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What is the gospel? Karl Barth says that when we say "gospel," good news, we are talking about salvation, about the mighty acts that God has worked pro nobis:

The gospel is constituted by the mighty acts of God in history for the liberation of the cosmos. It is not a set of rickety arguments about the divine order; it is not the expression of some sublime religious experience brought mysteriously to verbal form; it is not a romantic report about awareness of God in nature; it is not a speculative, philosophical theory about the nature of ultimate reality; it is not a set of pious or moral maxims designed to straighten out the world; it is not a legalistic lament about the meanness of human nature; it is not a sentimental journey down memory lane into ancient history. It is the unique narrative of what God has done to inaugurate [God's] kingdom in Jesus of Nazareth, crucified outside Jerusalem, risen from the dead, seated at the right hand of God, and now reigning eternally with the Father, through the activity of the Holy Spirit, in the church and in the world. Where this is not announced, it will not be known.⁷

Barth says what the gospel is not—not religious experience, not moral platitudes, not an attempt to straighten out the world, not a deeper appreciation of nature, not something personal and subjective, not ancient history—in order to say that salvation is "the mighty acts of God in history for the liberation of the cosmos." The first book of the Bible says that the world is initiated solely through an act of God and the last book of the Bible is a sustained hymn that sings the great triumph of God in which creatures in heaven and on earth sing that "salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne" (Rev 7:10). Crucified Jesus is the one who brings, "Salvation and glory and power" (Rev 19:1).

A Christian is someone who lives in the light of this story. A Christian and a Buddhist (or for that matter, a Republican or a Democrat) differ primarily on the basis of the stories they are living. These stories tell uswhat is going on in the world, what we might reasonably expect and who really sits on the throne.

We could never have made this story up by ourselves, "this salvation of God" (Acts 28:28). We thought we knew what salvation was until we were face to face with the Christ, God's definition of salvation. Salvation does not mean anything we would like it to mean. Salvation has a particular face, a specific name, a location. We might have liked to be saved in Switzerland, which is a beautiful place. Instead, God reveals our salvation in a dusty, utterly unappealing locale (ugly back then and still is) like Nazareth. We might have received our salvation more gladly had it come to us more generally as the highest and best of humanity rather than specifically as a Jew from Nazareth who was tortured to death.

Salvation is learning to live with the God that we've got, now and forever, learning to love the God who saves. You can easily see that the thing that impresses me, as a Wesleyan, about the God we've got is that God is love. Of course, the statement, God is love, is problematic. For one thing, we don't know God. For another thing, our talk of love is suspect. Both the word God and the word love await content and definition by the particular stories that are Scripture.

We must therefore attend to Scripture, listening carefully, enjoying the particulars, looking for the overall picture that emerges, so that we may know the God that we've got, or, more specifically to the way the Scripture tells it, the God who has got us. (Remember that you are reading the thoughts of one who, when asked by a bishop the traditional ordination question, "Are you convinced that everything necessary for salvation is contained in the scriptures of Old and New Testaments?" answered, "yes.")

A good place to begin is with attention to one of Jesus' greatest hits, the so-called good Samaritan (Luke 10). A man on his way from Jerusalem to Jericho is victimized by thieves who rob him, beat him, and leave him half dead and in the ditch. Down the road comes a priest. This officially religious man will surely be the salvation for the man in the ditch. No, the priest passes by on the other side. If the clergy won't save you, who will? Then comes a pious, Bible-believing layperson—who passes by on the other side. Last comes a despised Samaritan. You have lost a lot of blood. This is your ultimate hope for rescue but you are aghast to learn that your hope, your salvation is none other than a good-for-nothing, anything-but-poor-and-pious, lousy Samaritan.

"I'm OK," you protest. "It's just a flesh wound. Don't bother yourself," muttering under your breath, "I'd rather die in this ditch than to be saved by the likes of you!"

The loathed Samaritan risks all, extravagantly responds to the need of the man in the ditch. So this is not a story about a person who stops and gives the man in the ditch the use of his cell phone in order to call the highway patrol—we would have done that. It's a story about the odd, threatening, humiliating, and extravagant form by which God draws near to us for our rescue. And, in noting our reaction to the story, it's a story about our shock at the peculiar One who risked all for us.

Like most of Scripture, the story of the man in the ditch is a story about God before it is a story about us, about the oddness of our salvation in Christ. I've used this interpretation of the parable of the good Samaritan before, and I can tell you that my congregation didn't like it. They like stories about themselves more than they like to hear stories about God. They are resourceful, educated, gifted people who don't like to be cast in the role of the beaten poor man in the ditch. They would rather be the anything-but-poor Samaritan who does something nice for the less fortunate among us. In other words, they don't like to admit that just possibly they may need to be saved.

