"[God] desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For
there is one God;
there is also one mediator between God and humankind,
Christ Jesus, himself human,
who gave himself a ransom for all
—this was attested at the right time. For this I was appointed a herald and an apostle (I am telling the truth; I am not lying), a teacher of the gentiles in faith and truth." (1 Timothy 2:4-7)
If you ask the apostle who wrote these words, which many of us heard this past Sunday in worship, there is nobody God intends to leave out. Seriously, nobody. Literally, nobody.
Sometimes we don't pause for long enough to take that in or come to terms with what this passage from 1 Timothy is saying about God, but it really is a pretty breathtaking claim. "God desires everyone to be saved" is the starting point, and then as if to back up that claim about God's wishes or aspirations, he adds that God has put God's money where God's mouth is, so to speak, in Christ Jesus, "who gave himself a ransom for all." That's a pretty wide reach, if we take it seriously, and it seems like the writer doubles down on just how big a claim he is making. He doesn't walk it back and say, "Well, God will take as many as God can get," or "God will make a reasonable effort to reach as many people as God can." But rather, the claim is that God both desires to save everybody in the end, and that God has given Jesus as a ransom for all.
That had to be scandalous in the ears of the first listeners to this letter; after all, it is still mind-blowing to our own, who live in a culture where every resource is seen as a scarce commodity, whose value only comes from being limited to "some" rather than "all." When these words were first written, the Christian community was truly wrestling with the question of whether God's saving love was just for religious insiders who had grown up within the ethnic ties of ancient Israel and Judah, or whether God was now including outsiders ("gentiles") who didn't share DNA, religious background, or the shared language and culture of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob's descendants. There were some who were convinced that God's saving love was a limited commodity like gold, silver, cryptocurrency, or rare-earth minerals, and that it was only available to people from the right places, the right ethnicity, and the right religious prerequisites. And then there is the tradition that comes out of the apostle Paul, that dared to say a big ol' NO to that train of thought. And both Paul and his later proteges made the counterclaim that God's will was to reach everywhere, to seek out everyone, and to save not just one group, or a sizable collection of individuals, but the whole nine yards. God intends, as we see here in these verses, for everybody to be saved; if we needed proof, continues First Timothy, we need only look at the cross at which Jesus offers himself like a ransom "for all."
This month we have been focused on the theme of going "with Jesus... on the margins," and this passage is one more example of what we mean by that. Here we have a clear voice from the New Testament saying that God is intent on going into every crevice, corner, nook, and cranny of the universe to seek and find us like a shepherd going after a lost sheep, and that God isn't willing to just settle for holding onto a large number of us, or even the majority of us. God "desires everyone to be saved," and that's a much stronger claim than just God offering some commodity called "salvation" with a "take-it-or-leave-it-I-don't-care" kind of indifference.
God is not, in other words, like the cashiers at your local retail or grocery store. They want my business (that is, my money), but they aren't particularly invested in getting me to buy THIS particular product, or even necessarily getting ALL the business in the neighborhood. The managers at my local grocery store know that they are competing with other stores like them, along with big box stores like Walmart, convenience stores, fast food restaurants, and farmers markets. They want enough of a share of the market that they can keep their business open, but they don't really care if I'm the customer or my neighbor is, or the lady who lives the next block over. That is, it's not really "me" they are after, but just "enough" of the local population to keep their own profits up. And of course, all too often, we treat church the same way--that we are just one more vendor of one more commodity, and as long as we get enough "market share" of people to keep meeting our budget expenses, we can be satisfied. That sounds very much like conventional business sense, but it doesn't sound like the God being described in today's verses.
Rather, when the writer of today's passages pictures God, it is not with the self-interest of a business trying to boost income, but with a longing for each one of us individually. We are important to God, every last one of us, not because we represent a pie-slice of "market share" in the religion industry, but because God actually loves each and every one of us and desires us to be pulled into salvation. And there is nobody God leaves out of that love or that desire. There is no point at which God just shrugs the divine shoulders and mutters, "You can't win 'em all," before letting some of us slip through the cracks. There is never a point at which God says, "Well, I tried, but now I'm too tired to bother with Steve over there--he's just too much of a stinker and a lost sheep, and he's not worth the trouble of saving anymore!" And, as 1 Timothy tells it, there is never a person of whom God says, "I don't care about saving you." It's all of us that God is after. It's all of us who are included in the ransom exchange in Christ.
Now, given all of this, there are two questions we are left with as we face another day in God's world. The first is simply this: if God sees every last one of us as worthy of the love, effort, and cost of saving, then how can any of us treat anybody else like they are less-than? And second, given 1 Timothy's assertion that God "desires all to be saved," do you think that in the end, God really gets what God wants? That is, in the end, when all things are made new, do you suppose the story of the universe truly ends with God giving up in frustration and saying, "I tried, but I just wasn't strong enough to do it. I guess I'll settle for whatever percentage of humanity went to church or believed in Jesus through the proper wording of the creeds..." or do you think that ultimately God will get what God desires for the whole world? The way we approach those questions changes the way we view other people. If we believe that God will eventually settle for something less and end up giving up on some people, then we will have reason to give up on people or regard them as potential collateral damage without losing any sleep over them. But if we believe that God sees every person as worthy of costly sacrifice and infinite effort to save, then we can't dismiss somebody else--no matter how far off to the edges of our perception they are--as unimportant or not worth our love.
So, what do you think? Will we take seriously the New Testament claim that there is nobody left outside of God's desire to save? And if we do, how will it affect the way we treat people--even (or especially) the people we struggle to love right now?
Lord God, stretch our love to be as wide as yours, and deepen our care for reaching other people to be as full and strong as your own desire for all to be saved.
No comments:
Post a Comment