Got Jesus?
Y’shua.
That’s what they call him in Israel.
Y’shua is Hebrew for Jesus;
literally it means “God saves.” “Christ,” which follows the first name Jesus,
is not a last name but a title.
“Christ” is the Greek term for the Hebrew “messiah,” which literally
means “anointed one.” The anointed one
is Jesus; messiah is the one through whom God saves. Before Jesus was Lord, he
was the one through whom God saves. In
Matthew’s gospel, the angel Gabriel announces Jesus’ birth to Joseph saying,
“You shall call him Y’shua (God
saves), for he will save his people from their sins” (1:21). In Luke’s gospel, an angel of the Lord
announces to the shepherds, “Today in the city of David a Savior has been born
to you; he is Christ, the Lord.” Before
Jesus was Lord, he was Savior. I find
it interesting that folks ask, “Do you believe in Jesus Christ as your Lord and
Savior?” I am sometimes tempted to
answer, “No, but I believe in him as my Savior and Lord.” You see, no one follows Jesus as Lord – no
one accepts Jesus’ lordship over their thoughts, their actions, their will –
unless they first receive him as Savior and know the blessings of his eternal
love and unconditional mercy. Before
Jesus is Lord, he is Savior.
The
Apostle’s Creed begins the second paragraph with the words, “I believe in Jesus
Christ….” But this phrase begs several questions: what does it mean to call
Jesus the Savior, the one through whom God saves? What is “salvation?” How
does Jesus, the Galilean Jew of the first century, fit into God’s saving
actions for all humanity and, indeed, the entire cosmos itself?
*****
Incorrect,
limited and downright wrong-headed views abound when it comes to understanding
salvation. The no doubt apocryphal
story is told of a bishop in full priestly garb trying to get a train from New
York to Boston. The bishop asked a
young man how to find the train to Boston.
“If you want to go to Boston,” instructed the young man, “you’re going
the wrong way. You gotta turn around
and go back that away.” The bishop
thanked the young man and began to follow his instructions when the youngster
stopped the bishop, “Hey, Mister, why you wearing that costume?” The bishop explained the nature of his
religious wardrobe and asked if the young man would like for the bishop to tell
him how to get to heaven. The young man
declined the invitation to have the bishop share with him directions on how to
get to heaven. “Why don’t you want to
know how to get to heaven,” wondered the bishop? “From you,” responded the young man, “why you can’t even find
your way to Boston!”
The assumption
made by the priest is that salvation is all about “getting to heaven.” Such “ticket punched” theology is seriously
limited. Salvation is much more the heaven; salvation begins here on earth as
well. Salvation includes not merely
one’s spiritual self but incorporates the physical, mental and emotional self
as well. God is Creator of all that is
seen (the physical) as well as all that is unseen (the spiritual). Salvation is not only about “getting saved”
so we can go to heaven but about a full-bodied discipleship that leads into
accepting Jesus as Lord.
Or
again, consider the story of one of my seminary classmates. Bishop Paulos was a Phd. student at Princeton
Theological Seminary when I received my Masters of Divinity. One day the
president of the seminary was giving Bishop Paulos a tour of Manhattan. The president had stepped away for a moment
when a street preacher accosted Bishop Paulos: “Do you know Jesus Christ as
your Lord and Savior?” Now this
question was asked of a man wearing a black cassock with the matching black
skull cap of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, as well as an eight inch metal
cross around his neck. Excuse me? Bishop Paulos was obviously someone who had
devoted his life to Christ, so why ask the question? Bishop Paulos, who was something of a Pauline scholar, answered
using Paul’s favorite phrase with which to talk about being a Christian: “I am
in Christ,” he responded. “Yes, but is
Christ in you?” answered the young street preacher. “Have you asked Jesus into your heart?”
Once again we see
a limited perspective corrupt how one understands salvation. The young street
preacher was fixated on a particular verbal formulation and, not hearing the
specific words he was looking for, ignored the obvious signs of a faith
commitment from Bishop Paulos, both his priestly vestments as well as his much
more biblical language. Rather than
forcing a particular dogma or doctrinal formulation upon someone, God’s
salvation invites the believer to turn one’s life over to God; again, to move
from Jesus as Savior to Jesus as Lord in every area of life.
