A Reflection on the Gospel

In the eleventh chapter of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, there’s this fascinating story most commonly known as the story of the Tower of Babel. As the author tells it, humanity has rebelled against their creator and subsequently fallen into brokenness and disarray on every level of their existence, and we find them pressing further and further into their own hopelessness and futility with each passing day. As the story goes, rather than recognize their futility, these people decide to take heaven – achieve fame and salvation – by the work of their own hands. "Come, (they said) let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth."

It seems to me that, at a certain level at least, these people understand that salvation is what they need; they understand that things are not as they should be. But for these people, the solution to their problem lies in their own hands – in bricks and blueprints: building a tower to reach heaven.

As I read this story, I am struck by how little ‘religion’ has actually evolved since then. We can talk about preferences in the types of bricks and we can argue about the blueprints for the tower, but every religion, at its heart, boils down to a compilation of instruction about what to do in order to attain salvation (or otherwise find the solution to the ways things are messed up): bricks and blueprints. In Islam, for example, salvation is found in living according to the five pillars. In Buddhism and Hinduism, our hope lies in discovering the path to enlightenment. But in Christianity? Salvation is found in the death and resurrection of Jesus.

When we take the time to actually look, I think that this is precisely why a Christian worldview is genuinely radical: when you look closely at Christianity, you don’t actually find a religion at all… you find a story. We don’t find a compilation of instruction about what to do in order to be saved. Instead, we find a proclamation about something that has already been done. Christianity is, at its heart, not saving instruction; it is a saving EVENT. It is about coming face to face with a moment in history: a moment in history which, as discussed in my previous reflection, centers on the cross.

In attempting to describe all that happened between Good Friday (the cross) and Easter (the resurrection), it’s all too easy to fall into philosophical abstracts: an endless maze of figurative and convoluted language. In the end, there’s just more going on there then we really have the ability to understand. Suffice it to say, though, that on the cross, Jesus took on everything and every way that we had messed up and, in the resurrection, made a way through it: doing for us what we could never do for ourselves and providing that solution that everyone, in their heart of hearts, is really looking for.

We are terminally ill; Jesus is the cure. We are rebels facing the consequences of a failed and misguided revolution; Jesus has secured our pardon. We are hopelessly in debt; Jesus paid it off for us… these are just some of the images scripture uses to try and describe the cross and all that follows.

To use the language of an earlier reflection, we, as well as the world we live in, are hopelessly out of tune, unable to participate in the symphony for which we have been created. Jesus is both an embodiment of perfect intonation and the craftsman able to fix the instruments of our own souls. He is the auto-tune that enables us in our feeble attempts to play along in the present moment, and that hand that, if we let him, will skillfully and gradually adjust the tension of the strings of our hearts so that, eventually, we will find ourselves able to make that music we were created to make. Able, finally, to take part in the endless, creative symphony of heaven itself.

The reason the Bible calls this ‘Good News’, and not just ‘good instruction’, is that this tuning and repairing work is something that must be done to us and for us. Apart from the hand of the craftsman, all the good instruction in the world will ultimately only serve to frustrate and alienate; we instruments cannot tune ourselves. The good news is that this HAS been done for us. The death and resurrection of Jesus is that event, that moment in history, where the craftsman entered the scene, placed humanity on his workbench, and did for us what we could never do for ourselves.

Before we are able to move forward with Jesus, it is this reality, this story, with which we must come to grips. It isn’t until we lay down our religious bricks and blueprints, until we stop attempting to fix ourselves with our own resources or abilities, stop trying to behave ourselves into heaven, and come to grips with the good news that Jesus has already done the work on our behalf that we will be free from the crushing weight of our own brokenness and the burden of religious moralism, finally able and free to make a genuine difference in our world.

In the end, to step from brokenness into the life that we’ve been created for is simply to come face to face with Jesus – the healer, tuner/fixer, and ultimate source of life – and say, “Yeah… I want that.” As to what follows? That’s a journey; one that I am even now still in the midst of, and expect to be for a long, long time…