John 20:17: My God and Your God Explained Simply
Short answer: When Jesus says “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” in John 20:17, he is telling Mary Magdalene both who he is and who she has become. The risen Christ still calls God his Father, and he invites his disciples to call God their Father too. He is God's eternal Son by nature; his followers become God's children by adoption. The precise wording of John 20:17 gives the church enormous comfort: the Son who died and rose has not left his people behind. He treats their standing before God as bound up with his own. Where he goes, he draws his brothers and sisters after him.
The morning Mary Magdalene would never forget
John's resurrection account opens in the dark. Mary Magdalene comes to the tomb while it is still dark, finds the stone removed, and runs to tell Peter and the beloved disciple. After they leave, she stays outside weeping, stooping to look into the tomb. That is where she sees two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had lain. They ask her why she is weeping. Her answer is honest grief: someone has taken away her Lord, and she does not know where they have laid him.
She turns and sees Jesus standing there, but she does not recognise him. She supposes he is the gardener. Jesus asks her the same question the angels asked, and adds a second: who are you looking for? She asks where he has been taken and offers to carry him away herself. Then he speaks her name, and everything changes. That single word, spoken by the risen Lord, opens her eyes. Nothing in the narrative is incidental. John is showing us that the resurrection is known first by hearing the Shepherd's voice.
What is easy to miss is that Mary is not yet ready to grasp what kind of risen existence Jesus now has. She wants the old closeness back. There is something deeply understandable in that. She had followed him, watched him die, and now finds him alive. Her instinct is to reach out and hold on to what she has. Jesus gently redirects her. The resurrection body is not a repair of the old life; it is the beginning of a new order, one that will be shared with his people in a way the old arrangements could never supply.
His instruction is not a rebuke for love. It is a redirection toward purpose: go to my brothers and tell them. Mary becomes the first witness of the risen Lord, sent to the men who had fled. The risen Jesus immediately commissions. He does not keep his people at a distance, admiring from afar; he sends and speaks and gathers. Everything Jesus says to Mary that morning is for the church that will hear it read aloud, centuries later, in rooms full of people with their own griefs and their own longing to hold on.
Why my Father and your Father are not the same phrase
Jesus does not say our Father, as if he and the disciples stood before God on identical footing. He says my Father and your Father. That distinction matters. Even after the resurrection, after the agony of the cross is past, Jesus still speaks of God as mine. His sonship is not a temporary role he put on for the incarnation and then put off. In the risen Christ we meet the eternal Son, the one who was with God and was God, now reigning in a body that bears the marks of his love.
At the same time, he joins their name to his own: and your Father. This is not a demotion of himself, but a promotion of them. He is saying that the God he knows as Father is now, on account of his work, their Father as well. What was uniquely his by nature becomes theirs by grace. He does not merely point upward and call God a distant deity; he brings his disciples into the family relationship he himself enjoys. The whole gospel is contained in that small conjunction. My, and yours, and both because of him.
Hebrews 2:11-12 helps explain how this can be. The letter says of the sanctifying Son and the sanctified people that they “are all from one,” and that “So the disciples went away again to their own homes.” The risen Christ is not embarrassed to be identified with his people. He names them family. In John 20:17 the same family language appears, addressed to a woman who had just been weeping at an empty tomb. Jesus does not begin by explaining doctrine. He begins by telling her where he is going and who waits there for her.
So the two phrases are not redundant. My Father speaks of his eternal, unbroken, essential sonship. Your Father speaks of our adopted, purchased, Spirit-given standing. Both are true in the same sentence because both are true of the same person: the Son who bears our nature pleads the family privilege he possesses, and he shares it. The words are precise, and their precision is where the comfort lies. Our access to God is not self-generated. It is granted through the One who calls us brothers.
My God and your God: the risen man still worships
Some readers stumble at the second half of the verse. How can Jesus speak of my God? If we are not careful, we either flatten the distinction or push him out of the Godhead altogether. The New Testament holds both truths in tension without confusion. The Son is truly God, and the Son also became truly man. As man, he prayed, he obeyed, he submitted, and he worshipped. As God, he receives worship. Both are true of one person, and John 20 gives us a window into that mystery.
Jesus had earlier quoted Psalm 22:1 at the cross, according to Matthew 27:46: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Those words were drawn from a psalm of lament that ends in vindication and praise among the assembly. The cry of abandonment was not the last word. Now, three days later, the same mouth that cried my God in anguish speaks my God in resurrection. The forsaking is over. The relationship is not severed; it is confirmed. He is still, and forever, the one who calls God his own.