Even back in Jesus’ day there were folks with
limited perspectives on salvation.
First century Jews considered ritual purity of primary importance. Every home in Jerusalem had a mikve for ritual cleansings. A mikve
is a closet-like structure filled with water that one walks down six to eight
stairs to get to in order to immerse oneself in water. At least once a day, twice for the more
religiously intense, the observant Jew would walk down the stairs before a meal
time in order to purify oneself. The
Jews believed that such outer purity conformed both to God’s will as well as
God’s law. But Jesus took issue with
his Jewish brothers among the Pharisees regarding their sense of purity. Jesus told the Pharisees that it is not what
enters someone from without that makes them impure but what comes from within that
creates purity or impurity. For Jesus,
the fruit of true salvation is a life lived from the inside-out.
Or again, consider
another skewed vision of salvation among first century Jews. Many Jews were
political “zealots” who identified salvation with liberation from their Roman
oppressors. For the greater part of
four centuries Jews had been under foreign control: first the Babylonians
(Iraq), then the Persians (Iran), then the Greeks, then the Syrians, followed
by a brief stint of liberation (the Hasmonean Dynasty / Maccabeus), followed by
Roman rule. It is perfectly
understandable how Jewish religious thought could link salvation with political
freedom; after all, they were people of the Exodus whom God had freed from
similar political bondage in Egypt.
During the first century many a “messiah,” which was synonymous with
“rebel leader,” would elevate oneself to rally the people to cast off
Rome. The destruction of Jerusalem and
Masada in A.D. 66-72 and the obliteration of Judea in A.D. 135 both started
with messianic leaders attempting to “save” Israel.
One of the
startling aspects of the angel’s announcement to Joseph is that Jesus would
come “to save his people from their
sins.” Whose sins? Not the Roman sins. Jewish sins. No wonder Jesus’ message fell on so many deaf ears among his
people. Imagine for a moment you are a part of an oppressed people. What is the mind set of oppressed people;
where is their focus? On their
oppressors of course. We see this
around the world today in Palestine, Iraq, Northern Ireland and the Sudan. The angel’s words, however, suggest that
salvation is not found in changing what others are doing to you but in changing
what we are doing to others. Are we bringing justice to the oppressed? Are we treating others with respect that
offers them dignity? Once again we see
the true Christian definition of salvation as one that lives from the
inside-out rather than from the outside-in.
*****
The Christian
faith must reject limited, narrowly defined understandings of salvation. “Salvation,” for the Christian is a big
word; it is an umbrella term that means more than “getting our ticket punched
to heaven,” more than “having the right words to say about Jesus,” more than
“observing a form of outer purity,” more than “political liberation.” All of these things are good in their own
way, but none of them, alone, are sufficient.
In the New
Testament, the Apostle Paul mines the deep ore of Greek language and culture to
describe the new reality of life with God through Jesus Christ. Paul’s choice of words expresses salvation
in its many forms using three “vocation” labels: justification, sanctification
and glorification. These three words
point us toward the past, present and future tenses of salvation.
The past tense of
salvation is that the believer has been saved.
Salvation is a finished act, already accomplished in Christ. All of our sins we have committed, all of
the sins we will commit, are forgiven in Christ through his sacrifice on the
cross. Paul describes this sense of
completeness with the word “justification.”
Justification is a word that comes from the courts. When the accused stood before the judge at
the end of the trial, the judge would proclaim the accused either guilty or
innocent. If the judge proclaimed the
accused innocent, he would say “justified.”
When we stand before God as Judge, God proclaims us justified. “Innocent” we might ask? We know we are not innocent before God. How
is it that God can pronounce us justified?
The answer is a miracle of God’s grace, for when we stand before God as
Judge, God looks to Jesus and says it is “just-as-if-I’d” never sinned. We have
been saved.
The present tense
of salvation is that the believer is being saved. Salvation is an on-going action of God’s grace upon us through
the Holy Spirit. Paul describes this
sense of on-going salvation with the word “sanctification.” Those who sing in choirs will recognize the
root cognate, “Sanctus,” which means holy.
To be sanctified, then, is to be made holy. One way to think about the distinction between justification and
sanctification is with the following aphorism: “God loves us just the way we
are (justification), and too much to let us stay that way
(sanctification).”
