John 14:6-7
1 Corinthians 15:20-22
Imagine you’re at a neighborhood block party – or a PTO meeting – someplace where you’re kinda familiar with, friendly with, most of the other people, but you don’t know them super well. Lots of acquaintances, maybe only a few close friends. Now, imagine, if as you’re gathering, getting ready to begin, if someone were to ask: “So, do you think that Jesus is the only way to salvation?” That’d be awkward, right? It might make things at least a wee bit uncomfortable.
This is the last Sunday in our 4-week sermon series “Your Four Biggest Questions about God,” where we’ve been taking your big questions – questions you submitted – and wrestling with them together. And this week’s question, I think, is the one that is the most likely to make people squirm in mixed company.
Because, of course, we live in a pluralistic culture, in a deeply interconnected world. We know lots of non-Christians folks – folks who don’t believe in Jesus – who are good folks, amazing neighbors, good friends, kind, loving, generous, would give you the shirt off their back – and, if we are honest, we also know lots of people who identify as Christians but are kinda, well, to be honest about it, they are jerks. So, the question “is Jesus the only way to salvation” seems like a theoretical question, but really it’s a personal one. It’s a way of saying, “will my neighbor, or my sibling, or my spouse, or my parent, or my child, who is so kind, and who I love, and who helped me through some tough times – will this person who I love be saved? Will I get to see them in the resurrection? Even if they don’t believe in Jesus?”
So, this question, it’s a big one. It matters. And there’s a positive and a negative way to ask it, and I think both of those questions really matter. Positively, we would ask: Is Jesus the only way to salvation? Negatively, we would ask: if people don’t believe in Jesus, are they left out – or, if we’re willing to use this word – are they going to hell?
Let’s start with the positive way to ask it: is Jesus the only way to salvation? Well, I think the answer, from a Christian perspective, has to be yes. We Christians say that Jesus is Lord. We believe that he is the Lord of the universe, that in him and through him all things were created. The universe exists because of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And if that’s true, it’s true for everybody. It can’t just be true for us, while other religious beliefs are true for other people. If Jesus is Lord, if he is God-in-the-flesh, if the stories we tell are true, then that’s it. The God of the Bible, the God of Israel and Jesus Christ, does not brook competition, will not stand for being one God among many. If God is God, then all other claimants to the throne are pretenders. The early Christians said “If Jesus is Lord, then Caesar is not” meaning that not just was the worship of Zeus not allowed, but the emperor worship that was so popular among the Romans – what we might call “civil religion” was also not OK for Christians. We might say “If Jesus is Lord, then Money is not,” or “If Jesus is Lord, then America is not” or “If Jesus is Lord, then my family is not.” Those things may all have their place, but those things cannot, will not, save us – too many of us treat them like they are God, and they are not God – they are false gods. Only the true God, the God of Jesus Christ, is in control of the universe, has the power to save us.
Now, that doesn’t mean we have to be jerks to people of different religions. Lesslie Newbigin, a bishop in the Church of South India, and a great practitioner of interreligious dialogue, liked to talk about holding to our faith as scientists hold to scientific knowledge. Newbigin used the work of Michael Polanyi, a philosopher of science, who talked about “holding to truth with universal intent.” When you make a scientific discovery, you believe that is the way the world works – but a new discovery comes along, a new scientific paradigm emerges – maybe the move from Newtonian physics to Relativistic physics – to move from one to the other, you have to be willing to admit that your knowledge before wasn’t perfect and that you were wrong. But, now, you believe this new thing, when you accept it, you again believe that it is true for everybody – whether I believe in relativistic physics, if that’s how the world works, that’s how the world works, regardless of my opinion. But, a good physicist can say: this is how the world works, but maybe some new discovery will come along and prove to me that I’m wrong. So, to apply that to Christian faith – it’s not that we are waiting for a new discovery to prove us wrong. That’s not the point. The point is, if we think that something is true, we have to think it’s true for all people. But, we also have to hold it with humility – admitting that we are limited, finite, creatures who don’t have perfect knowledge – so, you know, we might be wrong. Which means, when we encounter someone who thinks or believes differently, we can be confident in our beliefs without being a jerk to them if they believe differently. We can say “I believe Jesus is Lord” and believe that is true for everyone – even those who don’t believe - and also treat someone who doesn’t believe that with a sense of love and respect – because their beliefs are just as earnest as ours.