Why is this story not about us? Doesn't the story end with Jesus saying to his interrogator, "Go and do likewise"? "Go" and "do" what? I'm saying that more difficult even than reaching out to the victim in the ditch (which is hard enough for us) is coming to conceive of yourself as the victim, learning to live as if your one last hope is the Savior whom you tend to despise.⁸

The Samaritan is more than a moralistic story about how we ought to do good for others but rather a joke about how Jesus makes all of us look poor and beaten up and then teaches us to receive the God we've got. When Jesus was criticized for the company he kept at table, he was clear that he saves only the abandoned and the dying (Luke 19:10). But that also means that we can expect some resistance to the notion that Jesus Christ is our salvation. In John's Gospel we looked upon Immanuel, God with us, and cried, "you are a Samaritan and have a demon" (John 8:48). Many looked upon God's salvation—a Jew from Nazareth who lived briefly, died violently, and rose unexpectedly—and responded, "We would rather die in the ditch than to be saved by you." Therefore, the story of our salvation is, at key points, a story of our resistance, our violence to the Savior we did not expect.

Jesus reacts to our situation in the ditch, not with more rules and regulations, not with harsh condemnation, but with a sort of love that can only be called reckless, extravagant, prodigal. There is, dare I say it, a kind of promiscuous quality in his extroverted love.

When asked, by someone like me, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus said, "Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor" (Mark 10:21). This was a ridiculously extravagant demand, except this is exactly what Jesus himself was soon to do on the cross.

"And if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you" (Matt 5:40-42). Note that Jesus has not defined love as bringing out the best in other people, or love as making the world a better place in which to live, nor is love something that comes naturally from good people like us. Love is more demanding than a pagan virtue like justice. Jesus' love is what Jesus commands, something enabled by who he is. He expended everything. He laid down his life for a bunch of stupid, wayward sheep, friends who were also his betrayers.

In so doing, Jesus was not simply being a great ethical teacher; one is impressed by the impracticality of what Jesus commands. If you give everything you've got to the poor, eventually you will have nothing to give. And how does self-giving better the lot of the poor after they have consumed everything that you have given? Will such liberality only produce character flaws in the poor? If you so thoughtlessly give to the needs of others in this way, you will eventually be used by others who will take advantage of you. Taken to the extreme, it could lead to your death.

But then Jesus says that this is exactly where this should lead. "No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends" (John 15:13). Love, as Jesus embodies love, is reckless self-expenditure. "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me" (Luke 9:23).

Why would Jesus commend such a way? He seems to do so, not because of its potential human benefits and rewards, but simply because this is the way God is. This is the way reality is. This is the grain of the universe. He is thereby revealing the way the world is meant to be, all the way down. Without consideration of benefits or consequences, this is reality. A seed can only germinate and come to fruition when it falls to the earth and dies (John 12:24). Being most fully alive, being most completely who we are created to be, is a matter of self-expenditure. Self-giving is selffulfillment. Whosoever loses a life, finds life. "Whoever does not love abides in death" (1 John 3:14). The greatest of all is servant of all. Whoever wants to become great must turn and become as nothing but a little child.

"This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you" (John 15:12). And as 1 John puts it, "We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another" (1 John 3:16). Jesus was "in the form of God . . . taking the form of a slave . . . he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death" (Phil 2:6-8).

This way is the way? This puts in context Jesus' words that he is "the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6).

"This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent" (John 17:3). What the Savior revealed is not just God in general, deity in the abstract—that is, a God without soteriological punch—but a very particular, very peculiar kind of God, a God who is, in a number of essential ways, most "ungodlike." Here is no "god" who divinely floats above the grubby realities of this world but rather a God who, in love, locates pro nobis.

Thus Karl Barth said, "God is the God of the eternal election of His grace.^"9 Scripture tells us that which we could never know on our own, namely that God has elected to be our God not only at the beginning but also at the end. God has decided, in grace, to be for us. This is not only something that God sometimes does, or once did; this is who God is now, God pro nobis. The whole doctrine of the Trinity is our attempt to name the God who has met us in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ was not just an aspect of God or a good indicator of God; he was God. In him the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, all of the glory of God in him.

And our reaction to such close-quartered glory? In unison we cried, "Crucify him!"

God knows we tried to forget this story or to supplant it with alternative salvific accounts. Every story counter to Scripture tends to be an attempt to be done with that God who refuses to be done with us. I just heard the sermon of a TV preacher (who preaches each Sunday to more people than I preach to in a year). Though his sermon was charmingly delivered, his message was one of autosalvation—you are a good person who, with the right principles in your head (which I will tell you), by the application of the right technique (which I have discovered and will now graciously give you), will be able to save yourself by yourself.

The preacher didn't actually use the word save, for I doubt that he thinks we're in any kind of dilemma from which we need to be saved. (Improvement, rather than salvation, seemed to be his goal.) Nor did he refer to Scripture in his sermon, which seemed wise since the story he was attempting to lay over our lives is meant (even if he doesn't know it) to defeat the story that is Scripture. I don't think he even used the name "God"—his sanguine account of the human condition really doesn't leave any work for God to do that we cannot just as well do for ourselves. Surely, his sermon implies, there is some means for us to get saved other than by Jesus.