© 2023, Dr. Tamilio

The very word Gospel means “Good News.”  When we read the Gospels (one could say that when we read all of the Bible) we are reading God’s Good News to us.  Anyone who watches the news on television or reads the newspaper (which is quickly becoming a relic of the past) anyone who “keeps up with the times,” knows that most of the “news” is bad.  So what’s the Good News?  Let’s use our imagination for a moment and see how life could have been.

Imagine for a moment that there is no God.  We are simply here by accident: no purpose, no overarching reason.  We are here because we are here having evolved from some single-cell organism.  We live.  We die.  That’s it.

What makes this problematic for us, as opposed to all other lifeforms, is that we are the only species that is aware of our mortality.  If there is no God and no afterlife, then it’s lights out when we die.  That’s all she wrote.  No more life, no more consciousness, no more anything (or no more “nothing” as my kids used to say).  The Apostle Paul put it best when he said, “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable” (1 Cor. 15:19).  Listen carefully to what Paul is saying here.  Even if we had Jesus as our guide and teacher for this life only, we would be the “most miserable.”  I may have mentioned to you before how a dear friend of mine in college, who was an atheist, said he used to read the Bible (especially the New Testament), because he liked Jesus’ moral teachings.  That was it.  According to Paul, my undergraduate friend is the “most miserable,” because his “hope” in Christ is for this life only.  This is not to say that Christ’s teachings are not important or are even secondary.  However, if all we have from Jesus is sound moral instruction, then we could just as easily worship Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, or John Stuart Mill.  Jesus provides much, much more, and that is the Good News we declare.

If you read the Torah — the first five books of the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament as Christians call it — you see a cadre of commands to atone for sin.  They typically involve the sacrifice of animals: oxen, sheep, goats, and certain birds, especially for people who could not afford larger animals.  These animals were to be sacrificed by the priests and the blood was sprinkled on the altar.  You even find depictions of animal sacrifices in other, non-biblical texts.  Homer’s epic The Odyssey is replete with sacrifices to appease the gods.  The idea is that such blood sacrifices made one right with God.  Jesus, however, put an end to such sacrifices by becoming the ultimate sacrifice himself.  By shouldering the sins of humanity and paying the price for them on the cross as a substitutionary sacrifice, Jesus paid the price for humankind.  Gregory A. Boyd and Paul R. Eddy remind us that, “This view of atonement is called the penal substitution view, for Christ accepted the punishment for sins in our place.”[1]  Alister McGrath adds, “Sinners ought to have been crucified, on account of their sins.  Christ is crucified in their place.  God allows Christ to stand in our place, taking our guilt upon himself so that his righteousness — won by obedience on the cross — might become ours.”[2]

This is hard for some (if not many) to fathom.  Why would God pick anyone, especially an innocent person, to pay the penalty for others?  That is the definition of injustice, isn’t it?  It would be if the person who paid the price was just a person.  Jesus is far more than that.  He is God incarnate.  That changes everything.  God pays the price for us.  God takes death into himself.  God is the one who suffers as incarnate in the fully human, fully divine Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus the Christ.  Jesus dies on the cross so that we don’t have to.

That being said, we are to actively respond.  We are not just passive recipients of God’s grace.  Jesus died for us so that we might live for him.  I cannot stress that enough.  Jesus died for us so that we might live for him.

This begs a question that Vivian Bricker seeks to answer in her online article, “What Does It Mean to Truly Live for Christ?”  She starts by acknowledging that “Living for Christ in the present age can get extremely difficult at times.  Rather than living for Christ, it can be easy to do the alternative — to live for ourselves or our own wants and desires.”[3]  That’s the way the world works.  Instead, Bricker says, we need to do two things to live for Christ.

The first is to follow the way of Christ as opposed to the way of the world.  “The teachings of the world tell us to ‘live our best life’ or to do all we can for our own ultimate pleasure and happiness,” Bricker writes.  She says that such an “endless pursuit of pleasure and happiness will leave us torn, worn out, and exhausted.”  Instead, we need to live for Christ.  Bricker writes, “When we start truly living for Christ, we are going to break the mold of the world.  No longer will we want to live according to the world.  Rather, we will want to live for Christ and serve Him with our whole heart.”

The second is that we need to surrender everything for Christ.  Nothing can come before Jesus in our lives.  He is primary, never secondary.  Bricker says that “We do not have to be a missionary or a pastor to live for Christ.  If we are Christians, then we can live for Christ in our daily lives.”  She reminds us that “God has trusted us each with our own talents, skills, and gifts, and He wants us to use these things to be able to serve Him and others.”  By using the spiritual gifts we have been given and making Jesus our priority, we surrender all to him.

This thinking can be hard, especially for those who struggle to believe, and the struggle can be real.  It can be hard for some to believe that not only is there a God, but that God loves us so much that he came here in the flesh to offer himself as a perpetual, living sacrifice.

God has done what we cannot.  We cannot save ourselves.  Many people can’t even balance their checkbooks; I don’t know what gives us the impression that we can save ourselves or that our hopes and dreams and lives themselves can encapsulate the meaning of existence…

In today’s Epistle lesson, the Apostle Paul writes, “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.  Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person — though perhaps for a good person, someone might actually dare to die.  But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.”  For some, this is a hard pill to swallow.  For others, it is the ultimate meaning of life.  What we think does not matter as much as what God has done, and what he has done is everything.  Amen.

[1] Gregory A. Boyd and Paul R. Eddy, Across the Spectrum: Understanding Issues in Evangelical Theology, 2d ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), 127.

[2] Alister E. McGrath, Christian Theology: An Introduction, 5d ed. (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 329.

[3] Vivian Bricker, “What Does It Mean to Truly Live for Christ?” taken from Christianity.com, published August 25, 2002.