Jesus, for our salvation
Readings: Psalm 22. 1-11, 25-31, Ephesians 2. 1-10, Luke 24. 36-49
What is the Gospel? What is the good news at the heart of Christianity? That’s the question before us as we turn in our series on the Creed to what Jesus did, his actions. What did Jesus do, and how has he changed the world forever?
We’re on the fourth part of our series on the Nicene Creed, and the third of four parts on the person of Jesus. So far we’ve established that he is fully God and fully human, and now the Creed turns its attention to his life on earth. I’ve split it up slightly, we focussed last week on his birth ‘For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven; by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and was made man’. That was last week, but it belongs to this week too as the Creed continues ‘For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again in accordance with the scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the father’.
And in so many ways it’s striking in what is missed out isn’t it. We go from Jesus’ birth, and skip right past his ministry, his teaching, his miracles, right to his death. To put it another way we’ve skipped right from Luke 2 to Luke 23 completely ignoring the middle 20 chapters. Does it mean then that those other 20 chapters don’t matter? No. What the Creed is doing is trying to boil down the essence of Christian faith, what it is at its bare bones whilst still being truly Christian, it doesn’t replace the Bible, instead it seeks to draw out the essence of what we believe about God and his mission.
And here the Creed is keen to remind us that what we’re dealing with in this section are real historical events. When the Bible, or the Creed talk about the crucifixion, resurrection and ascension of Jesus, we’re not dealing with stories, or myths or philosophical ideas, we’re dealing with history. We’re talking about a real person, Jesus, who really did live, really did die on the cross, really was raised to life and really did ascend into heaven and is seated at God’s right hand. It’s why this section and last week’s section are the ones to mention other people; Mary and Pontius Pilate. The Creed is pointing to real historical people to remind us that these events are true historical events, real moments that happened in our world. Jesus born of Mary and crucified under Pontius Pilate are reminders that our faith is rooted in real events.
But it also reminds us that these events happen ‘in accordance with the Scriptures’. It’s not so much saying ‘as the Bible tells us’ which might be how we read it; he was crucified, died, raised according the the Scriptures, when we open the Gospels that’s what we find, although that’s true. It’s saying ‘as the Scriptures told us was going to happen’, ‘as the Scriptures prophesied’. It’s why I picked Psalm 22 as one of the readings for today. It’s what Jesus says in that Gospel reading we heard, he opens their minds to understand the Scriptures that all that has happened is in accordance with what they said was going to happen.
And as we consider these events we come to the core of the Gospel; how are we saved? What is God’s mission? Why do these things happen?
I’ve mentioned them in passing for a few weeks but now we’re ready to meet them properly; the Adoptionists. Those who claimed that Jesus was just a man and became divine through his perfect obedience. For them Jesus didn’t come down, he was simply one of us, an ordinary human being. And in perfectly keeping the law, God gives to him a delegated divinity, makes him a god. And so, they say, we can learn from his life and his teaching how to do the same.
The essence of the Gospel, the good news for the adoptionists was, and is, that you can do it too! Jesus proves that it’s possible to keep the law, so now you can follow his example and do it too.
Think of it like the 4 minute mile, in the past it was thought to be utterly impossible, you couldn’t run a mile in under 4 minutes, it had never been done, and some experts were saying it physiologically just wasn’t possible. And then Roger Bannister in May of 1954 ran it in a mere 3 minutes and 59 seconds and suddenly it was possible. The following month someone beat his record, and over the next 3 years 15 others would run a mile in under 4 minutes, the mental barrier was broken and now more and more people were doing it.
That’s the adoptionist view of Jesus. He was just a man, and yet remarkably he kept the law perfectly and so ascended to be a god, and you can do it too if you try hard enough. Look at his life, learn from his teaching, and you can do the same.
So many in our world see Jesus in this way, they’re not too concerned with whether he was God or not, or whether he became a god. That stuff doesn’t matter so much to them these days. Jesus is an amazing teacher and example, so they’re trying to learn from him and try to be like him. It’s what many people assume Christianity is about, trying to live like Jesus.
We can even easily think in this way, even if we’ve properly grasped the real Gospel, which I’ll come to in a moment, we can so easily slip into this way of thinking in our lives. Not so much outwardly denying Jesus is God, although that’s the end point of it, but viewing him simply as an example, we try to do what he did. And whilst that’s certainly an aspect of discipleship, following where he has gone, living as he commands, if that’s all the Christian faith is, it’s exhausting. Because we keep messing up, we keep sinning. I’m seeing an increase online of preachers and influencers saying that you can be perfect, that to be a Christian is to perfectly keep the law, to stop sinning completely. Jesus did it and now you can too. But it’s all a lie.
