salvation

John 10:1-10

It’s an occupational hazard of being a Christian that there are other Christians who think you don’t measure up. One of my favorite cartoons is one of Wiley Miller’s “Non Sequitur” strips in which a man and woman are standing in front of a church, looking at the church sign. The sign says, “The Church of We’re Absolutely Right and Everyone Else Is Wrong.” The man says to the woman, “…And ironically, it’s non-denominational.”

This narrow view of who owns the truth – of who’s in and who’s out with God – has driven many people away from organized religion all together. In Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, a precocious child named Adah muses, “According to my … Sunday-school teachers, a child is denied entrance to heaven merely for being born in the Congo rather than, say, north Georgia, where she could attend church regularly… This was a sticking point in my own little march to salvation: admission to heaven is gained by the luck of the draw. At age of five I raised my … hand in Sunday school to point out this problem to Miss Betty Nagy. Getting born within earshot of a preacher, I reasoned, is entirely up to chance. Would Our Lord be such a hit-or-miss kind of Savior as that? Would he really condemn some children to eternal suffering just for the accident of a heathen birth, and reward others for a privilege they did nothing to earn? … Miss Betty sent me to the corner for the rest of the hour to pray for my own soul while kneeling on grains of uncooked rice. When I finally got up with sharp grains imbedded in my knees I found, to my surprise, that I no longer believed in God.”

This passage from Chapter 10 of John’s Gospel seems at first glance to be one of those “I am the only way” texts that people have relied upon to set Jesus up as a hit-or-miss savior. “I am the gate,” says Jesus. “If anyone enters through me, he shall be saved and shall find pasture.” This is pretty unequivocal. Christ is the gate. I think what’s important about this statement, and all of Jesus’ statements to this effect in the Gospels, is just that: HE is the gate. Christ is the gate. We, on the other hand, are not the gate, nor are we the gatekeepers. Back in the ‘80’s there was a nightclub in Manhattan called Studio 54. It was famous in part because bouncers stood by the door with a clipboard, looking over the crowd outside to decide who looked cool enough to be admitted. When it comes to salvation, we are not like the bouncers at Studio 54. It is Christ’s job to decide who is saved and on what basis, and for what reasons. It is not our job. If you don’t remember anything else about this passage, remember that it isn’t our job, it isn’t the job of any human being or group of human beings, to decide or even to worry about who is or isn’t saved.

Perhaps more importantly, though, Jesus doesn’t say what he means by “saved.” The traditional assumption, like Adah’s assumption in The Poisonwood Bible, is that he’s referring to an afterlife; that those who are “saved” go to heaven after they die, and those who are not, well, something else happens. But Jesus isn’t talking about heaven here. In Greek and Roman politics of Jesus’ day, kings and emperors were described as “good shepherds” who promote and provide a life of security and abundance for the empire’s subjects. John consistently presents Jesus as an opponent to imperial rule, so much so that he is killed for his opposition to Caesar. Biblical scholar Warren Carter writes that this description of Jesus in John 10 mirrors the role of the emperor as a ruler who keeps secure borders, a warrior who saves the people from attack or economic harm, and a benefactor who offers provision and even abundance. But unlike the emperor, Jesus is a true good shepherd, one who genuinely seeks to protect human lives from the thieves and bandits in imperial leadership. In the Roman world where 70 to 80 percent of the population was food insecure, protection from theft and the image of a green pasture was a poignant promise. So John’s Jesus offers not heaven in an afterlife, but a critique of the Roman Empire, which claimed (as reported in the writings of Philo, Josephus, Tacitus, and others) to bring wholeness and wellbeing to society, while its structures actually brought sickness and poverty to most of its subjects.

In other words, Jesus means it quite literally when he says, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). When imagining Jesus as “the gate” (John 10:7, 9), it’s easy to think of the gate as penning in the sheep and restricting their movements. However, the purpose of the gate is to protect the sheep from those death-dealing forces in the Roman world, and to provides access for the sheep to the pasture (John 10:9). Rather than a hit-or-miss savior obsessed with our eternal souls, this passage shows us a savior concerned with our well-being: our health, our wholeness, our shalom. Not after we die, but here and now, in this life.

Resources:
Wiley Miller, “Non Sequitur,” in the San Francisco Chronicle, March 15 (year unknown).
Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible (New York: HarperPerenniel, 1998).
Warren Carter, “Jesus the Good Shepherd: John 10 as Political Rhetoric,” in Come and Read: Interpretive Approaches to the Gospel of John, ed. Alicia Myers and Lindsey S. Jodrey (Lanham, MD: Fortress Academic, 2020).
Laura Holmes, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/fourth-sunday-of-easter/commentary-on-john-101-10-7
Lindsey Scott, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/fourth-sunday-of-easter/commentary-on-john-101-10-5

Acts 2:14a, 36-41

This passage in Acts reports that three thousand people joined the Christian movement as a result of one sermon – a very humbling statistic for any preacher. In contrast, where I live, if you confess to being a Christian you’re likely to get funny looks. Recently I learned there are people describing themselves as Christians who say empathy is toxic, a means of manipulating people’s emotions to accomplish a “liberal” agenda. Yikes. No wonder we get funny looks.

At first blush, it seems that the words of Peter’s Pentecost sermon would be the last thing we’d say to people who already think we Christians are curiosities at best, loathsome at worst. “Repent, and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven … Save yourselves from this corrupt generation,” preaches Peter. It isn’t only our un-churched friends and neighbors who are uncomfortable with that kind of language. A pastoral intern I worked with called words like these – repent, sins, save – “stained-glass words.” They are churchy words, words that have been trivialized in our culture, shrunken into something simple and even punitive when they have a deeper, richer, more life-affirming and more hopeful meaning than most people outside the faith, and many within it, assume.

