Two words that sum up the Christian life.  Two words that capture the whole meaning of the passion, death and resurrection of Christ.  Follow me.  That is how our Gospel ends today, not with a suggestion, an idea or a thought but rather a command.  Follow me.  What we learn from Christ’s death and resurrection is that our God is a God of forgiveness and redemption. If only we follow Him.  But so often that is not the kind of God we want.  We want a god that rescues us, a god that will save us from humiliation and pain in this life.  We want a god like the god of old, at least of the Old Testament.  We want a god that will part the Red Sea of our life, miraculously bring us through all the hardship and slavery we face to a promised land.  Or promised life.  A god that will defeat the forces that oppose us and our happiness.  No sickness, no ungrateful children, no dying spouses. 

We are not terrible people for thinking that; we are just human.  We see that humanity in Jesus when He is praying on the Mount of Olives before His passion and death.  “Father, if you are willing, take this cup away from me.”  Even Jesus, in His human nature longs for a rescuing God but then He adds, “still, not my will but yours be done.”  We know that Jesus is deeply and intimately loved by his Father and yet his Father does not rescue him from humiliation, pain, and death.  In his lowest hour, when he is humiliated, suffering and dying on the cross, Jesus is jeered by the crowd with the challenge:  “If God is your father, let him rescue you!”  But there is no rescue.  Instead, Jesus dies inside the humiliation and pain.  God raises him up only after his death. 

That is one of the shocking truths of the resurrection:  We have a redeeming, not a rescuing, God.  So often we base our faith on a rescuing God, a God who promises special treatment to those of genuine faith:  Have faith in Jesus and you will be spared from life’s humiliations and pains!  Have faith in Jesus and prosperity will come your way!  Believe in the resurrection and rainbows will surround your life!  It took the early Christians that were suffering terrible persecutions some time to grasp that Jesus does not ordinarily give special exemptions to his friends, no more than God gave special exemptions to Jesus.  So, like us, they struggled with the fact that someone can have a genuine faith, be deeply loved by God, and still have to suffer humiliation, pain, and death like everyone else.  God did not spare Jesus from suffering and death, and Jesus does not spare us either.

But Jesus never promised us rescue, exemptions, immunity from cancer or escape from death.  No, what He did promise is that, in the end, there will always be forgiveness, forgive them Father for they know not what they do.  There will always be redemption, this day you will be with me in paradise.  That is what we saw by the charcoal fire in today’s Gospel, a fire that reminds us of the charcoal fire Peter sat around in the courtyard when he denied three times that he knew Christ.  Now at this fire he testifies three times to his love of Christ.  Forgiven, redeemed.

What does God ask of us?  The same thing He commanded of Peter.  Follow me.  What does that look like?  On Holy Thursday He told us, “I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do.”  A life of service, a life of love.  A life of spreading the Good News that we are forgiven and redeemed as we saw in our first reading from Acts.  Oh there will be pain, sorrow, disappointment, times when we deny that we know Christ.  But what we learn at Easter is that there is always forgiveness, there is always redemption.  There is always eternal life.