John Chapter 9 and Our Need To Tell A Better Story
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The cost of everything is on the rise and with that the cost of doing ministry is becoming more expensive, too.
To help Renewed Heart Ministries meet these rising costs, we are asking each of you to consider making a special one time donation to Renewed Heart Ministries, this month.
You get to decide what voices are heard in our faith communities. Your support enables us to be a life-giving, healing light and continue to be a voice for desperately needed change. Renewed Heart Ministries is a ministry on the margins that prioritizes the needs of marginalized people, especially those who have been the recipients of misinformed, faith-based harm.
The work of helping people find ways to heal and live out their faith through love, compassion, and justice are needed now more than ever.
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Or if you prefer to make your donation by mail, you can do so by mailing it to:
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New Episode of Just Talking Available on YouTube
New Episode of “Just Talking” Now Online!
Season 1; Episode 6. John 9.1-41. Lectionary A, Lent Week 4
Each week, we’ll be talking about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend. We’ll be talking about each reading in the context of love, inclusion, and societal justice. Our hope is that our talking will be just talking (as in justice) and that during our brief conversations each week you’ll be inspired to also do more than just talking.
If you teach from the lectionary each week, or if you’re just looking for some thoughts on the Jesus story from a more progressive perspective within the context of social justice, check it out, you might like it.
You can find the latest show on YouTube at https://youtu.be/8ir6Ew5bhDw
Please Like, Subscribe, hit the Notification button, and leave us a comment
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John Chapter 9 and Our Need to Tell A Better Story
Herb Montgomery | March 17, 2023
To listen to this week’s eSight as a podcast episode click here.
We don’t need to assign moral value to the ways we each encounter our world. All in all, John chapter 9 is a reminder to me that today, as Jesus followers, we need to tell the Jesus story in better ways than this chapter does. As Jesus followers today, we should be about shaping our world into a safe, compassionate, just home for everyone. A world that big enough for all of differences, where each person can “sit under their own fig tree” (Micah 4:4), and no one—no one—has to be afraid.
The lectionary reading this week is from the Gospel of John:
“As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
“Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him. As long as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” After saying this, he spit on the ground, made some mud with the saliva, and put it on the man’s eyes. “Go,” he told him, “wash in the Pool of Siloam” (this word means “Sent”). So the man went and washed, and came home seeing.
His neighbors and those who had formerly seen him begging asked, “Isn’t this the same man who used to sit and beg?” Some claimed that he was. Others said, “No, he only looks like him.” But he himself insisted, “I am the man.” “How then were your eyes opened?” they asked. He replied, “The man they call Jesus made some mud and put it on my eyes. He told me to go to Siloam and wash. So I went and washed, and then I could see.” “Where is this man?” they asked him. “I don’t know,” he said.
They brought to the Pharisees the man who had been blind. Now the day on which Jesus had made the mud and opened the man’s eyes was a Sabbath. Therefore the Pharisees also asked him how he had received his sight. “He put mud on my eyes,” the man replied, “and I washed, and now I see.” Some of the Pharisees said, “This man is not from God, for he does not keep the Sabbath.” But others asked, “How can a sinner perform such signs?” So they were divided. Then they turned again to the blind man, “What have you to say about him? It was your eyes he opened.” The man replied, “He is a prophet.”
They still did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight until they sent for the man’s parents. “Is this your son?” they asked. “Is this the one you say was born blind? How is it that now he can see?” “We know he is our son,” the parents answered, “and we know he was born blind. But how he can see now, or who opened his eyes, we don’t know. Ask him. He is of age; he will speak for himself.” His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jewish leaders, who already had decided that anyone who acknowledged that Jesus was the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue. That was why his parents said, “He is of age; ask him.”
A second time they summoned the man who had been blind. “Give glory to God by telling the truth,” they said. “We know this man is a sinner.” He replied, “Whether he is a sinner or not, I don’t know. One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!” Then they asked him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?” He answered, “I have told you already and you did not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples too?” Then they hurled insults at him and said, “You are this fellow’s disciple! We are disciples of Moses We know that God spoke to Moses, but as for this fellow, we don’t even know where he comes from.” The man answered, “Now that is remarkable! You don’t know where he comes from, yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners. He listens to the godly person who does his will. Nobody has ever heard of opening the eyes of a man born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” To this they replied, “You were steeped in sin at birth; how dare you lecture us!” And they threw him out.
