Immortality is attractive because it acts as if eternality is something that we possess as human beings. Resurrection is humbling because it is pure gift to utterly mortal beings like us. Immortality usually assumes continuity in the next life with this life—if we enjoyed rose gardening in this life, we'll get to garden in the next. Resurrection promises a whole new world, a radical discontinuity with the pain and frustration of life in this world, discontinuity that occurs because we are now near God in a healed, restored, wonderfully refashioned world.
Why does my church talk so little about salvation? We preachers speak before people who neither conceive of themselves as dying down in the ditch nor know a God who is able to stoop, a God who not only loves to heal, but loves even to raise the dead. Able to solve most of our real problems by ourselves, fairly well off and well fixed, working out regularly and watching our diets, we come to church only for helpful suggestions for saving ourselves. As Jesus would have said of someone in our circumstances, "You've already had your reward" (Luke 16:9-18).
I'm reminded of that dramatic moment in the Exodus when Moses tells Israel "stand firm, and see the deliverance that the LORD will accomplish" (Exod 14:13). "Thus the LORD saved Israel that day" (14:30). Note that all that is required of us is to stand and to see. The rest is God's. God forbid that this book be written or read as just another of our salvation projects. Better that these pages be part of our standing, seeing, and adoring the salvation of the Lord.
God may be pro nobis, for us, but God is also extra nos, outside us. Whether we know it, like it, respond to it or not, something has occurred in Jesus Christ that is not determined by us nor limited by the boundaries of our imagination. We must not make the effectiveness of God's work on the cross and in the Resurrection contingent on human responsiveness. The reality of salvation by Christ precedes any human possibility of salvation in Christ. Redemption is an accomplished fact, pro nobis. But God's determination fully to have us and completely to love us makes this an event also in nobis. Though reconciliation with God is a gift of God, it has yet to be fully accomplished until God gets all that God wants—to have us, all of us, in communion. Salvation is the good news, "Become who, by the grace of God, you really are" rather than the bad news, "Try hard to be someone who, with enough strenuous spiritual effort, you might eventually be."
Thus there is a finished and completed quality about the work of God on the cross. Yet by the grace of God, there is "more and even more" as well, as we find ourselves drawn daily into the sphere of such love, as we grow in our ability to return some of the love that has so completely, fully loved us. Salvation is not a project to be done by us but a gift to be received by us. Gratitude, responsiveness becomes a fundamental motif of the Christian life. Although our "yes" does not accomplish our salvation, our little yes is given a place in the fulfillment of God's great "Yes!" to us in the cross and resurrection of Christ. And the Wesleyan in me suspects that our "yes" will rarely be a one-time, once and for all "yes."
God's love desires not only our assent but also our participation. Jesus doesn't just want us to adore him but to follow him. We are told by Jesus that we are to take up his cross daily (Luke 9:23). Every day we must wake up, jump out of bed, and be surprised by the scope of our salvation in Christ. Our "yes" thus becomes "yes" again-and-again, more-and-more as we grow in grace. As Barth said, we are all "amateurs" when it comes to our faith in Christ. We keep having these fine moments of recognition and recognition in which we once again are "surprised by joy" (C. S. Lewis). In the Lord's Prayer, note that we again and again, as if for the first time, ask God for the gift of our daily bread.
The smug "I'm saved, how about you?" betrays the grace of God as a daily, ongoing, continually awakening, and surprising gift of emergent awareness. We are saved by the completed work of Christ, yet it is also true that we are graciously, moment-by-moment being saved. We thus may joyfully anticipate that time, that place when we shall be fully "saved," closer to the heart of God than we ever dreamed or dared imagine. Paul says that he, and indeed the whole creation, is "groaning" in agony for such complete redemption (Rom 8:22).
If you've never known what it's like to be offered the gift of love by another person, I'm too poor a poet to describe it for you. But if you have been so loved, you'll know what the church is pointing to when it describes the grace of God as unmerited, life-giving, life-transforming gift, almost like the eros of two adolescents.
The church has always struggled to interact divine initiative (God's initiating "Yes") with human agency (human responding "yes"), God's objective work on the cross and our subjective response. Christ's presence in the Eucharist, the church has said, is always valid and efficacious, no matter how poorly performed by the priest, though not always beneficial to the recipient because of the demeanor of the recipient. It is this objective quality of God's work that has been smothered in our contemporary subjectivity. North American evangelical Christianity has unfortunately tended to speak of salvation in a way that makes it sound as if it were a psychological experience that we have rather than a work that God does. Barth said that our reconciliation to God is a present actuality, a fact that has been established by the work of God, not something that we think we have experienced.
Salvation comes to the empty-handed. "Just as I am without one plea, but that thy blood was shed for me," as we sing. The church is not here to produce a product—to make disciples, produce converts, or win people to Christ (note the capitalist metaphors). God in Christ is already doing that. We are simply (did I say simply?) to point to this particular God, to testify to what has happened in the invasion of our humanity by this God, and to show the world what life looks like when a life submits to the realty of Christ. We have been shown something that much of the world is waiting to see, even when the world doesn't yet know for whom it awaits.
Once upon a time I went out to a small rural church to baptize a twelve-year-old boy whom a pastor had been instructing in the faith. I was happy to oblige until the pastor said, "Jeremy very much wants to be immersed. Can you do that?"
"Er, uh, sure. I can do that," I said, unwilling to admit that I had rarely baptized anyone by immersion.
I arrived at the church that Sunday morning, and sure enough, there was the pastor standing on the front steps of the little church with a small boy.
"Jeremy, this is the bishop," the pastor said proudly. "It's an honor for you to be baptized by the bishop."
Young Jeremy looked me over and said only, "They tell me you don't do many of these. I'd feel better if we had a run-through beforehand."
"That was just what I was going to suggest," I said.
We went into the church's fellowship hall where the pastor showed me their newly purchased font, dressed up by a carpenter in the congregation, surrounded by pots of flowers. Jeremy said, "After you say the words, then you take my hand and lead me up these steps, and do you want me to take off my socks?"
"Er, uh, you can leave them on if you want," I said.
Well, we had a wonderful service that Sunday. I preached on baptism, the choir sang a baptismal anthem then the whole congregation recessed into the fellowship hall and gathered around the font. I went through the baptismal ritual. Then I asked Jeremy if he had anything to say to the congregation before his baptism.
"Yes, I do. I just want to say to all of you that I'm here today because of you. When my parents got divorced, I thought my world was over. But you stood by me. You told me the stories about Jesus. And I just want to say to you today thanks for what you did for me. I intend to make you proud as I'm going to try to live my life the way Jesus wants."
Though I'm now weeping profusely (Jeremy asked, as I led him up the steps into the pool, "Are you going to be OK?"), I baptized Jeremy and