Easy as ABC?
The Christian message: Accept, Believe, Confess and go to heaven? Not if you read the Bible, says Andrew Leo…
The Gospel. Quite a central concept to Christianity really, and yet it seems to me that a large number of Christians (including a large number of would be “biblical” Christians) have very little idea what it actually says or means. When someone mentions the Gospel, it is generally assumed that they mean something along the lines of ‘accept Jesus as personal saviour, believe, confess and go to heaven’. Fine, apart from the fact that Jesus was never recorded saying anything remotely like it. Although apparently based on Paul’s writings (notably in Romans) such a gospel is flawed on the basis that it comprehensively distorts Paul’s theology at vital points. This approach raises more problems than it solves. What relevance does this mechanistic gospel of salvation by faith have to our relationship with God here and now? Is it all about “heaven after we die”? What is its relevance to trade justice, conflict in Iraq and the Holy Land, and environmental destruction? Above all, what relevance does this gospel have f or our hurting world? Very little, it would seem. We, as Christians, seem to have become much more interested in escaping from the world rather than redeeming it. This is a tragedy. Could it be that we have misunderstood the very thing we are called to proclaim to the world?
Let’s get stuck in straight away by asking what does Jesus mean by the Gospel? The answer is, quite simply, “repent, the kingdom of God, the saving, liberating rule of God is at hand”. Nothing about “take my righteousness and I’ll take your sin”. Nothing about “accept me as personal saviour and go to heaven”. Nothing about “God’s mad, would rather like to smite all of you but will content himself with smiting me instead so you can go to heaven”. It was a message about the in-breaking kingdom of God, a kingdom available to everyone. On a personal level, Jesus’ mes- sage was that everyone can begin to be saved from the corruption and decay in our own lives through aligning themselves with God’s in-breaking kingdom. Through following Jesus’s teachings in the Sermon on the Mount on lust, anger and conceit, we can begin to wipe off the crap from the image of God within us. We can become fully human, fully who God intended us to be. God’s purposes are bigger than individual human lives; his kingdom cannot be confi ned. What got Jesus into further trouble was that he applied his message on a social level too. He didn’t say ‘God’s kingdom is here, you might like to give it a try if you like that sort of thing’, rather he proclaimed it as a reality to the world. This proclamation of the kingdom therefore stood in direct challenge to all other kingdoms of the world that claimed people’s allegiance — including the dominant Roman kingdom of the time. He was not only taking on the Jewish establishment, but the Roman Empire itself. In the end, this proved too radical for the authorities and people of the time. They had to get rid of this man somehow — he was causing too much trouble. Eventually, their conspiracies and plotting enabled this to happen and Jesus was put to death. And yet, even then, with all the injustice of this, he refused to fight back. He healed the soldier who came to arrest him, and he forgave the thief dying next to him. He cried out on the cross ‘Father forgive them’. The world tried to break Jesus, yet he would not be reduced to the level of the world; all the time he remained consistent to his message of fighting evil with love. Even as he hung there on the cross, soaking up all the pain that the world could throw at him, he would not fight back with violence.
Yet this wasn’t the end of the story. Jesus’ magnificent resurrection on Easter Sunday vindicates his message — love does eventually triumph over evil. At the time, the cross was highly symbolic of Roman power — a chilling reminder of what happened if you went against the Roman Empire. In Jesus, God takes on this sort of brutal power, symbolised by the cross, and defeats it decisively through love. God’s power is of a different sort — it is non-violent and non-coercive power — and it wins hands down. As Paul puts it: ‘having disarmed the powers and authorities, he [God] made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross’. The kingdom of God does not come through evil, violence, coercion and retribution like the kingdoms of this world, but through self-sacrifice, service and love . Echoing Jesus’ message of ‘turn the other cheek’, the resurrection decisively demonstrates God’s victory, through love, over the powers of evil, sin, death and decay. Through executing judicial sentence on sin in Je sus, God breaks down all the barriers between himself and his creation. He demonstrates his faithfulness to his initial covenant with Israel (his covenant justice) when he promised to put the world to rights, because he has at last done exactly that — dealt with sin decisively. The turning point of the war between evil and love has taken place. Love wins hands down.
So, what then does Paul mean when he talks about Gospel? According to Tom Wright it can be summed up in three words: Jesus is Lord. The root of the word Gospel can be traced back to two separate sources, both of which would have influenced Paul. In Greek culture, the word “euangelon” (which is translated as Gospel or good news in most Bibles) is a regular imperial term which meant the announcement of a new King or the accession to the throne of a new Emperor. In the Old Testament, we first come across the word in Isaiah, when it is used to denote the good news that one day, YHWH will install himself as the true King of the world . Paul combines both meanings. Therefore, for Paul, the Gospel (the Good News) is that the one true God (YHWH) has brought the long and torturous story of Israel to completion through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah. God’s reign on earth (the kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed) is thus established through Jesus, who is now King of the whole World. The Gospel i s the royal announcement that a new king has arrived, namely King Jesus.
The Gospel declaring Jesus as king redeems the world. It doesn’t assure us we’re escaping and going to heaven after we die. In fact, both Paul and Jesus have very little to say about that (not that you would know it from the obsession amongst contemporary Christians with going to heaven). The true hope for the world is a new creation free of corruption — a new creation we will all take part in through our resurrection bodies, new bodies that will finally get rid of all the corruption and decay in our own lives. The kingdom of God (God’s saving rule), when fully implemented on that exciting day, will see that new creation come. It will be a day when every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord. For now though, it has fallen to us Christians to be God’s light to the world: a blessing to the world, bringing the Gospel (God’s kingdom) to the nations as we work towards that final new creation. Fairly obviously, that new creation doesn’t just apply to us individually, but to the whole world. We should be just as interested in unfair trading practices, environmental problems, unjust wars, poverty, AIDS, corrupt governments and greedy corporations as we are in our own private lives. The Gospel is a powerful, adventurous and hugely exciting message about the fact that the world will one day be put to rights. The question now is what are we going to do about it?
For further reading on Jesus’ Gospel of the Kingdom see Steve Chalke The Lost Message of Jesus and Brian McLaren’s The Secret Message of Jesus.
For further reading on Paul see Tom Wright’s What St Paul Really Said and his extensive commentary series Paul for Everyone.