Jesus heard that they had thrown him out, and when he found him, he said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” “Who is he, sir?” the man asked. “Tell me so that I may believe in him.” Jesus said, “You have now seen him; in fact, he is the one speaking with you.” Then the man said, “Lord, I believe,” and he worshiped him. Jesus said, “For judgment I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.” Some Pharisees who were with him heard him say this and asked, “What? Are we blind too?” Jesus said, “If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains.” (John 9:1-41)
Happy St. Patrick’s Day to everyone!
Our reading this week is interesting and there’s a lot here to cover in this story. We won’t get to it all but we’ll cover what we can.
Most academic scholarship agrees today that Gnosticism has both Jewish and Christian starting points. It evolved in the late 1st Century CE out of nonrabbinical Jewish sects and early Christian sects during the time that the Gospel of John was being written in the Johannine community. I believe that the author or authors of John’s gospel looked at the world similarly to the community that would later come to be known as Christian Gnosticism. Some things in John are different from later Gnosticism, and they have many things in common. A couple weeks ago, I shared from the works of Irenaeus how later Gnostics only valued the gospel of John out of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
The Pharisees and the proto-Christian Gnostics would have deeply disagreed about how to look at the world, and we bump into this division in our story. These worldview disagreements were very similar to those that later Rabbinical Judaism, which grew out of Pharisaical Judaism, had with Gnostic Judaism. These were not primarily a struggle between Christianity and Judaism. Only insofar as Christianity or Judaism took Gnostic forms would it have conflicted with Rabbinical Judaism.
Anti-Judaism was already present by this time among Gentile Christians, but this story and stories like it in the gospel of John have a long history of inspiring Christians to see all of Judaism as negative through negative stereotyping and the label Pharisees. The schools of the Pharisees that followed Hillel had much in common with early Christian communities that looked more like the Jesus of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. This is important because atrocities Christians have been responsible for against the Jewish community that can be traced back to interpretations of stories like this week’s. With stories like this, Christians have characterized the struggle as between Christians and Jews rather than between the Pharisees of that time and all forms of Gnosticism, Christian or Jewish.
The very first thing we bump into in the story is how the Gnostics explained so much concrete suffering in our world. The question “Who sinned?” betrays a worldview that assumes that all misfortune is somehow deserved. Many forms of early Jewish and Christian Gnosticism were not purely monotheistic but dualistic: they believed the material world was made by one God who had done the best they could but still created a world that involved suffering and pain. Christian gnostic sects framed Jesus as a Gnostic savior who came from a second Divine entity and saved the world through gnosis or knowledge (see John 17:3).
If John’s gospel was not written by those who were themselves proto-Gnostics, they definitely wrote a gospel that was especially vulnerable to being valued and interpreted by Christian Gnostics later.
Our story this week includes other binaries such as day and night, which we’ve spoken about the last two weeks. We even have a debate between the Pharisees and Gnostics over the Sabbath. Remember that the Gnostics were all about liberating our good souls/spirits from our material world of pain and suffering. The Sabbath was about a physical, enfleshed, material resting of bodies from physical labor each seventh day, and therefore would have fallen under the category of the material/physical, which Gnostics did not particularly value or prioritize.
Something we should mention here is the implication in the story that miracles are the sign of whether someone’s teachings are true. Our sacred texts aren’t monolithic on this topic. They include multiple warnings that even if miracles are performed, we should not trust that alone.
In the end, though, the Johannine community declares that the school of the Pharisees should be rejected because their spiritual understanding is blinkered. I could not disagree with this more. There is much Jewish wisdom that we Christians would do well to listen to.
Lastly, the narrative uses blindness as a metaphor and the way to describe the Pharisees as worthy of rejection by those seeking gnosis. I’ve said this repeatedly: using blindness to negatively characterize an opponent, adversary, or story nemesis is very ableist. It’s also harmful to those who live with physical blindness. We don’t need to assign moral value to the ways we each encounter our world.
