But God had another story, and she had to learn it if she was to learn Israel’s story so that it led to her Son in the way God designed it. She had to go back and listen again to what Simeon meant when he said a sword would pierce her own heart; she had to go back in time to Jerusalem when after traveling an entire day, perhaps all the way to Scythopolis, a Roman city over which stood the tel on which Saul was brutally exhibited, she and Joseph realized Jesus wasn’t with them. So they retraced their steps, and having climbed up to the temple, they found the young messianic boy teaching the leaders of Israel. At that time, he taught Mary that he had to be about his Father’s business, and Mary began to ponder what kind of boy he might be. But she knew because she had heard the angel and had sung the song and seen the miracles. She also had to go back and think of how he first responded to the request for more wine. Instead of saying “Sure, mom, check the clay pots,” Jesus said, “Not now.” At that moment Mary surrendered to Jesus’s plans. There were, in other words, hints, but nothing was as clear as this silliness of attracting hookers and toll collectors, of hanging with fishermen and family members, and of exorcising demons and troubling the Pharisees.
Mary had to learn a different story, and eventually she did, but it may not have been until her son was publicly and humiliatingly crucified in Jerusalem, no doubt stark naked, with a mocking title over his head that Mary gained the chutzpah to believe. When did she learn? We don’t know, but by the time Jesus was raised and exalted, she had come to terms with the story more completely because she was with the followers of Jesus in Acts 1 and she was there at Pentecost, and she no doubt played a role in the early fellowship in Jerusalem, and it was no doubt in part from her that Luke was able to tell the stories of Luke 1–2 and that one of her other sons, James, was able to lead the church in Jerusalem.
What was the story she had to learn? That God’s story is Jesus’s story. That making sense of Jesus’s story is the way to make sense of God’s story in this world. That her son, Jesus, was indeed the Messiah, but that he was a Messiah who would reign not by force or by coercion or by violence, but by suffering under the force, coercion, and violence of the political, military, and religious leadership of Jerusalem. But that God, her God, could raise her son back to life and exalt him above every other name, and that this story, the story of living faithfully, dying unjustly but redemptively, and being raised was the story that needed to be learned.
It’s told over and over in the pages of the Bible, beginning of course with Adam, and Abraham, and Joseph, and Moses, and David, and the prophets, who in their own ways anticipate the fulfillment of God’s story in the story of Jesus. But we can’t become gospelers until we learn this story the way Mary had to learn it. When we do, the gospel comes alive and we can expand beyond the reductive boundaries of the gospel that so many of us learned, and learn to embrace the kind of gospel Jesus and the apostles preached.
Indwell the Story
Learning the story is the first part. It is when we indwell the story that we, as the church, become the gospel by embodying it. I’d like to take Paul the apostle, and especially as seen in Galatians, to illustrate what I mean by “indwelling” the story.
We will assume the conversion story of Paul in Acts 9. What we find is that Paul’s encounter with Jesus, the resurrected, vindicated, and now speaking-to-Paul Jesus, was a one-of-a-kind explosive encounter and from that point on, Paul reframed Israel’s story as a story that was fulfilled in Jesus. Allow me, though, to retrace steps by saying that Paul’s conversion story is not the story of “how he got saved” so much as how he came to the conviction that Jesus was Messiah. Anyone who has studied the stories of Jews who convert to Jesus know that the conversion story is essentially one of exploring whether or not Jesus is Messiah.8 That, I am contending, is the archetypal gospel story and gospel response.
How then did Paul “indwell” this story? He not only had learned the story inside and out, as the many references to the Old Testament and his exegesis of the Old Testament reveal, but he had learned to indwell this story. I want to draw our attention to one text, Galatians 2:15–21, which can be read as the central theological text of the entire letter.
We who are Jews by birth and not sinful Gentiles know that a person is not justified by the works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law, because by the works of the law no one will be justified.
“But if, in seeking to be justified in Christ, we Jews find ourselves also among the sinners, doesn’t that mean that Christ promotes sin? Absolutely not! If I rebuild what I destroyed, then I really would be a lawbreaker.
“For through the law I died to the law so that I might live for God. I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!”
For our purposes the opening lines of verses 15–16 are nothing short of monumental. Here is Paul, a Jew, dragging Peter, also a Jew, into the same circle, and openly confesses that justification before God comes by faith and not by adherence to the Torah. However, one comprehends Judaism and Paul’s relationship to Judaism, and how one comprehends justification, whether it is exclusively a soteriological word or also an ecclesiological word, what matters here is that Paul indwells this story of Jesus as the saving story. I take the “we” and the “I” of this entire passage to be about the Jewish experience (and not the gentile experience).
The story of Israel has become, in the hands of Paul, the story of Jesus who saves both Jews and gentiles on the basis of faith. The Torah has served its purpose; the Torah that divided the Jew from the gentile has now lost its divisive power. Paul is indwelling this story of a Jew and gentile church, a free and slave church, and a male and female church, and this church’s unity is found 100 percent in Christ alone. (That’s another sola for our Protestant theology: unity in Christ alone.)
Furthermore, Paul personally indwells this story because he’s died with Christ on the cross; so much has the cross become central to Christ and his story that he has climbed Golgotha and died with Christ. Yet more, the life he now lives is a resurrection life; so much has the resurrection penetrated his theology that the very Christian life he now indwells is a resurrection life that taps into the resurrected life of Christ. Thus, “Christ lives in me.”
His entire life is now a Christ-life. That story has so impacted him that his life is now indwelt by Christ and he indwells Christ, and his life is the Christ-life lived out in the Roman Empire for the sake of Christ. Paul’s life is thoroughly gospelized: he has learned the story and he is indwelling the story.
Embody the Story
Enough theory. What about today? How can we embody the gospel today? How can we make the story visible to our communities? I want to suggest that one word will tie this into a coherent whole for us, and that one word is witness. We are called to be witnesses.
But of what? That’s one of our problems. We are witnesses to so many things, perhaps too many things. Let me call attention to American Peoria for a minute. I’m sure that most people know about the Republicans and the Democrats, and you probably know that many evangelicals are Republicans, and if you listen to some—not all, mind you—you would think some evangelicals are witnesses to Republican politics. And we are witnesses also to, for many, a preferred lifestyle. We need to hear again the searching words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, not the least of which would be those found in Matthew 6:25–34, which probe us and say, “You are way too wealthy, you are holding on to too many things, and you are wearing fine clothing and jewelry, and you . . .