This matters for how we read the resurrection appearances. Jesus does not return as a disembodied spirit or a memory. He comes as the risen man, the firstfruits, the new Adam. He has a Father he can name and a God he can worship. And because he is the representative head of a new humanity, his standing becomes ours. When he says my God, he is not excluding us; he is going first. He stands before the throne as a man, so that men and women may follow him there.
The practical effect is enormous. Our prayers do not rise into empty space. They rise through the risen human priest who has already entered the presence of God in our nature. When you struggle to pray, when the words feel thin, you are not inventing a relationship. You are joining one that already exists in him. He calls God Father, and he teaches his people to do the same. He calls God his God, and he does not mind if we take up the same phrase, because he has made it ours.
Adopted children learn to say what he says
Romans 8:15-16 explains what the Spirit does in us. It tells us that we who believe “And because you are children, God sent out the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, “Abba, Father!”” but received Romans 8:15-16 says, “For you didn’t receive the spirit of bondage again to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!”” The phrase Abba is an intimate address, and it is no accident that the Spirit uses it. The children of God do not merely think about God as Father; they cry out to him that way. Intimacy is not an add-on to the Christian life. It is what the Spirit produces in those who belong to Christ.
Galatians 4:6 says the same thing in slightly different words: because we are children, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying Abba, Father. Notice the sequence. We do not work ourselves into sonship by repeated prayers. God sends the Spirit because we are children. The crying out is the evidence, not the price. And consider whose Spirit it is: the Spirit of his Son. The same Spirit that empowered the life of Jesus is the Spirit who now prompts our prayers. Our voices echo his voice.
This is where John 20:17 and the epistles meet. Jesus says my Father and your Father, and the Spirit makes that your Father real in your mouth. He says my God and your God, and the Spirit teaches you to say my God without fear. Adoption is not an abstract legal transaction hidden in a ledger. It is a living relation, produced by the Spirit, expressed in prayer, and confirmed in the ordinary Christian life. Every time you pray, you are doing something that Jesus has already done and continues to do on your behalf.
Practically, that means your prayer life is not a performance to be graded. It is a family conversation. Luther's warning against fear is well grounded in Romans 8. If you have come to Christ, the Spirit in you is already speaking. You do not need to perfect your words. The Son, who has a Father, gives you a Father. The Son, who has a God, gives you a God. What was once only his by nature is now yours by grace, and it will remain yours forever.
Brothers of the risen Lord, sent with a message
Jesus tells Mary to go to my brothers. Something has changed in the language. During his earthly ministry he had called them disciples, friends, and servants. Here, on the far side of the cross and the empty tomb, he calls them brothers. The word is not sentiment; it is a status. Hebrews 2 connects it to his sanctifying work: he who sanctifies and those who are sanctified share one origin, and for that reason he is not ashamed to call them brothers. The category shift has been paid for.
This makes Mary's errand something more than a delivery job. She carries a message about identity: your brother has risen, and he is going to his Father and yours. She was not an apostle in the later technical sense, but she was a commissioned witness. The risen Christ chose her to bear the first announcement of resurrection and adoption to the men who would lead the church. The dignity of that assignment is worth noticing in a passage where so much else happens.
And she goes. The text does not describe her arguing, bargaining, or lingering. She runs with the message. The result is a community that knows who it is: brothers and sisters of the risen Lord, with access to the same Father and the same God. The church did not invent its identity. It received it from a woman sent by Jesus on the first day of the week. Everything we call Christian brotherhood is downstream of that sentence.
For us, the practical question is whether we treat this as merely a title or as a living reality. If the risen Christ calls us brothers, then our shared life is not a hobby or an option. It is the family into which we have been brought by his work and sealed by his Spirit. We can look around at a congregation of ordinary, sometimes difficult people and say: these are the ones he is not ashamed to call brothers. And we can do more than say it. We can live as though it were true.
What the ascent to my Father secures for you
Jesus did not ascend simply to relocate. His going to the Father completed the work he came to do. He had told his disciples earlier that he was going to prepare a place for them. The ascent announced in John 20:17 is the movement of the risen Lord into the presence of God on our behalf. He enters as the forerunner, the one who goes first. That is why his going is good news rather than loss. If he had stayed, we would have the comfort of his nearness but not the security of his enthronement.
What does that mean for the believer today? It means our hope is not located in an event that happened in the past only. It is anchored in a person who is alive now, in the presence of the Father, calling God his God and ours. The ascension matters because it tells us where our great High Priest is. He is not absent. He is not silent. He is where we need him to be, and because he is there, we can approach God with confidence and call him Father with the same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead.
