Victory

Victory as Salvation

Swanbourne 21.3.21                                                                                                   Lent 5

The Christian religion is often boiled down to one word - salvation - a word that has often had a bad press. It is often associated with well-meaning but overly pious Christians asking people if they are saved from lives they are perfectly content with. 

            Nevertheless, the word does have a central place in holy scripture, both in the Old and New Testaments. The earliest writer in the New Testament, St Paul, used it in a number of his letters to his fledgling churches. He began, for example, his letter to the Roman Christians by stating ‘For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith’ (Rom.1.16). But the question obviously arises: saved from what?

            If what I have said in these Lent sermons has had any resonance with you then the answer should be obvious. Saved from ourselves. Saved from that inbuilt tendency towards self-centred egotism, the making little gods of ourselves, that has brought such death and destruction upon individuals, families, and even whole nations, that we call original sin. Saved from all the ways in which that original sin leads us into sin and death. 

            Sin and death talk through the lives of all us human beings. It is there in the accumulation of power over others we have seen a whole lot in this pandemic, from burly police arresting a mother at home in her pjnk pyjamas for posting support for an anti-lockdown rally, to men and boys sexually intruding on women and girls without their consent. It is there in the accumulation of wealth; greed which includes the belief that the government owes me a living to the ever-decreasing amount of time and money given to our charities. It is there in the prideful abuse of others that plays the victim card to manipulate them according to your ideology, a prideful game played by the self-righteous from duchesses to dragoons of political or environmental or anti-racist supporters.

            Prevalent in so many ways in human beings and human society, we need to be saved from the ravages of our own sinfulness and the death it causes. That death can be in real terms as in Myanmar right now where citizens are slaughtered by their own military for protesting against the military coup, or a more metaphorical death as in the destruction of trust in spouses, police, politics, or various good causes. The salvation from our own deep-seated, destructive, self-centredness was always going to be a supremely difficult and costly one.

            And so it was. God who created us good but free, and watching the evolution of his creature, humankind, into little self-made gods serving their own destructive ends, entered personally and fully into the process of our lives in Jesus of Nazareth. In doing so our Creator entered fully and completely into the sinfulness of human life. Jesus suffered all that human life in its beastliness had to offer. He knew poverty, powerlessness, misunderstanding and misrepresentation. He knew what it was to be manipulated by the powerful. He knew rejection. And it only got worse as his life travelled towards an encounter with the powerful in his society. In those last days of his life he knew fear, betrayal by a friend, mocking and physical pain through torture, being made a true victim sacrificed for the interests of the powerful. In all of this sin coming at him in his life Jesus alone among us human beings did not, not ever, give in to sin or allow it to direct his life or actions. Then, finally, he would be killed by the most drawn-out and painful death that the super-power of his day could devise. His execution would cause Jesus to come close to despair in the God he had served so perfectly and faithfully all his life. And so he died and that, I’m sure Pontius Pilate and the Jerusalem religious establishment thought, was that.

            Only it wasn’t. To the surprise and even disbelief of some of his own followers Jesus returned to life from the dead. Returned from the dead in such a new and glorious life that they used a particular word for it - ‘resurrection’. He was ‘raised’ by God his Father from the dead, not to his old life but raised to a new life, a life filled with the divine life of God himself. The resurrection of Jesus, the disciples almost immediately grasped, meant that everything was now made new. Jesus, a victim of all our human sinfulness could do to him, including death itself, could not be defeated by our sinfulness. He was vindicated in his truth, and in himself, by God raising him from the dead. He had, with great cost, defeated sin and death; defeated our self-centred and self-defeating tendency to place ourselves at the centre of existence. He had lived a life centred not on himself but on God and, in doing so, he had won a victory not just for himself but for all who followed him.

            Now, a new life, even a new era had begun. God in Jesus’ resurrection had opened up a new possibility for human beings as the creatures of a loving God. A possibility of defeating our sin and its child death; a possibility of living our lives oriented to God that God had always purposed for us, his creation. A possibility of being saved from ourselves by living with and for God in following the way of Christ Jesus.

            Salvation was God, through Jesus, reclaiming us, his creation, for himself. We were always intended by God to have a life-giving creaturely relationship with our Creator. At the heart of our human destructiveness was always our failure to acknowledge God as God and to live out our lives in that reality. This is why the nonbeliever would always find heaven to be hell. Cardinal John Henry Newman, when preaching still as an Anglican priest, once told his Oxford congregation: ‘even supposing a man of unholy life were suffered to enter heaven, he would not be happy there . . . [because] there he must do God’s pleasure.’ We know, as those whose lives are given faithfully to God, that God’s pleasure is our good; but that good is found not in serving ourselves and our interests but in serving God the source of all delight and truth, and goodness. However, to those who have spurned God heaven can only be a disappointment at best and at worst a nightmare in which God, the centre of eternal joy, is so fundamentally foreign, unwanted, and despised. The unholy person never wants his godlike status threatened or removed by the true living God.

