What's a Gospel?

Here’s a test.  What is the Gospel message?

a)   Jesus died to pay your debt of sin.

b)   Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!

c)   A word that means “good news”

Answer:  b

Many years ago, after some years in active rejection of Jesus and all things called by His name, and after the consequent despair arising out of ephemeral alternatives, I returned to Him.  I had become acutely aware of my shortcomings and of my inability to rein them in.  I knew that, although my case was mild, it did not differ in kind from others who drift into more consequential, death inducing, shortcomings. On the cosmic scales of justice I deserved punishment quite as much as they.  It’s not surprising, then, that the Gospel of my Protestant upbringing reached me in a profound place of need. 

The Protestant Gospel is answer a), “Jesus died to pay your debt of sin.”  What I needed was forgiveness, and that’s what I got, in spades.  For an over scrupulous young man, I was assured of forgiveness and at the same time was given a theology that would distract me for years and provide me a rich tool for learning scripture.  For this I am grateful beyond words.

Unfortunately, as I tried to live out the implications, an inversion arose.  Relief was fixed, was stuck, both logically and chronologically to the point of acceptance.  The debt was paid, but since original sin had not been removed from me, I continued to rack up more debt.  No problem, “Jesus’ death forgives Christians, too.”  As good as that was it provided little in the walk forward toward maturity.  And so once again I was essentially returned to my own devices; it remained my problem to undo my shortcomings[i].  For me the profundity became art when I made a simple line drawing that showed a large angry hand stretching down, a man cowering from what was about to happen, and Jesus on the Cross in between, shielding the cowering man.  

This is the weakness of Protestant—and for the same reason, Catholic—teaching.  It rests on the cornerstone of a vengeful God.  On that foundation, the teachings and practices for raising up the cowering man, for remaking him in likeness to the True Man, crumble.  The god whose nature is radically bifurcated in that way—like a mother protecting her child from the child’s abusive father, her husband—is not the Father revealed by Jesus Christ.  The complexities of teaching that grow out of it simply do not satisfy, making of faithful practice a process with a high intellectual prerequisite.  It can’t be right to require that of the typical person in order for him to be a “serious Christian.”  If it were, then the child of the woman from Cana would not have been healed; the publican would not have been justified; the woman who washed Jesus feet with her tears would have been forgotten.

Intuitions around these problems—the Angry God, and Intellect-as-table-stakes—drove my move into the Orthodox Church, where the joy of the Resurrection lay in Christ’s conquering of death by death rather than in a revived sacrificial victim.  And so we return to the opening question, what is the Gospel message?  Only after years of shedding my intellectual constructions was I able to see it in all its blessed simplicity:

      “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!” 

There it is, spoken directly from John, who prepared the way, and then from Jesus himself, who is the Way.  The real beauty is that forgiveness is already built into the message.  The Father bids you to the Kingdom, He wants you to come.  That hand reaching toward the cowering man does not bring death but life.  It reaches gently down bidding him, “come.”

So what’s all this about Jesus’ death?  After all He did bear the sin of the world: “by His stripes we are healed.”  Fr. Thomas Hopko answered this question in a lecture which has been archived with Ancient Faith Ministries (Understanding the Cross of Christ).  The answer, again, turns out to be simple, turning on the word itself: what is “the Gospel?” 

Most Christians know that gospel is a word used to translate evangelion. For some reason I had not known that this word had a common usage in the days when the Gospel writers used it.  Here’s Fr. Hopko: 

…Christianity appeared on the planet earth as a gospel, and a gospel is a good news, but it’s not good news in general; it’s a specific, technical term, evangelion, which means the good news of a king that he has been victorious in battle over his enemies and that he has triumphed, that he has conquered, and his subjects and his people are now safe; they are now saved; they are now protected.

It would be an understatement to say this blew my mind. Suddenly a great many pieces fell into place, pieces cut loose from shedding Protestant theological constructs.  To take just one example, the promise made to Abraham now transfers naturally forward as the Kingdom of Heaven ruled over by his descendant, eternally on the throne of David.  Truly Abraham, in Christ, became the father of many nations.  In Protestant rendering (an expansion of Romans 5) the faith of an individual, like Abraham, brings forgiveness to the individual, making of Christ a functional item to each person, rather than a King reigning over faithful people.

That cowering man has a home in the safe haven of the victorious King, the King who defeated all the enemies that terrified him.  When he stands up to come, each step closer to the Father, each step into His Kingdom, is a step of repentance.  As he draws nearer his repentance becomes the means of his re-creation, a joint work with Christ:

But the crucifixion saves [sinners]. Why? Because he loves them, and God is love, and love is the fulfillment of the law. And that’s what paying the debt means. When it says he “paid the debt” on the Cross, it’s not the debt of being punished; it’s the debt of loving.

For just as Jesus was faithful to the Father even unto death, the horrible death of crucifixion, so, too, can we be faithful.  Not of ourselves, but by walking with him in repentance, through a continual relationship of trust, trial, falling, being picked up, and trying again.  And if, in that process, we die, even then we are safe.  He conquered death, too.

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[i] Yes, I was and am fully aware of teachings about the Holy Spirit in Sanctification and so on, all of which swirls around the puzzle of semi-Pelagianism.   The only logically consistent solution is Predestination, which I, then, accepted.