Have you heard the one about Jesus and Satan, a computing contest and a power outage? I’ll spare you, but the joke came to mind while I was thinking through the question about how Jesus saves in light of a particular text from Matthew’s Gospel. In that scripture Joseph is told to name Mary’s baby Jesus, then Matthew quotes Isaiah, saying “They shall name him Emmanuel.”
So what is the infant God’s name again?
In that reading from the first Chapter of Matthew, we hear Joseph’s decision to stay with his pregnant fianceé after learning the origins of her child – quite suspicious origins if you are Joseph. An angel tells him in a dream that Mary speaks truth. The baby is indeed God’s child, and Joseph is to name him Jesus “because he will save his people from their sins.” The Greek word Iesous means “Jehovah saves.” Emmanuel means “God is with us.”
On the face of it, then, the scriptures don’t seem to be exactly in sync. When that happens, there is reason to take a deeper look. For me, that’s what led to this question about how Jesus saves. Juxtaposing two seemingly different names for Jesus might tell us something about how Jesus saves – and about how he doesn’t.
Let’s start with the way Jesus most definitely does not save. In my experience people often get confused about this. If when we say “Jesus saves” we think that means he rescues, we need to think again. There is no rescue, no valiant knight on a white charger, no release from the messes we tend to get ourselves in. Salvation, yes. Rescue, no.
If it were true that Jesus’ salvation meant rescue, I’d have questions. For instance, if Jesus rescues us from the consequences of accidents and human behavior, then where was he on, let’s say, Saturday, Dec. 13? That was a bad day. That day at Brown University two students lost their lives in a finals study session. That day, at Bondi Beach in Sydney, dozens of Jewish people were gunned down during Hanukkah festivities. That day, in Syria, my friend Ayad and two soldiers with him were ambushed and killed, apparently by an ISIS operative. If rescue was God’s modus operandi it seems a fair question to ask where God was in those instances. Was he off rescuing somewhere else? In Gaza perhaps? Was he preoccupied pulling people from the floodwaters in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Northwest? Was he off to Haiti or Jamaica? Rescuing the people of Cameroon or Myanmar?
If by salvation we mean rescue, then the loved ones of the wounded, missing and deceased would like a word. Those in our world who are suffering every kind of pain imaginable want to know. If Jesus rescues, why not me or my loved ones? You see the problem? Salvation is clearly not rescue. It is something more profound.
Jesus saves by coming to us. By coming as a human child, the Divine divinizes us. That sounds scandalous, doesn’t it? We are made holy through the incarnation as much as we are through Jesus’ passion, death, and resurrection. We are made “like God” in a way that carries great response-ability for one another and all creation.
Jesus saves by being with us. He is the Emmanuel – God-with-us – as promised by Isaiah. Whether this is any consolation to my friend’s wife and children, or for anyone else who suffers and grieves the events of December 13, I don’t know. Perhaps not so soon. Still, in Jesus we see the God who suffers with us and in us. I believe Jesus was with Ayad in his final moments, in some way I can’t fully comprehend. Our theology can get a bit unbalanced if we overlook this truth. It is especially important that we understand how he is God-with-us.
Jesus saves through the nonviolent, kenotic offering of his life on the cross. Perhaps most challenging – we are invited to imitate him in this. Salvation comes through – not in spite of – the suffering we experience. An important distinction, Jesus’ suffering is not willed by God, but entered into willingly by God’s son, the Christ. Understanding this and sharing Jesus’ practice of self-emptying is perhaps the most urgently needed human response to suffering. This is where we come in. This is where our understanding of salvation slips from something Jesus does for us, to something Jesus invites us to cooperate in, freely giving ourselves as he has done.
Jesus saves by his resurrection. At Christmas, we celebrate the “beginning” of Jesus’s story all the way through the “end” of his story: his death and resurrection. The beautiful stories of Jesus’ birth in the Gospels attest to his existence in time. They help us perceive the meaning of his Incarnation. The message of his resurrection is equally awesome: God is not bothered by death, which does not exist for him at all, to paraphrase theologian James Alison.
So yes, Jesus saves, by being Emmanuel – God-with-us.
Sister Beth Murphy, OP, is the communication director for the Dominican Sisters of Springfield.