The former Bishop of South Carolina Christopher FitzSimons Allison observed that the reason this heresy is so tempting is because it puts us front and centre, it’s about our self-sufficiency and feeds on our self-centredness. It’s about us and our ability and will power and our control. But the Gospel, the true Gospel, tells us we’re not self-sufficient, indeed that was the first sin, wanting to be like God, wanting to do this without need of him.
No, Jesus came ‘for us and for our salvation’, is crucified ‘for our sake’. He hasn’t come simply as example and teacher. God the Son become human isn’t because he felt like it, it wasn’t an experiment, it was ‘for us’, ‘for our sake’. And it wasn’t simply so that he could better understand us, join us in our world to become a merciful high priest for us, although he does, he comes ‘for our salvation’. In other words, he’s come as Saviour, come to rescue us.
He hasn’t come to show us keeping the law perfectly is possible even in our fallen state, he has come to keep the law for us, on our behalf, precisely because we can’t, so that we can know God for ourselves. For us and for our salvation, that’s why he has come. Come to save, come to do what we cannot, no matter how hard we try, come to do it for us.
Which means we’re not self-sufficent, nor do we need to be, instead we throw ourselves on him and his mercy and grace and accomplished work, and he raises us with him. As Paul writes in that passage we heard from his letter to the Ephesians ‘For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast’. It’s not about earning our salvation through keeping the law, it’s the gift of God given in Jesus Christ.
So often we think what we need is a coach, someone to teach us how to do life better, and we think of Jesus like that, someone who will give us tips and tricks to do life better. But we don’t need a coach, we need a Saviour. Paul in that same passage from Ephesians puts it really starkly; you were dead he says. Dead in your sins. And if you’re dead you don’t need a coach, there’s nothing a coach can do for you at that point, if you’re dead you need someone who can raise you to life.
This is the essence of the Gospel ‘for us and for our salvation, Jesus’.
His birth, death, resurrection, and ascension are for us and for our salvation. Jesus dies our death so that we can have his life. He exchanges our failure to keep the law, our failure to live as God commands, the Bible calls it sin, for his perfection. On the cross he carries all our guilt and shame down into death. And in his resurrection he raises us with him into his eternal and everlasting life, life not just without end, but life in perfect relationship with God in a world renewed and restored. But I’m getting ahead of myself, that’s the last sermon in the series.
And so whilst perhaps the news we will always fail to keep the law feels like bad news to start with, compared to the adoptionists who claimed you could, it really is good news, better news, because it meets us where we are, the reality that we really can’t keep it, so Jesus did.
That’s why the Creed breezes past Jesus’ teaching and miracles and all that happened between his birth and his death. It’s not that it’s unimportant, but it’s not the most important thing. The world has had many great teachers, many who had compassion on the sick and suffering, but only one who has died our death to raise us into his eternal life. Only one who has taken upon himself our sin, so that we could receive his righteousness, his perfection.
It’s not that our actions don’t matter, that our lives should not be changed by this, as Paul continues in that letter ‘we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do’. In lives renewed and restored through Jesus’ death and resurrection God calls us to do good, but it must be in that order. Faith in what Jesus has done first, good works, keeping Jesus’ commands and teaching, in response.
If we try to flip it we’ll find ourselves disillusioned and exhausted, wondering if God even loves us at all. Jesus comes for our salvation so put your faith in him, living in obedience to his teaching is simply the outworking of that faith.
Perhaps you feel I’ve breezed too quickly past this section, it’s the core of our faith after all, cross and resurrection and ascension, shouldn’t it get more weeks? But you could preach for years on Jesus’ death for us, his resurrection for us, and his ascension for us and not be done plumbing the depths of the wonder of it all. And so that’s why we do just that, for weeks at a time in Lent and Easter and at many other times in the year, preach the wonderous depths of God’s love for us. I’ve breezed past the events themselves because we have a lifetime to preach on them, and will still not reach the end of the wonder of it all.
My brothers and sisters, Jesus comes, not simply as teacher or example to show us how to live, he comes for us, for us and for our salvation. In a wonderous exchange Jesus has given us his perfection and shouldered our guilt and sin. He has died our death so that we can receive his life. That’s the beauty of the Gospel. Not try harder, but come to Jesus with all your failures and let him raise you up. As the 18th Century Puritan Jonathan Edwards noted ‘You contribute nothing to your salvation except the sin that made it necessary’, and so God in his great love for us raises us in Jesus from the death of sin, to life in him.
Amen.