A Reflection on Salvation
By Alan Smigielski
In our Christian Peace Witness fellowship circle, we’ve been engaging the dual questions of “what is salvation and what does it mean to be saved?” So much systematic theology has been built around how these questions have been addressed. Indeed, one could even say entire church polities grew out of the discernment over these questions by diverse communities of believers over twenty centuries.
But what about we who follow Jesus today in this time and in this place? Is salvation a state of being we achieve only with the death of our physical bodies? Is the next life the primary aim of a follower of Jesus? Do we rely on anyone or anything other than God through Jesus to save us? What are we saved from?
All deep and intriguing questions to keep theologians and churchmen (sadly men only in the Catholic tradition) writing and sermonizing about for the forseeable future. The more orthodox among them will strive to craft “answers” which somehow fit cohesively into an impervious edifice of ossified truth that was once the vibrant and passionately felt belief of a distant generation of Christians.
And here we are. Followers of Jesus who are of this time, and of this place. What do we believe passionately? Who or what is our salvation? We cannot accept a First Century cosmology from sacred scripture and reject what God has revealed to us through our intellect. For surely Jesus did not literally ascend into a cloud in Earth’s atmosphere, as in Luke’s stories. Nor could he have ascended somewhere into the physical cosmos. Even at the speed of light, Jesus would not yet have left our own Milky Way galaxy! But the Resurrected One undoubtably ascended into the hearts of humankind, for we still remember him twenty one centuries after his death for what he taught us and for the spirit in which he lived.
The sacred scripture stories are sacred for their insights into the nature of God and the perfect revelation of God in Jesus. Sacred, and yet born from the struggle we all live to be completely and authentically human. And that struggle is written, especially for Jesus followers, in the four canonical Gospels, the faith documents of several disparate early Christian communities. To read them as history or biography or cosmology free of error is to fundamentally misunderstand them and to make them absurd. But to read and pray them to encounter the spirit of Jesus and to help us incarnate his gospel of good news to the world is sublime.
What, you may ask, are the “answers” our Christian fellowship of many different traditions came to? In a word — Jesus. He is our salvation from all of the things in our hearts that keep us from being totally and authentically human animators of the Reign of God in our time. We are saved, healed, and made more whole when we live in his spirit of love for all, even our very enemies.
