Jesus manifested Himself to Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Joseph. At first, they didn’t recognize Him, not understanding the spiritual nature of His resurrection body, supposing if He had been raised from the dead He would appear as they had last seen Him alive. But the body of the Jesus they had known that was sown in death was but a bare grain of His resurrection body that was to be, of which they could not conceive, since He was the first-born from the dead, and of which even now, “eye has not seen and ear has not heard, and which have not entered the heart of man, all that God has prepared for those who love Him” (1Co 2:9). After revealing Himself to them in this very first encounter with the resurrected Jesus, He spoke to them two things of primary importance, both of which they were to go and tell His brethren. That He referred to His followers who had forsaken Him as brothers was significant, for not only does it communicate that His resurrection did not make Him something different from what in its essence was still a man, it also communicated that even the sinful weakness of our flesh would not “un-brother” Him from us. Rather, His death and resurrection were precisely what were necessary for us to receive our adoption as sons and be sanctified to do the will of the Father as Jesus exemplified, for which reason He is not ashamed to call us His brothers; cf. Mat 12:50, Rom 8:15-17, Heb 2:9-12. The first thing the two Marys were to tell His brethren was for them to go to Galilee, to the mountain He had previously designated (Mat 26:32, 28:16), where He would similarly manifest Himself to “more than five hundred brethren at one time” (1Co 15:6) to establish the fact of His resurrection. The second thing they were to report was that He was ascending to the Father, so they must not cling to Him in the very limited sense they had come to know Him according to the flesh, but in the much greater sense of who He truly is according to the Spirit.
What specifically did Jesus tell Mary to tell His brethren about His ascension? See Joh 20:17. Why did He not simply say He was ascending to “our Father and our God”? On the one hand, what does the distinction He makes between His Father and our Father, indicate about the special nature of His Sonship as opposed to ours? Cf. Joh 1:14,18 and our notes on Joh 20:7. On the other hand, what do His words also indicate about some aspect of the relationship He has with the Father being open and available to us? Cf. Joh 14:23, 17:11,20-26, Rom 8:15-17, Gal 4:4-7.
Throughout His ministry Jesus spoke almost exclusively of God as His Father; how are we to understand His words here and upon the cross (Mat 27:46) that speak of Him as His God? If Jesus is the only begotten, divine Son of God, in what sense is His Father also His God? See also Rev 3:2,12. Certainly, as a man, was not His eternal Father also His God? Otherwise, would He not in some sense have not been fully man? And yet, because He was without sin, how was the nature of His relationship to His God different from the nature of our relationship to our God? How is that similar to the way that the nature of the first Adam’s relationship to God—and the wife’s relationship to her husband—was different before they fell into sin? See Gen 3:16-17 and consider, in what way is fallen man’s desire for God the same as the fallen woman’s desire for her husband (cf. Gen 3:5), with the same result that the nature of God’s relationship to man is one of ruling over him even as the relationship of the man to his wife is one of ruling over her? Cf. Gen 4:7 where the same word is used. We understand then, as did the Church Fathers, that Jesus’ words are “expressly designed to distinguish between what God is to Him and to us—His Father essentially, ours not so: our God essentially, His not so; His God, only in connection with us: our Father, only in connection with Him” (Jamieson-Fausett). “He partaking of the human nature, our God is His God; we partaking of a divine nature, Christ’s Father is our Father” (Matthew Henry).
But consider further: even before the eternal, only begotten Son of God had become incarnate as a man, was there a sense in which His Father was also His God? For clearly, our perception of “God” has been distorted by sin to think of God in terms of His power over us and our relationship to Him in terms of a Master and slave, ruling over us, forcing us to do what we don’t want to do. But is that perception actually true? In light of His God’s love for Him in which Christ trusted so completely as to go to the cross in obedience to His will, which love God then demonstrated to be true by raising Him from the dead and seating Him at His right hand in glory, should our perception of God be one of power over us to force us to do His will, or one of love that invites us to be a part of what He is doing to also become a partaker of His own nature to share in His power and glory? In a perfect world governed by such love—into which God is in fact redeeming us—is the relationship of children to parents, wives to husbands, slaves to masters (or employees to employers), the governed to governors, which calls for submission to the will of another and in which those under another’s authority may even refer to them as lord—the same term we often use for God (cf. 1Pe 3:6)—are such relationships that involve power of one over another necessarily to be viewed negatively? Cf. Mat 20:25-27, 2Co 10:8, 13:10; see also Mat 8:5-10 for the centrality of this understanding to faith and salvation, as well as Son 7:10 for the only other time in the Bible the same word for desire mentioned above is used, but in a positive sense. If governors, masters, husbands, parents, etc… perfectly reflected the loving authority of our heavenly Father, would they not in some lesser sense be as “god”, reflecting His goodness and beneficence, to those who under their authority offer their glad submission, even as we understand Jesus as the eternal Son of God did to the Father, even before He became a man? In this sense, was not the Father also the Lord and God (perhaps lord and god?) of Jesus, being His Head (1Co 11:3), even before He became incarnate as a man? For although He was begotten and not made, He still had His source or origin from the Father, whereas the Father has no source. Cf. Exo 4:16, 7:1, 22:28, Joh 10:34-35, 1Co 15:28.