So, Jesus is the only way to salvation. That’s what Christians believe. To be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is Lord – and if he’s the Lord, he’s the Lord for everybody, not just for the people who believe in him. And we can believe that without being jerks about it. But, then, the follow up: what if someone doesn’t believe in Jesus? Does that mean that they’re going to hell?
Well, you know how that first question: “Is Jesus the only way to salvation” – asking that question at a PTO meeting is a good way to get kicked out of the PTO meeting. Well, there’s a question that preachers can ask that, I’ve found, is a good way for them to get run out of their churches. But, I’m going to ask it right now. Here’s the question: “What if hell is empty?” It’s funny, Christian preachers can do all sorts of things and people will put up with it, but if you suggest that hell might be empty – well, that’s a bridge to far for some of us.
So, I want you to hear me: what I’m going to say, for the rest of the sermon, I say with humility, with trepidation – in what the Bible would call “fear and trembling.” I can say this confidently: Jesus is Lord. God the Father has raised Jesus Christ, the Son, from the dead, in the power of the Holy Spirit. And we have been promised that, in Jesus, we are grafted into God’s people, and made to share in his blessings. Because of Jesus, we too are promised resurrection. Because Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead, death has been defeated, evil is on the run, and everything is made new – nothing can ever be the same. That’s the Good News. But, when we are talking about the eternal destiny of every person who has ever lived: well, that’s more speculative. God doesn’t give us all the details. But, you asked, so, I’m going to do my best, in the next few minutes, to try to answer, to tell you what I think. I hold to these beliefs with universal intent: I think I’m right, I think they line up with Christian teaching, with who Jesus is and what we read in the Bible, but, I could be wrong – and I might upset you with what I have to say. Sounds fun, right? Let’s give it a go.
Let me start with this: what if I told you that, for as long as the church has existed, there has been tension – disagreement – within the church over the question of “who shall be saved.” The reality is, there is no settled doctrine of hell – or of heaven – in the Bible. In the Old Testament, there’s talk of Sheol – that’s the word from the Old Testament that typically gets translated as “hell” – but it doesn’t mean what we think of when we think of hell. It means something like “the land of the dead” – where everyone goes where they die, kinda like Hades in Greek mythology. You go there, and it’s kinda boring, but it’s not a place of eternal torture or torment. There are several words in the New Testament that get translated as “hell,” and, again, none of them really mean “hell” as we think of it. The idea of hell, as we know it, doesn’t actually emerge until the middle ages, most especially in the poetry of Dante and some other medieval writers, who seemed to relish in inventing torments and demons and all of that. And it wasn’t until the 19th and 20th centuries that belief in hell became one of the fundamentals that certain Christians said you had to believe in order to be saved.
But, in the early centuries of the church, there is disagreement – there is tension –
between a sense that Jesus Christ will only save the faithful – those who have faith in him, those who follow him – and the belief that Jesus Christ will save the whole world. It’s there in the Bible – some passages seem to indicate that salvation belongs to the faithful – thus implying that those who don’t believe in Jesus won’t be saved – while other passages seem to say clearly that, as Saint Paul puts it in Romans and first Corinthians – just as death spread to all people through one man – Adam’s – sin, so salvation and life has now spread to all through one man – Christ’s righteousness. Or, as Jesus himself puts it in the Gospel of John – “When I am lifted up, I will draw all people to myself.”
The tension in this: surely there have to be consequences for the evil that we experience in this life – if you’ve been abused, hurt, by someone – if someone has done something awful, doesn’t the idea that they will eventually be punished for it sound liberating? To the early persecuted Christians, the idea that those who persecuted them would be punished for it was surely appealing. But, at the same time – and this is part of what we read in the letters of Paul in the New Testament – at the same time, the whole point of this Jesus thing is that we don’t deserve it. None of us deserve it. You can’t earn your way into heaven by being good enough. You can’t do anything that earns you enough brownie points with God in order to get you saved. None of us deserve God’s forgiveness, none of us can earn God’s love, but God gives it to us anyway. That’s the Good News. But, if you can only go to heaven if you believe in Jesus, then, what is belief, except our way of earning our way into heaven? It’s the thing we do in order to get God to save us. And, again, that’s not how God works. God saving us is a gift – a free gift of free grace. So, if God only saves people who believe – I don’t know, that doesn’t sound like Jesus. The Scriptures say that “while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” God saves us even though we don’t deserve it, and nothing we can do can earn God’s love for us.
