The risen Christ is not a generic mysterium tremendum. He is the one who identifies with the God who spoke in Deuteronomy. God is not unknowable, but encountered in a language that Jesus subjects himself to and exalts by his obedience. “This is what is written: The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day.”

Even Jesus knows his will and the will of God are not automatically the same. He had to conform his will to that of the Father. And his judgment about that will is not mystically endowed by inner voice, but by knowing the God whose will has been revealed in Israel’s scriptures, where sacrifice and ransom and the will that all nations be blessed are passages that conspire to insist Jesus must die not on Groundhog Day or the Winter Solstice, but during the festival of death out of life and life out of death. It is the psalms that comprise Jesus’s last words from the cross, not universal expressions of anguish or hymns to a dying and rising God from the Ancient Near East or Greco-Roman milieu.

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from my sermon A Room Furnished with Grief and Resurrection based on Luke 24: 36 – 48