All in all, John chapter 9 is a reminder to me that today, as Jesus followers, we need to tell the Jesus story in better ways than this chapter does. As Jesus followers today, we should be about shaping our world into a safe, compassionate, just home for everyone. A world that big enough for all of differences, where each person can “sit under their own fig tree” (Micah 4:4), and no one—no one—has to be afraid.
HeartGroup Application
1. Share something that spoke to you from this week’s eSight/Podcast episode with your HeartGroup.
2. How would you answer the disciples question at the beginning of our story this week? Share with your group.
3. What can you do this week, big or small, to continue setting in motion the work of shaping our world into a safe, compassionate, just home for everyone?
Thanks for checking in with us, today.
You can find Renewed Heart Ministries on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. If you haven’t done so already, please follow us on your chosen social media platforms for our daily posts. Also, if you enjoy listening to the Jesus for Everyone podcast, please like and subscribe to the JFE podcast through the podcast platform you use and consider taking some time to give us a review. This helps others find our podcast as well.
Also I want to share that we are partnering in a new weekly YouTube show called “Just Talking.” Each week, Todd Leonard and I will be talking about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend. We’ll be talking about each reading in the context of love, inclusion, and societal justice. Our hope is that our talking will be just talking (as in justice) and that during our brief conversations each week you’ll be inspired to also do more than just talking.
If you teach from the lectionary each week, or if you’re just looking for some thoughts on the Jesus story from a more progressive perspective within the context of social justice, check it out, you might like it. You can find JustTalking each week on YouTube at youtube.com/@herbandtoddjusttalking. Please Like, Subscribe, hit the Notification button, and leave us a comment.
And if you’d like to reach us here at Renewed Heart Ministries through email, you can reach us at info@renewedheartministries.com.
My new book, Finding Jesus: A story of a fundamentalist preacher who unexpectedly discovered the social, political, and economic teachings of the Gospels is now also available at renewedheartministries.com
Right where you are, keep living in love, choosing compassion, taking action, and working toward justice.
I love each of you dearly,
I’ll see you next week.
Now Available at Renewed Heart Ministries!
Herb’s new book Finding Jesus: A story of a fundamentalist preacher who unexpectedly discovered the social, political, and economic teachings of the Gospels, is available at renewedheartministries.com.
Get your copy today at renewedheartministries.com
Are you receiving all of RHM’s free resources each week?
Begin each day being inspired toward love, compassion, action, and justice. Free Sign-Up HERE
A World That Is Safe for Everyone
We Need Your Support
The cost of everything is on the rise and with that the cost of doing ministry is becoming more expensive, too.
To help Renewed Heart Ministries meet these rising costs, we are asking each of you to consider making a special one time donation to Renewed Heart Ministries, this month.
You get to decide what voices are heard in our faith communities. Your support enables us to be a life-giving, healing light and continue to be a voice for desperately needed change. Renewed Heart Ministries is a ministry on the margins that prioritizes the needs of marginalized people, especially those who have been the recipients of misinformed, faith-based harm.
The work of helping people find ways to heal and live out their faith through love, compassion, and justice are needed now more than ever.
You can make your one time give online by going to http://www.renewedheartministries.com and click “Donate.”
Or if you prefer to make your donation by mail, you can do so by mailing it to:
Renewed Heart Ministries
PO Box 1211
Lewisburg, WV 24901
Together we will continue being a source of healing, light, life, and change.
Thank you in advance for your support.
New Episode of Just Talking Available on YouTube
New Episode of “Just Talking” Now Online!
John 3.1-17. Lectionary A, Lent, Week 2
Each week, we’ll be talking about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend. We’ll be talking about each reading in the context of love, inclusion, and societal justice. Our hope is that our talking will be just talking (as in justice) and that during our brief conversations each week you’ll be inspired to also do more than just talking.
If you teach from the lectionary each week, or if you’re just looking for some thoughts on the Jesus story from a more progressive perspective within the context of social justice, check it out, you might like it.
