This is far outside what I would normally write, and I would not expect to see more of it from me in the future, but I feel compelled.
I feel like a whitewashed tomb trying to tell anyone anything about the good news. That picture is Jesus’s, in Matthew 23:27, for people who look clean on the outside and are full of dead bones on the inside. Most days, that is closer to me than I want to admit. So if you read this, do not hear a verdict. Hear somebody who is still trying to work it out.
What started it was a conversation over the weekend about salvation. I’m Catholic, and certainly not the best at it. The man I was talking to grew up Catholic too, and later landed in a non-denominational church. We were not fighting. We were just standing on different sides of the same question, which is how a person actually gets saved.
The longer we talked, the more I felt the door getting narrower. Not narrower in the way Jesus meant it. Narrower in the technicalities. Right heart, wrong wording. Right love, wrong label. And underneath that I kept thinking about the people who already assume God is not for them, because of where they were born, or what they were taught, or what name they were given for him. That is like condemning a blind man because he cannot read the page in front of him.
Gandhi is supposed to have said he would be a Christian if he ever met one. I do not know if those were his exact words. What he did say is that he could not claim to be a Christian in the sectarian sense, even while the example of Jesus’s suffering shaped his nonviolence. The sting of that is real. If the good news only lands on people who already cleared our checklist, then a lot of us have never actually offered it.
Here is the reading I could not get away from.
After the fall, we could not climb out on our own. That is the whole setup of the story. Then Jesus comes, and the cross is not the start of a new exam. It is the closing of the old account. Hebrews 9:15 calls him the mediator of a new covenant, and says his death redeems the transgressions committed under the first covenant. Hebrews 8:13 says that first covenant is obsolete. So when I say the old covenant is closed, I do not mean God changed his mind about love. I mean the old law stopped being the doorway. The doorway is what he paid for.
And the terms he leaves us under are not a new stack of rules. In Matthew 22:37-40 he says the whole law and the prophets hang on two commandments: love God above everything, and love your neighbor as yourself. In Matthew 11:30 he says his yoke is easy and his burden is light. That is the part I wish we would sit with. If salvation still depends on getting the technicalities right, the yoke is not light. It is the old weight with a new name on it.
This is where we got stuck. I asked about a person who actually lives those two commandments, who loves God above everything and treats people the way they want to be treated, but does not know the name Jesus. My feeling was that they are already inside the covenant. You would not have to come in under our label. You could be Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, or none of those, as long as God is the reason you bow and the people next to you are the people you love.
The verses people reach for there are John 14:6, “no one comes to the Father except through me,” and Acts 4:12, no other name under heaven. I do not read those as “you must know this English word, Jesus.” His name was Yeshua. Jesus is what we ended up calling him from the Greek translation Iēsous. If the whole thing hangs on the exact syllables, most of us were doomed already.
What I hear in “I am the way” is the path itself. The way is those two commandments. If you are walking it, you are going through him whether you know his name or not. Paul seems to leave that door open in Romans 2:14-15, where Gentiles who do not have the law, but do what it requires, show the law written on their hearts. And James 2:19-24 will not let faith float free of that life. Even the demons believe, and shudder. A person is justified by works and not by faith alone. Faith without that love is dead.
So who is the first to cast a stone? That question is Jesus’s too, in John 8:7. Are we really going to send a Gandhi to hell because he never took our label? He believed in a living God, called God Truth and Love, and built his life on not harming the person in front of him. Or Badshah Khan, a Muslim who named his movement the Servants of God and made them swear to forgive the people who oppressed them? Or Abraham Joshua Heschel, a rabbi who walked at Selma and said his legs were praying? I am not willing to be the one who throws that stone.
I believe that is what Pope Francis was saying when he said, “every religion is a way to arrive at God.”
The cross still matters. I am not saying the blood only washed Israel and the rest of us are standing outside it. Before the cross, his ministry was aimed at the covenant people. In Matthew 15 a Canaanite woman begs him to heal her daughter, and he tells her he was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel. It is not right, he says, to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs. She answers that even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the table, and he heals her daughter on the spot.
Those crumbs are not scraps. I can’t read them without thinking of the twelve baskets a chapter earlier, in Matthew 14, when five loaves and two fish leave that much in leftovers. The overflow of the bread meant for Israel is enough to fill a basket. She asked for a crumb and got a healing.
The payment is what opened the door. Jew and Gentile come in through the same opened door. It is by the cross that we can live by the new covenant at all. And now you must love God and decide your actions from the perspective of love.
That is the good news as I can see it. The old account is closed. The yoke is light. The requirement is love. I am a poor messenger for it.