Jesus Saves!
Mark 10
Colossians 2.8-15
Preached Canberra Baptist Church 22nd July 2007

Jesus saves! These words summon up for me (and for many people) memories of bad preaching and worse jokes.  They have become a cliché – a cliché associated with simplistic religion and earnest appeals. This is very sad, for the words embody the wonderful and central truth of Christian faith. Shot through the whole of the New Testament is the remarkable assertion that through Jesus Christ, human beings now experience transformed existence. Isn’t that the heart of the gospel message? That’s what the simple announcement that “Jesus saves!” intends to convey. Unfortunately, however, the words have become associated with a particular style of proclamation and a particular doctrinal/theological content that make many people wary and uncomfortable.
In the NT the wonder of Jesus and what Jesus means for human beings who encounter and respond to him is presented with a wide array of concepts and language. It is not as if the Bible itself presents us with one presentation, a single set of concepts about who Jesus is. There are many  titles attributed to him: Lord, Messiah or Christ, Son of God, Son of Man, Rabbi, the Second Adam, John the Baptist, Elijah, the firstborn from the dead, the Pioneer, the author and perfecter of our faith. 
The language and concepts that are used to describe what God has done in and through Jesus are even more diverse:

• the concept of sacrifice and the Jewish cult,
• the concept of redemption and its background in the slave market
• the idea of justification or acquittal with its background of legal argument and judgment
• the great longing for salvation, with its overtones of God’s actions in history to save his people from their enemies in Egypt and Babylon
• reconciliation, and peace-making, bringing together of former enemies in harmony and shalom
• healing and, that through Christ our wounds and illnesses are healed
• fulfillment we are made whole and complete
• restoration and renewal, through the contrast of the Old man and the new man, the first Adam and the second Adam
• ransom and the rescue of captives from bondage
• adoption and various ideas around being made part of a family