You can find the latest show on YouTube at https://youtu.be/_mF6Tol5WSQ
Please Like, Subscribe, hit the Notification button, and leave us a comment
Thanks in advance for watching!
A World That Is Safe for Everyone
Herb Montgomery | March 10, 2023
To listen to this week’s eSight as a podcast episode click here.
“That’s not necessarily bad. We simply need to make sure we are interpreting John’s Jesus in a way that doesn’t ignore the very concrete harm many are suffering because of unjust systems. Today, we don’t need a form a Christianity that is so afterlife-focused that it merely anesthetizes its adherents so we passively bear present injustice, look toward afterlife bliss, and don’t challenge, transform, or liberate folks suffering from this unsafe, unjust, and death-dealing world.”
Our reading this week is from the gospel of John:
So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon.
When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)
The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” “Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons [and daughters] and his livestock?” Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.” He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.” “I have no husband,” she replied. Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.”
“Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.” “Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship God neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Judeans. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship God in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers God seeks. God is spirit, and God’s worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”
The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.” Then Jesus declared, “I, the one speaking to you—I am he.”
Just then his disciples returned and were surprised to find him talking with a woman. But no one asked, “What do you want?” or “Why are you talking with her?” Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people, “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?” They came out of the town and made their way toward him.
Meanwhile his disciples urged him, “Rabbi, eat something.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.” Then his disciples said to each other, “Could someone have brought him food?” “My food,” said Jesus, “is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work. Don’t you have a saying, ‘It’s still four months until harvest’? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest. Even now the one who reaps draws a wage and harvests a crop for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together. Thus the saying ‘One sows and another reaps’ is true. I sent you to reap what you have not worked for. Others have done the hard work, and you have reaped the benefits of their labor.”
Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I ever did.” So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he stayed two days. And because of his words many more became believers. They said to the woman, “We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.” (John 4:5-42, Scriptures taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. )
The Johannine community’s version of the Jesus story begins with a collection of dialogues. Last week we looked at the first one, the story of Nicodemus. This week we are looking at a story that many scholars believe is included to explain why the Johannine community included Samaritan Jews when the Jews of Judea excluded them, and why they also included women, who are seen as disposable within patriarchal societies. The woman in this story had experienced rejection many times from the various men in her life, and her latest situation was filled with anxiety. The Jesus of this story is speaking directly to women like her.
Our reading is comprised of three sections: Jesus’ dialogue with the nameless woman, his exchange with the disciples after she departs, and the many Samaritan Jews that come out to meet Jesus and embrace him as “Savior of the world,” a title usually used then to refer to Rome and Caesar.
In each of these sections, the author of the gospel strings together sayings that could have been said by the historical Jesus. The overarching point of the story and the context that the minor details should be understood in is that this story seeks to show where the Samaritan Jewish population in the Johannine community can trace their roots back to.
One thing we bump into repeatedly in the gospel of John is tension between Samaritan Jews and Judean Jews. There was a long history here that, at the risk of oversimplifying, revolved around debates over what fidelity to the Torah looked like. Judean Jews accused Samaritan Jews of practicing different religious traditions than them, and they attributed the difference to their mixed heritage and history. Having been excluded from participating in the temple in Jerusalem, the Samaritan Jews had their own temple and their own version of the books of Moses. If Galilean Jews were marginalized by Judeans because of their Hellenistic practices, then Samaritan Jews were marginalized even more because of their heritage and alternative religious practices.
I find it encouraging to picture a Galilean Jesus embracing Samaritan Jews instead of following the exclusionary practices that may have been common in his society. Including those presently marginalized is a theme that we, as Jesus followers today, could learn a lot from. Our society also practices pushing certain people and communities to the edges because of their differences.
We also bump into the Johannine pre-Gnosticism that I mentioned last week as we read the story of Nicodemus. Real water contrasted with the mystical water of knowledge (gnosis) that will give a person eternal life. Debates over worshipping God at a physical location rather than worshiping God in spirit and truth. The claim that God is spirit.
