Who Will Be Saved?. William H. Willimon
Teresa, Martin Luther King, and Gandhi politely gave way as Jesus moved to the extreme right.
The speaker looked out on the assembled youth and exclaimed, "Do you people not listen? Did you not pay attention when I read the scripture? I'll read this one more time."
He flipped open his Bible and began to read, "At the right time Christ died for the ungodly," and as he read Jesus sheepishly moved away from Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King, across the stage, over to where Osama bin Laden and the others received him.
When he finished reading from Romans, the speaker said into the shocked silence, "Now, is there anybody here with the guts to come up and stand with Jesus and to walk with Jesus into your school on Monday morning? Anybody here open to that sort of salvation?"
Dozens of youth streamed forward, eager to give themselves to the one who, while we were still weak, at the right time, gave himself for the ungodly.
Spoken toward the end of Scripture, this could have been said every step of the way from the first, "I will be their God and they will be my children" (Rev 21:7). The once ungodly will be the godly. Salvation is when God finally gets what God wants in creating the world. Salvation means finally, safely to arrive where you have always been intended by God to be. One might expect God's restored good creation to be a redeemed garden to make up for the paradise we botched up in Genesis. Instead, Revelation says that God's crowning act of restoration is communitarian: New Jerusalem, a populous, raucously singing city, rather than a serene garden. You get this sort of result from a God who loves a crowd:
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. Nothing accursed will be found there any more. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever. (Rev 22:1-5)
CHAPTER TWO
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THE EROS OF GOD
Who will be saved?" is not as interesting a question as "Who saves?" That which makes Christian salvation counterintuitive, countercultural, and strange is the God who saves.
I saw this in the great mosaic apse at the church in Monreale, Sicily, a wonder of the medieval world. There, presiding over a dazzling array of jewellike depictions of the story of our salvation is Christ Pantocrator—Christ, Creator of all. Having seen photographs of that apse, I expected to be bedazzled by the Byzantine otherness of Christ, Christ the Judge of humanity. And yet the Christ I saw was Christ of the wide embrace, hands outstretched, reaching out from his majesty as if to encircle the whole church, the whole creation in his reach. All the stories of Scripture—told with such vitality and wonder in the mosaics of Monreale—are vignettes of this grand vision of a God who is stubbornly determined to have all of humanity.
Leaving the church at Monreale, a street vendor held up a trinket with Christ's picture stamped upon it. "Don't you want to take a little Jesus with you, mister?" he asked. No, we don't take Christ with us; he takes us places.
God's intended oneness, because of our sin, ended in a crucifixion; yet even in the Crucifixion, God is not thwarted. God creatively weaves such tragedy into God's purposes thereby remaking our sin into God's great triumphant embrace. "If we are faithless, he remains faithful—for he cannot deny himself," says 2 Timothy 2:13. The best modifier of this God is "love."
This God seems to have a desire to have us that is erotic in intensity. We make a mistake to separate agape from eros in speaking of the love that is experienced as the Trinity. Who is the lover in the Song of Songs?
Upon my bed at night
I sought him whom my soul loves;
I sought him, but found him not;
I called him, but he gave no answer.
I will rise now and go about the city,
in the streets and in the squares;
I will seek him whom my soul loves."
I sought him, but found him not.
The sentinels found me,
as they went about in the city.
"Have you seen him whom my soul loves?"
Scarcely had I passed them,
when I found him whom my soul loves.
I held him, and would not let him go
until I brought him into my mother's house,
and into the chamber of her that conceived me. (Song 3:1-4)
The church has traditionally taught that this Hebrew love song, which at first appears to be the erotic thoughts of two heated adolescents, is actually an allegory of the love of Christ for his church. Isn't it scandalous that the closest analogy for the love of God in Christ is the infatuated, sensual ramblings of two adolescents consumed with lust—I mean love—for each other? Love is costly, consuming, and fanatical, says the Song of Solomon. Apparently, God has got this thing for us almost like lust. Just before being hung by the Nazis in Tegel Prison, Bonhoeffer wrote to his friend Bethge that he had been meditating on, of all the books of the Bible, the Song of Solomon and found there much strong comfort that "nothing calamitous can happen" when we are loved by such an "ardent, passionate, sensual love that is portrayed there."1 Nothing calamitous—even as catastrophic as the Nazis—can happen to the person who has been ravished, claimed, embraced by such salvific love.
It is scandalous too that the New Testament dares to call the poor old church Christ's "bride." The church is invited by God to do what husbands and wives do in marriage. The bride nervously awaits the full consummation of Christ's love, recipient of a kind of arranged marriage. She is besmirched, unworthy of such adoration by one so pure and good. Still, she knows that she is betrothed, spoken for by the Savior who will keep his promise to fulfill his passionate intention to make love to sinners (Rev 21:2, 9). Jesus looks upon the poor old church the way a proper groom looks upon his bride.
God erotically risks, desires union with humanity. So God comes close enough to be not only God for us but also God with us. In what biblical writers call "the fullness of time" God steps up, steps in, and steps out in a most amazing overture of love. The God who was from the first so joyously creative extends that divine creativity to become Incarnate. A defiant young woman (Mary) submits to be a fellow conspirator in God's dramatic, miraculous move on humanity (Luke 1:46-55). Swept up in God's invasion of God's world, she bears a son with the revealing name, "God is with us" (Matt 1:23).
Think of all those images in John's Gospel where Jesus stresses intimacy. He not only comes to us but "abides" with us. He is the shepherd, and we are the sheep; he the vine, we the branches. Bread, we are to feed upon him. He is the Water of Life who eternally quenches our thirst. Almost never does this God seek simple agreement or correct thinking. God seeks us, all of us. God's goal for us is intimacy, indwelling. Not I, "but . . . Christ who lives in me," said Paul (Gal 2:20).
In Islam, at least from my amateurish reading of the Qur'an, there is this constant distancing of God, apparently as a means of honoring God. The God who is rendered in Islam is noble and exalted, at some remove from the world, God as absolute and majestic as a god can get. You would have to know the incarnational story that I've just narrated to know why that's a problem. Christians don't know that God is sovereign, noble, exalted, absolute, high, and lifted up. We know that God is Immanuel, love with us, for us.
By the way, we do not take it as a compliment that Islam regards Jesus as a great prophet. Jesus is a prophet, but prophets, even the most truthful and courageous of them, cannot save. They can announce