THE LAST RIVER MILE

The Jesus-following movement in the United States is at a point of crisis/opportunity. What it means to be “Christian” appears to be up for grabs, and extremely different theological and political viewpoints are doing the grabbing. For the sake of our primary tasks (Matthew 22:36-40 and Matthew 28:19) we need clarity. In that spirit, if Jesus-followers are “saved” and are seeking to “save” others, what does that really mean?

Much church history in North America has been built around what essentially is a reward/punishment theology. Heaven is the reward, and hell is the punishment. All of us deserve hell, and there’s nothing we can do of our own effort to avoid it. However, Jesus has taken upon himself the punishment due us. Say the “sinner’s prayer” and say yes to Jesus, and we get the reward instead of the punishment. Surely this is a dimension of what it means to follow Jesus. However, it is far from the totality of it.

English speaking people translate two words as “hell” in the New Testament of the Bible, primarily. Gehenna literally refers to the perpetually burning place of refuse placed far outside of the city of Jerusalem. Hades is a Greek concept, having nothing to do with Jewish cosmology. It simply means the underworld, or the place of the dead. The primary combined meaning is separation and lifelessness. Punishment can be inferred, but it’s mostly about being apart from life and without life.

Couple this with the two words used most often to express being “saved.” They are forms of the Greek words soter and sozo. They are words which are more about health than about reward and punishment. For example, Simon Peter uses the latter in describing the Body of Christ’s mission. (See Acts 4:12.) Sozo literally means to be made whole, to be healed, and/or to be protected from danger. It’s not dominated by a sense of avoiding punishment. It’s more about rescue from a present circumstance than about avoiding a future one.

Finally, there’s the concept of ransom in describing who and what Jesus is and what Jesus does. (See Matthew 20:28, Mark 10:45, and I Timothy 2:6. Ransom had particular meaning in relation to bond-slavery, and refers to the price of release from bonding. It’s more about liberation than about avoiding punishment.

None of this negates the reality of eternity. Nor does it eliminate seeking heaven and avoiding hell as real dimensions of the Jesus experience. But reducing being saved to the ticket to heaven/get out of hell card thing is to hamstring the full power of what a crucified and risen Jesus means. Salvation is more relational than situational. (In addition, keeping it about reward/punishment can be used more as a tool to control people than as an opportunity to love them with Christ-like love. But that’s a topic for another post…)

What would it be like if Jesus followed a heart-felt urgency to bring the healing, wholeness, and liberation of Jesus to lost, lonely, marginalized people, rather than just dangling reward and punishment in front of them?

I’ll see you around the next bend in the river.