In the exchange with the disciples, spiritual food replaces physical food. Concrete material harvests and how they were being exploited by Roman imperialism to the detriment of rural farming communities mentioned in the other gospels become a mystical, spiritual harvest.
All of this would later evolve into Gnosticism, which devalued what people experienced in their physical world, including injustice, oppression and real harm and encouraged Gnostics to gaining knowledge that would one day liberate their sprits/souls from being entrapped in physical existence.
Many sectors of Christianity today have much more in common with those early Gnostic communities than they do with the this-life and this-world focus of the Jesus of the synoptic gospels. I believe that commonality can be traced back to the gospel of John and its embrace of proto-Gnostic ideas and ways of looking at the world.of
The Johannine Jesus is very different from the synoptic Jesus we find in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. That’s not necessarily bad. We simply need to make sure we are interpreting John’s Jesus in a way that doesn’t ignore the very concrete harm many are suffering because of unjust systems. Today, we don’t need a form a Christianity that is so afterlife-focused that it merely anesthetizes its adherents so we passively bear present injustice, look toward afterlife bliss, and don’t challenge, transform, or liberate folks suffering from this unsafe, unjust, and death-dealing world.
Lastly, I am encouraged that this story ends with contrasting Jesus with Rome. Again, Rome and Caesar were both referred to as savior of the world. Although some later less life-giving forms of Gnosticism would interpret this “saving” as an escape from this life, today we can interpret Jesus and his teachings as offering a set of values and ethics that put us on a life-giving path. The path Jesus sets us on assists us in transforming our physical world into a just, safe, compassionate home for everyone, a world large enough to hold all our differences, where we are not simply tolerated but celebrated, and where we not only survive but we thrive. In this world, exploitation and extraction is replaced with reciprocity and sharing. There’s enough for everyone. And everyone can experience home.
HeartGroup Application
1. Share something that spoke to you from this week’s eSight/Podcast episode with your HeartGroup.
2. How does this story of the woman at the well speak into your justice work? Share with your group.
3. What can you do this week, big or small, to continue setting in motion the work of shaping our world into a safe, compassionate, just home for everyone?
Thanks for checking in with us, today.
You can find Renewed Heart Ministries on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. If you haven’t done so already, please follow us on your chosen social media platforms for our daily posts. Also, if you enjoy listening to the Jesus for Everyone podcast, please like and subscribe to the JFE podcast thro ugh the podcast platform you use and consider taking some time to give us a review. This helps others find our podcast as well.
Also I want to share that we are partnering in a new weekly YouTube show called “Just Talking.” Each week, Todd Leonard and I will be talking about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend. We’ll be talking about each reading in the context of love, inclusion, and societal justice. Our hope is that our talking will be just talking (as in justice) and that during our brief conversations each week you’ll be inspired to also do more than just talking.
If you teach from the lectionary each week, or if you’re just looking for some thoughts on the Jesus story from a more progressive perspective within the context of social justice, check it out, you might like it.
You can find JustTalking each week on YouTube at youtube.com/@herbandtoddjusttalking. Please Like, Subscribe, hit the Notification button, and leave us a comment.
And if you’d like to reach us here at Renewed Heart Ministries through email, you can reach us at info@renewedheartministries.com.
My new book, Finding Jesus: A story of a fundamentalist preacher who unexpectedly discovered the social, political, and economic teachings of the Gospels is now also available at renewedheartministries.com
Right where you are, keep living in love, choosing compassion, taking action, and working toward justice.
I love each of you dearly,
I’ll see you next week.
Now Available at Renewed Heart Ministries!
Herb’s new book Finding Jesus: A story of a fundamentalist preacher who unexpectedly discovered the social, political, and economic teachings of the Gospels, is available at renewedheartministries.com.
Get your copy today at renewedheartministries.com
Are you receiving all of RHM’s free resources each week?
Begin each day being inspired toward love, compassion, action, and justice. Free Sign-Up HERE
A Social Jesus
Herb Montgomery | April 12, 2018
“Today, sectors of Christianity that only teach a personal Jesus deeply need a reintroduction to the gospels’ social Jesus. They need to rediscover and understand social salvation contrasted with personal salvation. They need a gospel that impacts the here and now and that isn’t just about the premium they must pay in this life to get a post-mortem fire insurance policy.”
