JESUS SAVES

JESUS SAVES

NOT AN INDIVIDUAL ETHIC  

In the 2^nd. Century, the version of Christianity called Gnosticism focused on the salvation of the individual soul from the body. The soul needed saving since it had fallen into the body by mistake or mischief. According to the Gnostics, only spirit is good; matter is bad. So the spirit, as a “spark” of divinity, had to be awakened to realize its true being, and set free from the shackles of the body in order to return to the pure light, which is Christ. The Gnostics had no time for the Incarnation, since the divine goodness could not be associated with evil matter. So they had little good to say about ordinary human life or about social institutions. Their point of salvation was the “return” of the human soul to its “source.” Even today, certain forms of Christian spirituality concern themselves only with the salvation of the individual, with no care for the wider world at all. Happily, this individualistic mentality is being phased out with better understanding of the interdependence of person and society.

NOT A SOCIAL ETHIC

                A certain type of liberation theology today locates salvation in society, not in the individual. Sinful and alienating social structures keep human beings from realizing their full potential. For instance, patriarchalism, racism, neo-colonialism, and globalisation – these are the systemic patterns of oppression and marginalisation that engender and perpetuate the moral diseases of envy, competition and violence. Salvation will be accomplished when the social order reflects “the rule of God” preached by Jesus and exemplified by his style of life.

                While this idea of social salvation is admirable, it fails to present a clear picture of how God saves, except through the efforts of humans who work for such a social agenda. Nor is it clear how Jesus is Saviour, except as his proclamation of the good news in Nazareth (Luke 4, 16-32) and his Beatitudes (Luke 6, 20-24) sketch the agenda, while his embrace of the outcast suggested how it might be fulfilled. Thus Jesus is seen primarily (and popularly) as the reformer of the social order, and the good news amounts to the vision of a society freed from distinctions and discrimination.

OVERSIMPLYFYING SALVATION               

Escaping our bodies or changing our social structures will not address the real issue of salvation. The real issue of salvation is the disease of the human heart and the distortion of human freedom that we call sin; salvation consists in the restoration of the person to participation of the divine life in Jesus, thereby bringing about the healing of societal structures. Salvation derives, not merely from a philosophical analysis of the human condition or an ideological critique of society, but essentially from the intervention of God in the personal and social life of man and the latter’s experiential surrender to this divine intervention in Jesus Christ.  

RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD

The complex stories of the Bible reveal that salvation was rooted in the history of a long relationship between human beings and the God who created, called, chastised and finally graced them fully in the person of Jesus Christ. Salvation also involves the healing of this relationship that only God can accomplish. God alone saves. The implication of this is that both God and humans are persons, that is, they have the freedom to direct their knowing and love towards others. Only persons can hear and accept, freely give themselves to and accept others, for love means to possess and to be possessed.

The fact that God alone can save implies that human freedom is so enslaved by sin that it cannot direct itself properly. Sin is not a matter of the spirit being polluted by the body, nor is it a matter of people being enslaved by an unjust social order. Sin is a disease of freedom itself that is so profound, so complex, so entrenched, that only God – who has created us as free creatures – has the power, knowledge and love to redirect that freedom rightly. Salvation is not only about getting right knowledge of the self, nor merely about creating the right political order: it is about being in right relationship with God. And only God can make that relationship right.

Good for us, Jesus is God !

JESUS – SAVIOUR GOD

                If God above all is Saviour, and salvation comes from him, then the designation of Jesus in the New Testament as Saviour is of tremendous significance. It means that God saves us through Jesus’ agency. Jesus is God’s prophet, apostle (“sent”), Word, and, most frequently and intimately, God’s Son. Jesus is not only the sort of human that God desired and was pleased with, but also that he is the very human face of God. This is a confession that orthodoxy has defended against all diminutions, for if God has not entered into the fabric of human freedom in order to heal it, then it indeed remains unhealed. Good for us, God has got involved with us in Jesus !

                Precisely through the way in which he was human, Jesus was Saviour. His human freedom expressed the right relationship with God and thus all other relationships as well in an ever-widening pattern of healing and reconciliation reaching even to the structures of human society.

JESUS SAVES  - 2

SELF-EMPTYING

            If Jesus had earned any title to divinity, we should consider an outpouring so total that nothing was left of the merely human. In setting the human to naught, all that remained was the burning flame of the divine. It was the moment when the divinity “absorbed” all that was left of the humanity in pure obedience to preserve it and unite it forever to his Person in the transcendent order. That was the moment when Jesus had the non-dual experience, when he could say, “I and the Father are one,” and “Whoever sees me sees the Father.”  His humanity had become so completely taken up into the divinity, that the Father was no longer an object, related as subject to object, but as subject in subject.

Here Jesus’ humanity came to full flowering; the quality of being human was completely perfected, i.e. that specific quality consisting of the capacity of total self-surrender to the Supreme Being. So it is with us when in union with Jesus we surrender ourselves to the Father. Our individual humanity with all its accumulated excellence is not exposed to futility, but rather consummated in God. This is what the Resurrection of Christ points to.  “Whoever follows Christ the perfect man becomes himself more a man.” “The fact that it is the same God who is at once saviour and creator, Lord of human history and of the history of salvation, does not mean that the autonomy of the creature, of man in particular, is suppressed; on the contrary, in the divine order of things, all this redounds to the restoration and consolidation of this autonomy” (Vatican Council II, Gaudium et Spes, art. 41).

            God may seem to be most absent when we are in pain, but with the denial of every access to pleasure or self-centredness, in the dying which life ultimately imposes on us, there often stirs in the deepest reaches of the soul another kind of life. It will come to flower in those who die gracefully by accepting their mortality and even welcoming it as a stage of growth. When this has been achieved, one has already risen from the dead, even as Jesus did at the moment of his death on the cross. We often notice in the lives of the saints a strange paradox: the deeper their appreciation of the things of God, the greater the darkness they have to endure. As they enter into realms of that union so far beyond the imagination of ordinary believers, the saints can find themselves at times in regions of anguish, which also pass our comprehension. Physically Our Lord’s sufferings were not the most extreme in the history of human torture. But if one takes account of his unique inner spirit, “his unique hypostatic (two natures in one Person) suffering embraces every temporal and eternal suffering possible to a created human being” (Hans Urs von Balthasar). At the same time we might bear in mind another aspect of the paradox of mysticism: even the very bitterness can have its sweetness, and even the very darkness can dazzle.

ASSUMING SINFUL CONDITION

            Now we can begin to understand the sinlessness of Jesus, who was, according to the verse from the Letter to the Hebrews, “in all things like us, sin alone excepted.” This is what distinguishes him from all other human beings, for sin is not part of human nature but a violation of human nature. All sins are “crimes against humanity.” Human nature is, so to speak, the raw material from which a human life has to be built. Human nature is not in itself sinful or sinless, for sin can arise only when the person, the leading edge of the self, chooses to adopt one desire or possibility of action over another. Sin does, indeed, mark our humanity without marring it. On the positive side, sinlessness not does abolish humanity but brings it to the level God intended for it in the new Adam.

            Good for us that the eternal Son of God assumed our nature and, with it, our sinful condition with its arrogance and self-seeking. And when died the Son, so did our pride and arrogance, for everyone knows how the process of dying signals the exhaustion of arrogance quite perceptibly, and, by that token, the advent of the kingdom of heaven. The process of dying is the physical sign of the advent of divine purifying love. That kingdom is now, in every death that we die to sin.