This is also why Christian hope is not optimism. It does not pretend that life is easy or that everything works out smoothly in this age. It rests on the fact that the Son who was forsaken has been received, and that those who belong to him share his standing. Whatever you are walking through, the voice that said my Father and your Father did not stop being true. The empty tomb is not just about the past. It is about who is waiting to receive you when the family reunion is complete.
For those who are unsure of their standing, the invitation stands in this very verse. The God who is the Father of Jesus is willing to be your Father, on the basis of what his Son has done. You do not need to manufacture a relationship. You need only to come to the risen Lord, who is not ashamed to call his people brothers. The Spirit of adoption is still crying Abba in the hearts of all who trust him, and that cry is evidence that the door has been opened.
Where we must be careful with this verse
John 20:17 is rich, but it is easy to overread it. It does not settle every question about the relationship between the persons of the Trinity. It does not prove that Jesus was a mere creature, nor does it prove that his sonship is only something he received at the resurrection. It also does not prove that everyone is already a child of God in the full New Testament sense, no matter what they believe. The verse establishes a specific relationship between the risen Jesus and his people. It should be allowed to say that, and not more.
We should also avoid pressing the contrast between my and your so hard that the plain sense is lost. The point is not that Jesus sits on one side of a gap and we sit on another. The point is that the Son who is eternally his Father's is gracious enough to make his Father ours. Both halves are true at once. When we hold them together, the verse is a window into the gospel. When we separate them, we either make Jesus a distant figure or make ourselves presumptuous. Holding both is the way of wisdom.
Other passages that speak to John 20:17
John 20:17 does not stand alone. Hebrews 2:11-12 grounds the language of brothers in the sanctifying work of the Son, who is not ashamed to call his people family. Romans 8:15-16 shows the Spirit of adoption teaching believers to cry Abba, Father, which is what Jesus' words make possible. Galatians 4:6 reiterates that the Spirit of his Son is sent because we are children, confirming our sonship from the inside. And Matthew 27:46, drawing on Psalm 22:1, gives the dark background against which the resurrection announcement shines: the One who cried out about being forsaken now speaks of a Father who receives him. Together these passages show that the journey from abandonment to adoption is the very shape of the gospel. To consider how God's promises shape believing desire, see Psalm 37:4 Meaning: Does God Promise Every Desire? To think about the renewal of the mind that accompanies adoption, see What does Romans 12:2 mean by renewing your mind? For the apostolic claim to have seen and touched the risen Word, see What Does 1 John 1:1 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application and on the honesty that follows genuine fellowship with him, see What Does 1 John 1:8 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application.
Biblical fidelity check
John 20:17 establishes that the risen Jesus retains his own relationship with the Father and that he brings his disciples into a corresponding relationship. It establishes that he is not ashamed to call them brothers, that he commissions them to carry the resurrection message, and that his ascent to the Father is part of the good news rather than a departure from it. It does not establish that Jesus' sonship is different in kind from ours, nor that ours is identical in kind to his. The verse gives a basis for adoption without erasing the distinction between the eternal Son and the sons and daughters he saves.
A common misreading treats the sentence as if Jesus were merely a model who shows us that everyone is already a child of God. That is not what the text says. The brothers he names are those who have been sanctified by his work and gathered around him, not the world in general. Another misreading treats my God as evidence that Jesus is less than God. But the New Testament presents him as truly God and truly man, and his human worship does not cancel his divine nature. The verse asks us to hold both truths together, and it rewards those who do.
Frequently asked questions
Why does Jesus say my Father and your Father rather than our Father?
The distinct wording preserves the difference between his eternal sonship and our adopted sonship. He is the Son by nature; we become children by grace. Yet he joins our name to his, so that the God he knows as Father is also our Father. The two phrases together are the gospel in miniature: the Son shares what is his, and we receive what we could never earn.
Does my God and your God mean Jesus is not God?
No. The New Testament consistently presents Jesus as truly God and truly man. As man he prayed, obeyed, and worshipped; as God he is worthy of worship. John 20:17 speaks from his human side without denying his divine identity. His use of my God is a mark of genuine humanity, not a confession of creaturehood. Christians have long held both truths together without confusion.
How does this verse connect to the Spirit of adoption?
John 20:17 announces the relationship; Romans 8:15-16 and Galatians 4:6 describe how it is experienced. The Spirit of the Son is sent into our hearts, crying Abba, Father. What Jesus declares to Mary becomes an inward reality in every believer through the Holy Spirit, who teaches us to pray and assures us that we belong to the family of God.