“After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. ‘The time has come,’ he said. ‘The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!’” (Mark 1:14-15)
“Have you accepted Jesus as your personal savior?” he shouted at me. I was at the grocery store one evening trying to grab some missing ingredients for dinner. As I left the store I passed a table on the way to the parking lot. There, a group of Christians sat or stood behind the table, trying raising money for their organization.
I politely smiled in his direction and said, “No thank you.” I was still walking as I heard him call out, “If you die on the way home do you know for sure where you’ll end up next?”
I couldn’t believe there were still Christians who talked like this, with these well-worn phrases as conversation starters. But again, this is Appalachia and as someone born and having grown up here, if you can still find this kind of talk anywhere, you can find it here.
This month at RHM, we are featuring Walter Rauschebusch’s classic work A Theology for the Social Gospel as April’s book of the month. One of the things I appreciate about the early 20th Century Social Gospel movement is that it drew attention to Jesus’ vision for social salvation, not individual, private, personal salvation.
I recently posted this quotation from Rauschenbusch on Facebook: “If our theology is silent on social salvation, we compel [people] to choose between an unsocial system of theology and an irreligious system of social salvation” (Ibid. p. 7). Immediately one person asked, “What is social salvation?” This question reveals more than it asks.
Firstly, contemporary, privatized, and individually focused forms of Christianity focus their adherents so much on personal salvation and Jesus as a “personal Savior” from post-mortem punishment that those who only encounter this kind of Christianity may have never even heard of the social salvation described in the gospels.
Seeing Jesus as a social savior is the oldest Christian message. It can be argued that interpreting Jesus as a personal savior, an individual savior, or a private savior is a later interpretive addition not found until Christianity became populated with middle- to upper-class people centered in their culture.
Secondly, how nice it must be to belong to a social class that’s so privileged that it doesn’t even know what social salvation is, much less imagine it needs it. Countless people face discrimination, marginalization, and exclusion each day and don’t need a textbook definition for the phrase “social salvation” because they know the system all too well. They know what it is to need salvation from societal and social injustice and oppression.
Let’s dive in.
Kingdom
Each author of the synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke-Acts) place the theme of “the kingdom” at the center of their stories about Jesus.
“After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. ‘The time has come,’ he said. ‘The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!’” (Mark 1:14-15)
“Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people.” (Matthew 4:23)
“But he said, ‘I must proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns also, because that is why I was sent.’” (Luke 4:43)
“Paul entered the synagogue and spoke boldly there for three months, arguing persuasively about the kingdom of God.” (Acts 19:8)
“He proclaimed thekingdom of God and taught about the Lord Jesus Christ—with all boldness and without hindrance!” (Acts 28:31)
I have my own theories about why the author of Acts ties Paul’s teaching to Jesus’ “kingdom” but the fact is that the Kingdom is the focus in the gospels and Paul must come to be associated with it in the book of Acts. Nowhere in the book of Acts is the goal to escape postmortem hell or enter into a cosmic heaven. The coming kingdom is the central theme.
The kingdom theme in the gospel stories served a twofold purpose: it hearkened back to the Maccabean era of hope in restored Jewish independence and it contrasted with the Roman empire (see Daniel 7). Matthew’s use of kingdom is more in line with the first purpose, and Luke’s is more about the second. Mark’s use can be argued to be a hybrid of both. Neither view of kingdom was about saving individuals. Instead they were about restoring distributive justice for a whole community, including all the individuals that made the community. The hope of the kingdom went beyond the personal to the social: it was about social salvation.
Gospel
In the canonized Jesus stories we have today, the term gospel meant the announcement of the coming of this kingdom. It’s important to note that the term “gospel” or “glad tidings” was originally a political term, not a religious one. The Roman empire used it to refer to announcements made when the empire annexed a new territory. The gospel was public announcement, or tidings, of the newly arrived rule of Rome. So the word “gospel” itself was not about privatized, individual, personal change but rather a fundamental social change.
