of our first rebellion in the Garden, God's Plan B after we failed to follow Plan A in Eden. From the beginning, we are created for oneness with God and what God does with us, from the beginning, is atonement, at-one-ment.
At a youth conference, the leader stood and read from Paul's Letter to the Romans:
For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us . . . we have been justified by his blood, . . . saved through him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life. (Rom 5:6-10)
"I need your help," the speaker told the youth. "Who wants to be in a skit of Romans 5?" Hands were raised.
"OK, on the stage is a continuum from the very bad, on my left, to the very good, on my right. On my left is complete evil and on my right is complete good. As you are called to the stage, I want you to place yourself where you belong in regard to the good and the bad. OK? Now who will be Mother Teresa?"
A teenager went up and took her place on the far right.
"Martin Luther King?" Another came up and stood just to the left of Mother Teresa.
"Mahatma Gandhi?" The three of them hung out on the right edge.
"OK, next, Adolph Hitler?" A young man grinningly took his proper place on the far left, all the way across stage from the three saints.
"Osama bin Laden? Attila the Hun?" Other villains came up and dutifully clustered on the far left.
"Now, I need one more person up here—Jesus Christ. Jesus, come on up," he said. Eventually a young woman was coaxed forward. Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, and Gandhi politely gave way as Jesus moved to the extreme right.
The speaker looked out on the assembled youth and exclaimed, "Do you people not listen? Did you not pay attention when I read the scripture? I'll read this one more time."
He flipped open his Bible and began to read, "At the right time Christ died for the ungodly," and as he read Jesus sheepishly moved away from Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King, across the stage, over to where Osama bin Laden and the others received him.
When he finished reading from Romans, the speaker said into the shocked silence, "Now, is there anybody here with the guts to come up and stand with Jesus and to walk with Jesus into your school on Monday morning? Anybody here open to that sort of salvation?"
Dozens of youth streamed forward, eager to give themselves to the one who, while we were still weak, at the right time, gave himself for the ungodly.
Spoken toward the end of Scripture, this could have been said every step of the way from the first, "I will be their God and they will be my children" (Rev 21:7). The once ungodly will be the godly. Salvation is when God finally gets what God wants in creating the world. Salvation means finally, safely to arrive where you have always been intended by God to be. One might expect God's restored good creation to be a redeemed garden to make up for the paradise we botched up in Genesis. Instead, Revelation says that God's crowning act of restoration is communitarian: New Jerusalem, a populous, raucously singing city, rather than a serene garden. You get this sort of result from a God who loves a crowd:
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. Nothing accursed will be found there any more. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever. (Rev 22:1-5)
CHAPTER TWO
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THE EROS OF GOD
Who will be saved?" is not as interesting a question as "Who saves?" That which makes Christian salvation counterintuitive, countercultural, and strange is the God who saves.
I saw this in the great mosaic apse at the church in Monreale, Sicily, a wonder of the medieval world. There, presiding over a dazzling array of jewellike depictions of the story of our salvation is Christ Pantocrator—Christ, Creator of all. Having seen photographs of that apse, I expected to be bedazzled by the Byzantine otherness of Christ, Christ the Judge of humanity. And yet the Christ I saw was Christ of the wide embrace, hands outstretched, reaching out from his majesty as if to encircle the whole church, the whole creation in his reach. All the stories of Scripture—told with such vitality and wonder in the mosaics of Monreale—are vignettes of this grand vision of a God who is stubbornly determined to have all of humanity.
Leaving the church at Monreale, a street vendor held up a trinket with Christ's picture stamped upon it. "Don't you want to take a little Jesus with you, mister?" he asked. No, we don't take Christ with us; he takes us places.
God's intended oneness, because of our sin, ended in a crucifixion; yet even in the Crucifixion, God is not thwarted. God creatively weaves such tragedy into God's purposes thereby remaking our sin into God's great triumphant embrace. "If we are faithless, he remains faithful—for he cannot deny himself," says 2 Timothy 2:13. The best modifier of this God is "love."
This God seems to have a desire to have us that is erotic in intensity. We make a mistake to separate agape from eros in speaking of the love that is experienced as the Trinity. Who is the lover in the Song of Songs?
Upon my bed at night
I sought him whom my soul loves;
I sought him, but found him not;
I called him, but he gave no answer.
I will rise now and go about the city,
in the streets and in the squares;
I will seek him whom my soul loves."
I sought him, but found him not.
The sentinels found me,
as they went about in the city.
"Have you seen him whom my soul loves?"
Scarcely had I passed them,
when I found him whom my soul loves.
I held him, and would not let him go
until I brought him into my mother's house,
and into the chamber of her that conceived me. (Song 3:1-4)
The church has traditionally taught that this Hebrew love song, which at first appears to be the erotic thoughts of two heated adolescents, is actually an allegory of the love of Christ for his church. Isn't it scandalous that the closest analogy for the love of God in Christ is the infatuated, sensual ramblings of two adolescents
