More Pelagius?

I was still thinking about Pelagius when today's Almost Daily E-Mo arrived from Barbara Crafton. Writing on Luke 14.1, she says:

[Jesus] wasn't in the world to save himself. He was here to save us.

But from what? From a God who, left to his own devices, was prepared to burn us all alive? From the possibility of sin in our lives? From doubt? From a doomed world, far too compromised to salvage? From our own appetites? Certainly, Christians have considered salvation in all of these lights.

But I think Jesus has saved us from something else: from a fear of death that arises from the deeper dread that life is meaningless. If I am a paltry thing -- and I certainly am -- and this is all there is, how can I regard my own passing with anything but despair: if this was my only chance, and I have frittered it away on nothing? I would have been better off if I had been born an animal, unreflective, unaware of a future.

Salvation means that we signify more than we know. That life is more than the sorry sum of all its half-baked events and stray intentions. That the shape of the divine love stamped upon us in creation endures in us, despite all our errors or the errors of others that have scarred us. That we are in a mystery, a large one, and that it is not a tragic mystery. There is a power beyond the power we wield, and we participate in it, much more than we know.

The hints we receive of this truth throughout our lives -- they are our certainty of salvation, and they sustain us as fully as we will allow. Although despair is an option for all of us, none of us is sentenced to it.

I remember when I was a young musician in London, before I became a Christian, before I discovered farming for myself, I used sometimes to sit in my flat in Putney with my heart aching for the impermanence of things. The best and the most beautiful that I or anyone else could make, the wonderful works of artists and writers and thinkers, the lovely city in which I lived and worked, the woman I loved, the children I dreamed we would have, would all crumble to nothing and be forgotten. Nothing would last, and in the end the dust of time would drift over all that mankind had made and done.

Despair would be a reasonable word for what I felt in those long moments. Don't underestimate that kind of existential despair, or think of it as some kind of intellectual fancy, not to be compared with real trouble as the world knows it. To truly feel TS Eliot's words, "This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but with a whimper" ('The Hollow Men,' 1925) as one's own is a horrible thing: more horrible, ultimately, than any physical pain or emotional grief I have felt in a longish and sometimes difficult life. A salvation such as Barbara Crafton describes is no cut-price salvation. Despair is as deep a hell as any fire and brimstone pit, and the freedom from it that Christ gives is the most glorious of gifts.

"Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, 'The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say,"“Look, here it is!" or "There it is!" For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among [or within] you.'" (Luke 17.20-21)