Here are three examples that we have still today of contemporary, secular uses of the term gospel in the 1st Century.
“Even after the battle at Mantinea, which Thucydides has described, the one who first announced the victory had no other reward for his glad tidings [euangelion-gospel] than a piece of meat sent by the magistrates from the public mess” (Plutarch, Agesilaus, p. 33, 1st Century).
“Accordingly, when [Aristodemus] had come near, he stretched out his hand and cried with a loud voice: ‘Hail, King Antigonus, we have conquered Ptolemy in a sea-fight, and now hold Cyprus, with 12,800 soldiers as prisoners of war.’ To this, Antigonus replied: ‘Hail to thee also, by Heaven! but for torturing us in this way, thou shalt undergo punishment; the reward for thy good tidings [euangelion-gospel] thou shalt be some time in getting’” (Plutarch, Demetrius, p. 17, 1st Century).
“Why, as we are told, the Spartans merely sent meat from the public commons
to the man who brought glad tidings [euangelion-gospel] of the victory in Mantineia which Thucydides describes! And indeed the compilers of histories are, as it were, reporters of great exploits who are gifted with the faculty of felicitous speech, and achieve success in their writing through the beauty and force of their narration; and to them those who first encountered and recorded the events [εὐαγγέλιον– euangelion] are indebted for a pleasing retelling of them” (Plutarch, Moralia (Glory of Athens), p. 347, 1st Century).
The phrase “glad tidings/gospel of the kingdom” as the gospels’ authors used it was a way to signal that Jesus and his teachings held a new vision for structuring society. Those who were last in the present arrangement would now be first. Those being marginalized were to be included and centered. Those who were hungry and thirsted for a distributive, social righteousness would be filled (see Matthew 5 and Luke 6). The authors of the Jesus story used “gospel” to mean a change in society or human community that went beyond mere personal nor private change. It was about social change here, social change now.
Eternal Life
Even when we consider the way eternal life was framed in the gospel stories, an argument can be made that even eternal life is not private, personal, or individual, but communal and social. Eternal life meant the continuance of a community as a whole, not merely continuance for individuals within that community. The path Jesus was pointing toward is a path by which the human race can continue, a path that leads to life rather than extinction for our race and not simply life for individual humans. Eternal life is about having our quality of life rooted in what Parker and Brock call an “ethical grace” lived here on earth, a path of living differently as a society today, here, now.
“The Gospel defines three dimensions of this eternal life: knowing God; receiving the one sent by God to proclaim abundant life to all; and loving each other as he had loved them. Eternal life, in all three meanings, relates to how life is lived on earth. The concrete acts of care Jesus has shown his disciples are the key to eternal life. By following his example of love, the disciples enter eternal life now. Eternal life is thus much more than a hope for postmortem life: it is earthly existence grounded in ethical grace.” (Rita Nakashima Brock & Rev. Dr. Rebecca Parker, Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire, p. 22)
Death by Crucifixion
Lastly, people don’t get jailed (like John the Baptist) and don’t get crucified (like Jesus) for teaching personal, private, post-mortem salvation. They get in trouble, as we saw last week, when they call out social injustice and call for social change, societal reparations, social redemption, and social salvation. Private change threatens no one, but social change threatens those privileged in the present way of organizing society who would have much to lose if the status quo changed.
Today, sectors of Christianity that only teach a personal Jesus deeply need a reintroduction to the gospels’ social Jesus. They need to rediscover and understand social salvation contrasted with personal salvation. They need a gospel that impacts the here and now and that isn’t just about the premium they must pay in this life to get a post-mortem fire insurance policy.
There is a need to understand how the life modeled and teachings taught by Jesus have the potential to socially save. They aren’t a myth of redemptive violence and suffering that saves us from divine satisfaction. We can be deeply revived by following the teachings of Jesus, and not merely mentally assenting or believing story details about him. We need a gospel that recaptures the story truth of a resurrection, and not endless gospels that only offer people a cross.
It is to this end that we’ll be turning our attention over the next few weeks. I’m so glad you’re with us on this journey.
“After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. ‘The time has come,’ he said. ‘The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!’” (Mark 1:14-15)
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