Ancient Israel’s story is a story of the
creation of a new people, a nation, a community. Salvation is about life together.
Salvation is about peace and justice within community and beyond a specific
community. It is about “shalom” which is a word connoting not simply peace as the
absence of war, but peace as the wholeness of a community living together in
peace and justice in harmony with God’s dream for the whole world. In the
Hebrew Bible, salvation is never only an individual affair.
Significantly, the Christian Scriptures of the
New Testament continue that social emphasis relative to salvation. Notice the
teachings of Jesus. The Magna Charta of Jesus’ proclamation about God’s Kingdom
(the sermon on the mount in Matthew 5-7)
emphasized a higher dimension of communal life motivated by a radical and
transforming paradigm, “the kingdom of God is within you.” External behavior
isn’t enough. Internal motivations either heal or hurt. Our responsibility to
those who suffer (like the poor, the ostracized, the “sinners,” the sick, the
guilty, the hungry and homeless, the widows and orphans) is God-given and to be
taken as seriously as if we were relating to Jesus Himself. This new kingdom of
God is not to manifest the qualities and characteristics of the domination empire;
ruling through power, control and fear. It is to exhibit the compassion and
unselfish service of Jesus who ended up being killed by the social sin of the
domination systems of His day.
The rest of the New Testament describes the
creation of new communities “in Christ” whose life together embodied an
alternative vision to that of empire. These were inclusive communities centered
around the life of Jesus manifested by the sharing of necessities, loving and forgiving,
serving, healing brokenness and fragmentation, transcending conventional
boundaries of their worlds because of an allegiance to an alternative Lord. As
one of the primary leaders of this new community, Paul, would put it: “There is
neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in
Christ Jesus.” (Galatians
3:28, NIV)
Salvation is not simply about saving individuals
for heaven. It’s about a new social and personal reality in the midst of this
life. It’s about God’s transforming intervention into our worlds of brokenness
and bondage, bringing wholeness and reconciliation and peace. It’s about our
willingness to be involved in God’s work to restore life wherever it is needed.
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