Sarx

ALKING INTO Ingles last Sunday with Fr Brent, we were discussing the way that some people (the present author included) worry that loosening the grip on one part of traditional Christianity - eg sex - can lead to a loosening of the grip on other parts. I was adamant about that for a while in ways that many of my current readers (and my boyfriend) might find counterintuitive. I later lightened up. But at the time hearing people question ideas of Virgin Birth and Atonement (etc) seemed to me to be questioning the very nature of Church and God. But now I see a need for the “Big Three” as I call them:

Trinity. Incarnation. Eucharist. These tie it all together. Virgin births - even bodily resuscitations - are without use or merit without these three. Yet these three will survive without those things. I kinda thought, on Sunday, that maybe I needed to do a series on these. And I realise how freaking presumptuous that would be, but it feels like I’m being pulled that way by conversations at Church and in the Blogosphere.

Trinity, Incarnation and Eucharist bring about our Salvation. In order to go there, I need a sort of introduction on what is salvation, at all. What does it mean to be “saved”? This came up Wednesday night at class.In the NT Greek, the word is σωζω sozo. This is the same word used in the Septuagint’s Greek text. In the Hebrew, the word is Yasha (ישע) and it means to save: and from it we get “Yeshua” or Jesus. This word, “save” (Yasha or Sozo) is tied intimately into our conception of who Jesus is, and what it means to be Christian. Yet most of us do not know what it means.

To us and our late 20th century/early 21st century ears, to be “saved” (or, to be more exact, “saaaay-v’duh”) means, essentially, to get out of hell free. That’s our image. It’s not just an image made up by non-Christians: how many times has a preacher asked, “If you died tonight, where would you wake up?” So much of what it means to be “saved” has to do with oddly non-traditional but Christian-generated ideas of hell and God’s judgement. It’s painful to think of a God in these terms - a God who judges so perfectly he has to put some people into hell-fire for all eternity. And, yes, there are debates over the length of life/death/awareness of those who are thus trapped. Would a merciful God condemn his creatures to an infinite agony for a finite sin? Would a Just and Pure God not do so?

But these ideas do not come up in the Gospels when Jesus uses the word, “Sozo”. In most Bibles we learn more about the translators’ biases than we do about Jesus when the text says “Sozo”. For the same word can be translated “made whole” or “healed” as well as “saved”. When Jesus says to the woman who bleeds, “Your faith has healed you” he uses “sozo”. When Jesus says to the woman anointing his feet with her tears, “your faith has saved you”, he uses “sozo”. Our faith “sozo”s us - it makes us whole, it heals us.

Sozo is NOT an eschatological word. It’s not about the end of the world. It’s not something that happens after we die. It’s something that happens now. Outside of the Gospels, this word mutates into “Soter” and “Soteria” - Saviour and Salvation. But it caries the same meaning. It’s now. That’s why Paul tells us to “work out your salvation in fear and trembling.” It’s not a thing for later: it’s NOW. It can lead forward into eternity, of course, but it’s happening now.

Sin breaks us: it breaks our connexion with God, with our Neighbours (they are, esoterically, the same thing) and with ourselves.

Sin divides us from God. In the Western Tradition, the ending of the Garden of Eden story has God screaming, “You Ate the Forbidden Fruit! Now you have to DIE!” (Thunder, lightening, earthquake…) In the Eastern Tradition, the ending of the Garden of Eden story has God gasping in fear, “You ate the Forbidden Fruit! Now you have to die…. (shock, weeping, sadness, total silence….)

In the Western Tradition (at least a majority opinion today) we need something to save us from that eternal rage. In the Eastern Tradition (at least a majority opinion today) we need someone to fix us, restore us, to make us whole. It’s any sin that is our Garden of Eden: every sin that happens is the first one that happens and it makes all others possible. My sin damns you, condemns your children to falling deeper into division from God, not because God is so petty as to blame each of us for each others sin, but because sin is a disease, a broken bit, once it is broken, it can only be passed on as broken.

Sin divides us from our neighbour: because without that connexion to God there is no other connexion possible. And without that connexion to our neighbour - the icon of God present in our lives - it is not possible to connect to God, either. (Homage paid to the icon passes to the thing depicted, etc.)

Salvation is the putting right of all these things and anything that puts these things right can be said to be part of our salvation.

Jesus is not a fire escape. To be saved - to be sozoed - is to be enrolled in this process of salvation, to be actively engaged in the restoration of wholeness, now.

In succeeding essays, I hope to show why this is so: why salvation is, exactly, this process; and why our process of salvation as Christians relies on, demands or needs Trinity, Incarnation and Eucharist in order to make sense and work.

It is possible to see this as an East Vrs West thing, but I don’t think that’s either needed or helpful. It is, however, very true to say that in the wider, Christian traditions there are places where “the eastern view” is a minority opinion and places where it is a majority opinion. Likewise “the western view”. We may choose one over the other and label it as “more Christian” but I think that misses the point. “Catholic” means “whole” - the “Whole Faith” includes things we like and things we don’t, things that can be distorted and things that can balance out that distortion. The faith Sozos us, meaning to make us whole, makes us Catholic.

Tags: catholic, east, eucharist, faith, incarnation, orthodoxy, s=tie, salvation, sozo, trinity, west