Here are just 10 groups of metaphors about the saving work of Jesus from the New Testament - there are others.
The very richness of the Biblical witness is part of our problem: these concepts weave through the Christian tradition, becoming associated with one another. Often they lose their foundations, their primary reference, as the social world changes and they acquire distinctive religious meanings. When was the last time any of you redeemed a household slave, or were set free from slavery yourselves? How many sacrificial animals have you offered for slaughter so far this year? Yet you know the word ‘redemption’ and have heard it used. If I was to preach about “Jesus, our sacrifice” you would not be startled. As the social world of the Bible has faded away, these words and this teaching continue on, being re-interpreted from age to age and given their distinctively religious meanings.
We do need to reflect on this language and what the Bible teaches and make sense of it. There are ways of linking this language together in systems of thinking. The centre of the meaning of Jesus is found in the Cross, and so this theology of what being saved might mean focuses very much on how we understand the Cross and Jesus’ death.
There are different ways of understanding the Cross and its meaning. An excellent series of sermons on the meaning of the Cross has been presented by Dr Thorwald Thorwald and is on the church website. http://www.canbap.org/sermons/sermons_cross.htm
Some people have held that Christian faith requires us to accept a specific theology of the Cross. They believe whenever you are going to talk to others about Jesus and faith you have to give that particular message – a message tied up with specific ideas about atonement. Atonement is the doctrine of what is happening in the death of Jesus on the Cross.  How are we saved? What are we saved from?
Scholars have pointed to up to six doctrines of Atonement – not even I am silly enough to try and cover them all. I want to point to the main elements that are involved and invite you to think about your  experience and thinking about this important topic.
What are we saved from? Death,  judgment, ‘our sins’, Satan?
Scripture affirms there is a fundamental separation between God and human being. This gap, estrangement, blockage. powerlessness, is called by a little word for a big reality. It’s called sin. Not ‘sins’ -naughtiness, individual acts of rebellion or betrayal – but sin (in the singular), a force or power that seems to dominate us or keep us in a particular pattern of life.
This separation from God and the resulting breakdowns in human affairs – betrayal, selfishness, oppression – brings us into a divided engagement with the mystery of God. As God is just, holy, perfect we encounter his justice and holiness. Because of the separation and gap this manifests as judgment and wrath. But we also discover ourselves as the objects of God’s abiding, yearning love. Somehow in the Cross of Christ these three elements: our estrangement and separation, God’s justice and wrath, and God’s deep and wonderful love come together. We are saved from ‘sin’, the compulsive power that seems to hold us in thrall, the impotence to be our best selves, the brokenness of human nature that seems to always involve pain, difficulty and disappointment. And we are somehow renewed, made right, given life in this great act of God.
But how are we saved?  Just how these three elements come together and interact becomes the essence of our theology of the Cross. Some views stress the holiness and justice of God. One such theory is called ‘substitutionary atonement’. This view stresses that on the Cross Christ took our place, suffered our punishment and thus delivered us from punishment and judgment. The classical expression found in Anselm’s book Cur Deus Homo (1098). It is a presentation grounded in the worldview of feudal society when a strictly hierarchical model of social order was pervasive. In such a society a person offering their death in loyalty to their Lord is understandable. In a modern society of free individuals, the idea of God ‘requiring’ the death of Jesus is more difficult to understand. Many are uncomfortable with this approach because it leaves us with an irreconcilable tension between love and justice: justice seems to dominate love, leaving us with a monstrous God, who would demand the death of his own Son.
Against this view was that of Peter Abelard , a teacher at the University of Paris. Abelard’s stressed not the justice, but the love of God revealed in the Cross. He held that we are saved in an act of extravagant love which is given as gift and empowering example, so that we can find through the Cross the power to live ourselves as Christ lived, free from the compulsions of sin.
An older strand of atonement theology in the church has been called the Christus Victor view,  that the Cross was a decisive victory over the powers of sin and the forces of evil. This view invokes military language of combat and victory to describe what has happened in the Cross.  It sees the work of Jesus in his death as broader than just affecting individuals. It is a cosmic victory and the beginning of the new age which is beginning to break into human affairs in Jesus.
Other views of the death of Jesus stressed his life and teaching, so that the Cross was not just some unrelated transaction in the depths of Godhead, but the culmination and seal of the saving action of God already embodied in Jesus’ life and ministry.
In Calvin’s grasp of the meaning of the Cross comes a new twist. He saw the love and the justice of God as being in such radical tension that human beings are almost pre-destined to experience one or the other: we will either experience the Cross as entry into the power of God’s love or we will remain outside that love and encounter the Cross only as judgment and condemnation. This too was hidden in the mysterious purposes of God.
Each of these expresses something of the wonder of the Cross and the great truth that “Jesus saves!” Each have strong points and each raises questions and difficulties. Some people will argue that this is the right one and those ones are false. How do we choose? How do I work out what I believe?
CS Lewis commented in Mere Christianity “You may say that Christ died for our sins. You may say that the Father has forgiven us because Christ has done for us what we ought to have done. You may say that we are washed in the blood of the lamb. You may say that Christ has defeated death. They are all true. If any of them do not appeal to you, leave it alone and get on with the formula that does. And, whatever you do, do not start quarreling with other people because they use a different formula from yours. (CS Lewis, Mere Christianity , p. 144)
When we reflect on three of the great statements of the meaning of the Cross, we can see that each is grounded in the life-experience of its author. Peter Abelard, as well as being a teacher, was one of the great lovers of the Western tradition. He fell in love with beautiful student, Heloise. Theirs was an illicit love. They had a child but Heloise’s guardian opposed their M\marriage. Abelard was set upon, beaten and castrated by ruffians sent by Heloise’s guardian.  Helioise herself went into a nunnery and they were parted for the rest of their lives. It is believed they continued to write letters to each other for the remainder of their lives.. 
Anselm was an Archbishop of Canterbury. He wrote letters too. One edition of his great book on Atonement has a second part which includes his letters – to friends, to kings, to Popes. He lived in an age when the English throne sought to dominate the church and claim the loyalty of its clergy. Anselm’s  letters to the Pope and the King of England carefully defended the independence of the English church and constantly offered his loyalty to the Pope. 
Jurgen Moltmann , author of one of the greatest recent books on the meaning of the Cross (The Crucified God) traces his interest in Christian faith and theology from his experience as a prisoner of war looking out from behind barbed wire on the ruins of Europe. His powerful exploration of the Cross focuses on the God-forsakenness of Jesus and the way that estrangement and forsakenness are taken into the very heart of the Godhead and carried there!
So Abelard, the great and faithful lover who loved at great cost, saw the Cross as an act of extravagant love. Anselm, the church statesman who had to guard the allegiance of the church to the pope saw the Cross in terms of Christ’s allegiance to his true Lord and the rendering of honour to the right Master. Moltmann, the forsaken, lonely prisoner, saw in the Cross God’s bearing the God-forsakeness of all humankind. Do you see a pattern emerging here?
For us, what is important is not that the saving action of God is expressed in the correct terms, full of whatever orthodoxy it is to which we subscribe. What is important is that it is expressed in our terms, in language and metaphors and stories that reflect our life experience and how the power of Jesus Christ has informed and transformed our lives, connect in some way with the breadth of the Biblical story about Jesus. Only then will it have the power and conviction to convey the present reality of that ancient affirmation “Jesus saves!”