Sanctification is
best described by the old yarn about the elder in the country church who stood
up every Wednesday night at prayer meeting and prayed, “Lord, wipe the cobwebs
out of the corner of my life.” Every
week this same elder prayed what came to be known in the congregation as his
“cobweb prayer.” Finally, one of the
other elders, who coincidentally was the first elder’s best friend, had enough
of the cobweb prayer. As soon as the
first elder had prayed his cobweb prayer, his best friend stood up and prayed,
“Don’t do it, Lord. Don’t you dare wipe
those cobwebs from his life. Lord, I am
sick and tired of hearing about those cobwebs.
God, if your name is all that is merciful and just, don’t touch the
cobwebs, kill the spider!” We all have
at least one spider in our lives, and most of us have many. Sanctification is the work of God’s grace in
which we, along with God, kill the spider.
We are being saved.
The future tense
of salvation is that the believer will be saved. Salvation is a future act of
God’s grace which will not be revealed until we meet God in heaven. Paul uses the term “glorification” to
describe this last, great transformation of the Christian into a new creation
in Christ Jesus. The words “glory” and
“glorify” and their cognates have a complex set of nuances,[1]
of which one is the sense that glory means to reflect. When we glorify the Lord we reflect the Lord
to others; the image of the Lord is placed upon us in such a way that others
can see the Lord in us. What,
specifically, such glorification looks like is something of a mystery as the
Apostle John tells us: “It is not yet known what we shall be but we know that
when he (Jesus) appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (I
John 3:2).
John’s words tell
us something very important about salvation; namely, that salvation is about
becoming like Jesus. Yet we must be
careful here to avoid spiritual kitsch.
It is currently popular to ask, “What Would Jesus Do?” This is the wrong question. We are not called to do what Jesus would do,
for we are not Jesus. Jesus was called
to go to the cross for the sins of the world.
Any of his followers who seek to follow in those footsteps are misguided in the extreme. Jesus was called to be an itinerant preacher
– “foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests but the Son of Man has
nowhere to lay his head” – yet no legitimate argument can be made that the
billion Christians around the world should “go and do likewise.” Rather than asking about what Jesus would
do, it is far more profitable to wonder how he would live. The great Catholic theologian Henri Nouwen
said that our vocation is not to live exactly as Jesus lived but to live “as
authentically as Jesus lived and so to discover our true humanity.”[2] Our full glorification will be revealed only
in the fullness of time, but until then it is an ideal for which we may
strive. We will be saved.
*****
For the Christian,
salvation means being freed from the
guilt of sin and freed for life with
God. Many people, Christian and
non-Christian alike, misunderstand the church’s talk about sin in that they
presume all “sin talk” is for the purpose of making people feel bad about
themselves. Certainly preachers and
parents have abused the term sin is such ways for centuries. The true Christian understanding of sin,
however, is always linked with grace and salvation. Sin is linked with grace because it is God’s gift (grace) of love
and mercy that frees us from sin’s bondage.
Sin is linked with salvation because sin is salvation’s photographic
negative. The reason God is against sin
is because he is for salvation; talk of sin is not for the purpose of judging
one bad but of directing one toward living that is healthy, just and beautiful.
Drugs destroy the mind and make immature the emotions. Sex outside of marriage
leads to STDs, unwanted pregnancies and a higher rate of broken relationships.
Anger and bitterness rob us of our joy.
Pride and arrogance rob us of genuine love. Fear eats away our soul from the outside-in. Hate eats away at our soul from the
inside-out. In the same way that cancer is disease of the body, so is sin
disease of the soul. And Y’shua, God saves, desires to be the
cure.
God wants us to be
free. God wants us to be free to love
others. God wants us to be free to live from a place of joy. God wants us to be
free to take great pleasure in showing compassion. God wants us to be free to
burn for justice for others. God wants us to be free to be who we were created
to be.
Through Y’shua, through Jesus, God wants to save us.
[1] Other nuances for the word “glory” include “weight,” “light,” and “image.” It is often difficult to determine the precise meaning of glory for a particular usage; one must be sensitive to a passage’s context. In terms of salvation, becoming the image of God also would be an appropriate use of “glory.”
[2] Reference has been lost. I have it on a sheet of paper in my sermon illustrations file in my own handwriting, indicating that I heard it somewhere rather than read it.