            But we might find ourselves asking this question. If Jesus in his life, death, and resurrection saves us from our deadly tendency to sin why then does sin and death continue? And why do we see sin and death inflicted upon others by Christians, who are supposedly saved from such things? Why do we, if are honest, also know that sin and its actions and desires, are found in our own lives as Christians? If sin and death are a part of Christian lives and the Christian Church why should anyone bother with the idea that in Jesus God has provided for us salvation from sin?

            St Paul, that virulent opponent of Christians who became a Christian missionary, wrestled with this very problem. For Paul, Christians lived in a tension between what God had done already in Jesus’s victory over sin and death, and the not yet of the completion of this victory. God had done something decisive in Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, but the work of God in reclaiming us for himself was not yet complete. We live in this tension between the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet’. We have not been removed from the realm of sin; but, at the same time, with the gift of God’s Spirit to the believer, we can both desire and do the will of God. Both in the world and in the life of the believing Christian there is a tension, even a warfare, between the life of Christ within us and what Paul called ‘the flesh’ - the power of sin opposed to God. Paul knew this tension, this warfare, in his own life. In writing to the Roman Christians Paul speaks of the struggle he knows only too well. 

So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin . . . Wretched man that I am! (Rom.7.21-24a)

            The truth is that Christ has won a victory for us over sin and death, but the struggle to realise that victory goes on in the life of every Christian. We are still not fully delivered from sin and we continue to experience both its power in our lives and also the power of the new life of Christ. The Christian life is therefore a process of salvation, a life of becoming saved, slowly and sometimes painfully. God works to reclaim us for himself as we give ourselves to him in the power of Christ, a new life of giving to ourselves to God hat incudes our failures. It is a new life that will only be fully experienced in our resurrection of the body when at last we participate fully in Christ’s resurrection.

            Until then the victory of Christ in his Christian faithful, in us, is one that entails both suffering and conflict as the power of Christ slowly weans us away from sin. We share not only Christ’s resurrection victory but also his sufferings as that victory, through the power of the Holy Spirit who has been given us, takes on the power of sin and death in our lives. The Christian life is a process, a process sf our growing conformity to Christ that has yet to be fully ours in and through death. Victory has been won and begun in Christ’s death and resurrection, but we live in the overlap between the age of sin and the age of the Spirit. We experience this conflict in our lives and we see it in the history and the work of the Church, and in the wider world where God is also at work. 

            At times this tension and conflict will get to us. At times we will fail and sin wins again. But we should not be unduly alarmed or depressed at such times, or even at the existence of this conflict in our lives and the life of the Church. So I pass on to you these wise words of the New Testament scholar James Dunn.

[We are] still divided. Death as well as life is at work in the believer. Even defeat, when flesh succeeds in thwarting Spirit, should not necessarily cause despair - so long as it is experienced as defeat. On the contrary, it is the absence of conflict which should be a cause of concern. The presence of conflict between flesh and Spirit is a sign that the Spirit is having effect in shaping the character. (James Dunn, Theology of Paul to Apostle, p. 496)

In other words, the conflict we find in ourselves and more widely between God’s goodness and the evil of sin is a sign of the presence of God’s victory. It is only when we cease being conflicted that we know sin has won and we have capitulated. As I have said to you many times, failure does not disqualify us from being Christ’s disciples.

            So, in the realisation of Christ’s victory over sin in our lives and in the life of the Church there will be times when we experience struggle and failure, bitterness and the absence of God. As the poet Gerald Manley Hopkins put it in his poem ‘Nondum’.

God, though to thee our psalm we raise

No answering voice comes from the skies;

To Thee the trembling sinner prays

But no forgiving voice replies;

Our prayer seems lost in desert ways

Our hymn in the vast silence dies

Then, at other times Christ’s victory in our life scores a win and that glimpse enables us to keep on with the conflict. Hopkiins again:

Speak! Whisper to my watching heart

One word - as when a mother speaks

Soft, when she sees her infant start,

Till dimpled joy steals o’er its cheeks.

Then, to behold thee as thou art,

I’ll wait till morn eternal breaks.

This is the conflicted reality of faith. We are oppressed by doubts, shaken by uncertainties, perplexed and troubled at our own failures and confusions and those of the Church. We intend to do better and seem to get nowhere. Yet we, by the grace of God, persist in faithful trust in God’s victory in Jesus Christ notwithstanding our own conflicted Christian commitment. Each time we return to him after such conflicts and even failures we are one with St Paul, who knew the same conflicted share in the victory of Christ, a victory that has both been won on the cross and the empty tomb but is not yet fully realised. We, like Paul, persist in the battle until we can finally say, ‘I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.’ And its OK if you only make to the end of the race with your lungs burning and your legs weak and wobbly, and are the last to reach the finish line. Christ will be there to welcome you to his victor’s podium in the eternal joy of God’s wondrous loving presence.

Topics for Discussion

1.         How meaningful to you in your Christian life is the concept of salvation?

2.         How do you understand the cross and resurrection of Jesus?

3.         The sermon presents the Christian life as a tension between an already achieved 

            victory by Christ and the not yet fully realised fullness of that victory. How this 

            helpful to you?

4.         Is the presentation in the sermon of Christian life as a conflict, even a war, between 

            the life of Christ and the life of sin - what St Paul calls ‘the flesh’ - one that reflects 

            your reality?