Sin might be the scariest of these words. Maybe it’s easiest to think about sin in the context of another of these stained-glass words, repent. In Scripture, repent is not feeling really sorry for what you’ve done, nor is it feeling ashamed of the horrible person you are. In the Hebrew Bible, to repent means to return to God, to reconnect with God. According to this definition of repent, sin is being disconnected from God. This disconnection happens when, individually and corporately, we ignore God, turn from God, don’t take God into account. Which we all do, at least some of the time.

Repent has the same meaning in the New Testament, with one nuance. The Greek roots of the word combine to mean “go beyond the mind that you have.” Go beyond the mind shaped by culture to the mind that you have in Christ. In the New Testament, repentance is the path of reconnection, the path of transformation.

Salvation simply means to be saved from our predicament. What is our predicament? Peter says we need to be saved from this corrupt or crooked generation. These words have a hellfire and brimstone sound to them, but what they require us to do is look at sin as something that surrounds us. Sin isn’t just personal peccadillos but is pervasive in the structures and systems of society. When Peter says to the crowd, “this Jesus whom you crucified,” he isn’t talking to the people who hammered the nails into Jesus’ hands, or even to the crowd who shouted, “Crucify him!” He’s not looking for particular people to blame. He’s referring to this systemic aspect of sin. We are not all equally blameworthy for the systems of violence, injustice, and death that surround our personal lives, our society, and our world. But we are all caught up in vicious cycles of violence and injustice, whether as victims or victimizers or some of both.

That is our predicament. This predicament looks different for different people. We can look around us and see victims of obvious violence and oppression: victims of war, punitive immigration policies, racism or sexism or homophobia, and we can say, yes, those people are in a predicament. Those people need to be saved. But for others, the predicament might feel like something’s missing or wrong or broken. Your daughter is getting a divorce. Your son is trapped in an addiction. You’re in debt, you hate your job, your relationships give you more pain than joy. You can’t get off the hamster wheel of getting ahead or spending or worrying. You’re afraid that this is all there is.

Peter’s listeners are “cut to the heart.” Perhaps the story of the crucifixion has opened their eyes to their predicament and to their need for rescue from all that led to the crucifixion: empire, domination, injustice, the fear of losing privilege and power. Or perhaps they’re overwhelmed with the good news of great joy that God is willing to die at the hands of God’s people and then come back again, not to make them pay, but to give them more love.

It turns out it isn’t Peter’s preaching that saves three thousand people. What saves them, what saves all of us, is the story itself. A better translation of “save yourselves” is “let yourselves be saved.” Salvation is an experience more than a doctrine; it is that moment when you feel cut to the heart, and you have a clarity about God’s love that both reveals your predicament and empowers you to address it. When the people ask Peter what they should do next, it isn’t to get step-by-step instructions for salvation – it’s to respond to what they have already received by the grace of God through Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit. Peter says, “Be baptized.” Baptism is just the symbol of that new power and new life.

Grace, baptism, the power of the Holy Spirit. More stained-glass words. This story in Acts is about God’s mission in Christ to us as well as to Peter’s First Century audience. We are included in the promise he proclaims: “For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls.” But it is also about God’s mission through us. As Christ’s disciples, we are given the task of spreading the Good News of the promise we have received – the promise, as Frederick Buechner put it, “that Jesus lives on among us not just as another haunting memory, but as the outlandish, holy and invisible power of God working not just through the sacraments [of baptism and the Lord’s Supper] but in countless hidden ways to make even slobs like us loving and whole beyond anything we could conceivably pull off ourselves.”

That is the Good News. How do we spread it? How do we do that in a culture that not only doesn’t like the word salvation, but much of the time, is oblivious to any predicament calling for it? A culture that often seems to be actively working to maintain our predicament, even to the extent of treating empathy as toxic – unless, of course, that empathy is directed toward people in their own group, and toward efforts that support the structures that privilege that group and deny the humanity of other groups?

At a church I served, carved into the wood on the inside of the pulpit where no one but the preacher could see it was a verse from John’s gospel: “Sir, we would see Jesus” (John 12:21). That reminder is not just for preachers. It is for all of us. Individually but even more, as the church, the body of Christ in the world, it is our job to show people Jesus. To show them the loving, empathetic, compassionate Jesus who relentlessly sided with outsiders and the downtrodden, who forgave sinners and preached peace, who stood up to empire rather than collaborating with it, whose cross tells us how far God’s love will go to bring us back to God. Who “lives on among us not just as another haunting memory, but as the outlandish, holy and invisible power of God working … in countless hidden ways to make even slobs like us loving and whole beyond anything we could conceivably pull off ourselves.”

When George Buttrick was the chaplain at Harvard, a student came to his office and announced that he didn’t believe in God. Buttrick responded, “Sit down and tell me what kind of God you don’t believe in. I probably don’t believe in that God either.” I wonder what I’d hear if I asked one of my neighbors who is likely to give me a funny look, “Tell me what it is you think Christians believe and do that is so threatening. I probably don’t believe those things either. Tell me what kind of church you mistrust. I’m willing to bet that I don’t go to that kind of church. Tell me.”

Resources:

Marcus J. Borg, The Heart of Christianity (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancico, 2003).

Daniel L. Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1991).

Debbie Blue, “Reflections on the Lectionary,” in The Christian Century, March 25, 2008.

William H. Willimon, Interpretation: Acts (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1988).

Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew (New York: Walker and Co., 1995).

Solvitur Ambulando

Putting one foot in front of the other on the path of faith

Abundant Life

Cut to the Heart