This personal reflection on the joy of salvation is excerpted from Unforgettable: How Remembering God’s Presence in Our Past Brings Hope to Our Future, chapter 11, © 2022 by Gregory Floyd, published by Paraclete Press.
Salvation encompasses every intimate, hope-filled word God has ever spoken, every powerful thing he has ever done. There is nothing more comprehensive, more necessary, or more compelling than his salvation. In his Son, Jesus Christ, God reaches into my brokenness, my hopelessness, my despair, my shame. He reaches into the hell of my self-hatred. He enters the ugliness of my pride and my vanity, the lies with which I deceive myself and the empty promises with which I delude myself. He lifts me out of the catastrophe that my life is apart from him. He makes me new. Who could imagine such a gift? It is beyond the reach of my limited mind. But not beyond the depth of my hunger for wholeness and holiness.
Salvation is the most beautiful reality in the world. We instinctively recognize this. When we see the cop make his way out to the car that has plunged into the raging river and pull out the child, we are moved in a way that nothing else moves us. When we see the men and women of Doctors Without Borders, or Mercy Ships, or the doctors who volunteer to perform surgery on children with cleft palates, we are once again deeply moved. When we hear of a child being brought from Darfur or Eritrea or Mozambique to New York City for a life-saving operation, we all inwardly cheer because we know this is humanity at its best. We don’t care what it costs. In fact, the very question would appear perverse to all but the most cynical among us. When the child who has been stolen is found, we rejoice. When she is not found, we grieve. We talk about something happening across the country or across the world as though it were personal to us. This is a beautiful commentary on our common humanity.
What is happening in each of these situations? Someone is being saved. The fact is, we rejoice in salvation all the time. All these “salvations,” and all the others God wants to effect in our lives, stem from the original salvation: he wants to save us from the disaster, the hell of a life apart from him. In the end, I choose heaven or hell. The great lie of the world is that life just ends. The biblical revelation couldn’t be more different: every life is eternal, lived in the heaven of his presence or in the hell of his absence. It would be bad enough, mockery enough of all human achievement, if life just ended, if the silence of the grave was the final word. Eternity apart from God is infinitely worse. God does not send us to hell, as though he were a vicious tyrant, a sadist. No, we choose hell. Every time we refuse truth, we choose hell. Every time we refuse love, we choose hell. We possess this terrifying freedom. These little hells of our own choosing have consequences. They lead somewhere. Jesus had more joy in the one found sheep than in the ninety-nine that weren’t lost. We are that flock. To each one of us, he says,
“It is not the will of my Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish.”
Matthew 18:14
“Lord, save me,” Peter cried out (Matthew 14:30). It is not just the salvation that Christ won on the cross, which is, of course, the centerpiece of the Christian faith. He also comes to save all the parts of me that don’t work correctly, that are broken by life and the world I was born into, all the bad things that have happened to me. He comes to save me from the evil I have committed, from my sins. He saves me from the omissions of love, some big and some small, that I live on a day-to-day basis.
Throughout the Scriptures there are many ways that salvation is understood. It is deliverance from war and invasion. It is victory over one’s enemies. It is safety. It is dominion over nature. It is liberation from evil. It is always a work of divine initiative: God chooses to save because it is his nature to save. It is a work of his mercy and grace.
In the New Testament, one of its most frequent manifestations of salvation is healing. Healing is what the Latin root of salvation – salus – literally means. However, physical healing is always intended to convey a far greater salvation than just the health of the body. It is a manifestation that Christ has the power to save, and that it comes through the death of the sinless one on the cross. This salvation is forgiveness. It is deliverance from the judgment and anger of God. It comes from hearing the gospel and making a personal act of faith in Jesus, by baptism and membership in the Church. While there may be a definitive moment of being saved – the sacrament of baptism, for example, or a moment of declaring faith and giving my life to the Lord – it is also a process: we grow continuously into the fulness of salvation as we allow God to have greater and greater sway in our lives.
I constantly ask God to save me. From what?
From myself: all the parts of me that would rather go my way than his. I am still drawn to the world that has turned its back on him. There is a part of me that sees artists and writers, actors and athletes, people of great accomplishment and thinks, “I could be friends with them.” It is the part that loves events like the Kennedy Center Honors or the Olympics, but forgets to ask, in the moment of being enthralled by the gifts of the honorees and the athletes, whether they are making the correct choices about eternity.
“For what does it profit a man, to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?”
Mark 8:36
It is the part that loves sophistication and elegance, great writing and the well-turned phrase, beautiful music and the finest voices. Much of this is authentic: it is the joy of witnessing excellence. But excellence is only part of the story. Many people devote excellence to the wrong things. The greatest deceptions are rarely outright fabrications, but rather, half-truths posing as whole truths. This is part of what St. John calls “the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life” (1 John 2:16). It is the life of empty show. That’s the part I need to be saved from. That life has an immense draw, and I am not immune to it: beautiful people, good taste, the ease of wealth. The list goes on and on.
I also need to be saved from Satan: the tempter, the liar, the accuser, the deceiver. The one who says: “Look here. Look there. Look anywhere but the cross.” I need to be saved from reading things, viewing things, listening to things that either bring me down or bring me nowhere. Saved from wasting time on the inane. Saved from thinking that riches lie anywhere other than in Christ and his kingdom. Or that there is any better life than that of the Beatitudes, which proclaim:
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”
Matthew 5:3
I want the salvation he offers to infuse and transform every part of me so that I am free, with nothing to hide, with every part of me moving in the same direction, reflecting a light that is not mine.
While salvation is a gift, it is also something I work out with “fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12). In contrast to the tired argument that works cannot save us is the equally valid point that faith without works cannot save.
“What does it profit, my brethren, if a man says he has faith but has not works? Can his faith save him? If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and in lack of daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profit? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.’”
James 2:14–17
The scene of the final judgment tells us that the Son of Man will come with his angels and repay each of us for what we have done, not what we have believed. Christ assures us that what we do to the least, we do to him. To save our lives, we must lose them in the love and service of the least among us.
Christ comes with salvation. He who wept at the death of his friend Lazarus promises new heavens and a new earth, where he will wipe away every tear and vanquish death, mourning, crying, and pain (Revelation 21:1, 4). But there is more than simply a glorious future. Christ sends the Holy Spirit into our hearts today so that we can experience the comfort, strength, and encouragement in our present circumstances that only he can give. He offers us a hope that does not leave us disappointed because he pours his love into our hearts. The experience of his love abiding with us in all the circumstances of our lives allows us to know that what he has begun, he will finish. Salvation encompasses the unending list of all our insatiable longings. We have been saved. We are being saved. We hope to be saved.
Top image credit: Sunset with cross on hill, spiritual landscape and reflection concept. AI generated. ID 348068545 © Volodymyr Konko | Dreamstime.com Used with permission.
Gregory Floyd is Assistant Director for the Center for Diaconal Formation at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey, USA. He is a coordinator of The People of Hope, a Catholic charismatic covenant community based in New Jersey, and a member community of the international Sword of the Spirit. Gregory and his wife Maureen are the parents of nine children. They live with their younger children in Warren, New Jersey.