And, here’s the other thing: who is God? God is Love. That’s what we believe. And, in particular, God is the one who loves those who hate God. God is the One who loves God’s enemies. And, what does it mean to be saved – what is heaven? Well, one of the definitions is eternal union with God – becoming more and more like God, more and more like God intended for us to be – into eternity, forever and beyond time. Some have called heaven “the process of being perfected in love” – it’s learning to love like God loves and enjoy God and each other like God enjoys us. And, here’s the thing: if God loves God’s enemies, if God is willing to die in order to save us, if God is so stubbornly working to save the universe – and if heaven includes us learning to love like God loves, then how could heaven be heaven if there are people in hell? How could we enjoy heaven if we knew that there were people suffering in hell?
Here’s another way of putting it: the Bible teaches us that Jesus came to save the cosmos – the whole world – that’s what we read in John 3:17. The key question is: what if he was successful? Many Christians have ignored that possibility, have assumed that, well, someone has to end up in hell – because, you know, we humans want our enemies to suffer – someone has to be punished in the end. But, from the earliest days of Christianity, some voices have asked: what if Jesus was successful. Or, as Will Willimon, a Methodist bishop, likes to put it: Our God is stubborn. The God of Jesus Christ is a God who does not give up until he gets what he wants. So, what if God just won’t quit until everyone is saved?
My point is: this is and has been a live debate throughout Christian history. And the thing is, God is sovereign: God gets to do what God wants, because that’s what it means for God to be God. And God has some pretty clear warning that there are going to be punishments for those who do violence, who work for injustice, who support evil – liars and racists and murderers. So, I can’t tell you that hell doesn’t exist, and that no one will go. But, I think that there’s space within the Christian tradition for me to hope and to pray – and hope with some confidence – that hell will be empty. Goodness, some Christian theologians have even taught, based on the Bible, they have taught that someday, even the devil will be redeemed.
And maybe that offends you. Maybe it upsets you – but ask yourself, why? Does it upset you because it’s an idea that seems new and scary – well, that particular idea is at least nineteen hundred years old – so, it may be new to you, but it’s just about as old as Christianity. Does it upset you because it’s not how you want things to be? Or because it seems to make Jesus unimportant?
Here’s the thing: if Jesus Christ is Lord – and I believe he is – he doesn’t need fear, or bait and switch techniques – he doesn’t need to scare people into heaven by threatening them with hell. That’s 2-bit con artist stuff. If Jesus Christ came to save us, what if he was successful, I mean really successful – what if his death was so powerful that it saved everybody? Would that be so bad?
There’s a passage from 1 Timothy that really helped me get a sense of how I believe this works. Listen to this, it’s 1 Timothy 4:10, “Our hope is set on the living God, who is the savior of all people, especially those who believe.”
The savior of all people – especially those who believe. I once heard a preacher encourage us to think about salvation on two horizons – the eternal horizon, and the horizon of this world. Eternally – in the end, God’s going to get God’s way. When Jesus Christ died, and descended to the dead, he ripped open the gates of hell, and no one is going to be trapped there anymore. It may take an eternity to get some of us ready for it, but in the end, everyone will be redeemed, God’s love is more powerful than evil, God loves and saves even God’s enemies, even the worst among us. So, the living God is the savior of all people.
And the “especially” part, “especially those who believe” – in time, in this life, there is a gift, there is a blessing, there is a salvation we experience right now: believing in Jesus offers us an experience of heaven in the present tense, it offers us life with God right now, it offers us hope right now, it sustains us right now. So, there is a salvation that only those who believe in Jesus get – it’s the chance to be part of what God is doing, starting today. So, what we do in this life matters – because it helps spread God’s love now, spread God’s light now, invite people to connect with God and find life in the present tense – it impacts real lives now, and gets us ready to spend eternity with the One who is life itself. But, in the long run, God is stubborn, and God gets what God wants – in the long run, all shall be saved.
At, least, that’s what I believe. It’s what I hope. It’s what I pray for. It’s what makes sense to me, given what we know about who the God of Jesus Christ is, how fiercely he loves us, and how he saves us even though we don’t deserve it. I could be wrong – just like you could be wrong. But, as long as there have been Christians, there have been some hoping, and praying, and expecting that, in the end, Jesus is going to get his way, and all people shall be saved. And I’m one of them.
And, whether I’m right about that or not, here’s what I know is true, here’s the Good News: Jesus is Lord. For all of us. Which means that he loves all of us. He is working for good for all of us. And that’s Good News. Thanks be to God.
コメント