God is so tired...tired of playing the game.

If you’ve ever seen Golgotha (the place where Jesus was crucified) painted on an Easter egg, the picture in your head is probably one of three pious crosses on a grassy knoll silhouetted by a beautiful sunset in early spring. This depiction never missed a year in our family egg-decorating competition and we all felt it unrighteous to vote for anything more profane as the winner.

I wonder now if I could ever have won the competition by submitting a more historically accurate setting. How about an egg depicting the crosses in a garbage heap outside the city wall of Jerusalem where things get tossed aside. I’m doubtful that points would ever be awarded for historical accuracy.

I think we tend to want a nice aesthetic to go with our Golgotha, because we always assume that we’re the ones who are receptive to God; we assume that we’re the ones with eyes to see the true beauty of God’s heart as it’s revealed in Jesus; that we somehow know what’s going on behind the scenes in an otherwise gruesome event.

But the fact of the cross is a reminder that we don’t have to guess what would happen if we were to come into contact with God. We already know what happened. We did come into contact with God. We almost immediately decided that God needed to be disposed of.

Now God could respond to us in rage for behaving so shamefully. God could declare us unrighteous and ban us to the fiery furnace of hell. But you see the problem with that, right? That would be for God to start playing the same game that we were playing in the first place, the one where the winners are rewarded and the losers get punished.  If God responds to us in rage, God would certainly come out the winner but the winner of a game to which we ourselves had already determined the rules.

But what if the game itself is not worth playing? What if by quibbling with us about who wins and who loses, God would only be validating a game that should have never gotten started in the first place?

As it turns out, God’s too clever to get tied down by our rules by predictably responding to crucifixion with rage. God’s actual response turns out to be a game-changer.

When Jesus comes back from the grave offering forgiveness for us betrayers and murderers, this is neither God winning nor losing the righteous vs. unrighteous game. It’s more like God saying, “I’m tired of this game. Let’s play something else.”

I assume that as most of us encounter the unchurched or the de-churched, we’re coming into contact with people who really have no idea what the church is supposed to be (the church’s fault, not theirs). Actually, I can say it stronger than that. They tend to think we’re the exact opposite of what we’re supposed to be (because we often are).

Ironically, their assumption of us (not unfounded) is that we must be gathering on Sundays for the sole purpose of sorting winners from losers. Ironic, since we’re maybe the only group in the world founded on a story of betrayal and murder responded to with forgiveness. We’re founded on an authentically game-changing story.

This is why great stories of forgiveness always make for such bright, blinking intersections where God is palpably at work in the world. They’re the sort we just can’t make up.

Remember a few years back when that Amish community made a public statement of forgiveness for the shooters who took so many of their sons and daughters away from them? Remember how angry people got? Not at the shooters, at the forgivers. How dare they? 

Real forgiveness is an offense to us. It makes no sense. We can’t get from here to there just based on the raw materials of our reward and punishment thinking.  Some hocus pocus when the wedding reception is low on booze is one thing. Walking on water is a clever twist on Newtonian physics. But forgiveness is a miracle the likes of which we hardly have language. It introduces something entirely new, something that can’t be accounted for by our conventional wisdom or even our common sense.

The idea itself seems and never stops seeming unjust. It would be like if someone were betrayed and murdered, then came back to life, but rather than using the opportunity to avenge their own death, they came offering peace.