Saved

For God so loved the world that he gave his only son.

Whoever believes in him, will not perish, but will have everlasting life.

God did not send the son into the world to condemn the world,

But that the world might be saved through him.

-John 3:16-17

Once upon a time, someone decided to take a sign that just said "John 3: 16" to a football game and hold it up.  It makes sense, because anyone who has ever even had a day of Sunday School was probably made to memorize that verse.  Like most verses of scripture though, if you rip it out of context, you almost can't help but miss something important.  In this case the important thing that a lot of 3:16 people miss is 3:17, the part about Jesus not condemning the world, but saving it.

It's understandable that folks get pretty worked up about believing their way into eternal life, that's a pretty good deal in most people's mind: we get past death and on to something more.  But I would offer you a thing to think about, by way of a Bob Dylan song:

Inside the museum, infinity goes up on trial,

Voices echo, "This is what salvation must be like after a while."

But Mona Lisa must have had the highway blues,

You can tell by the way she smiles.

-Visions of Johanna, from Blonde on Blonde

Infinity very well might be a curse, eternity might in fact be heaven, or it might be hell, depending on certain factors. Ancient people tended to find a certain amount of comfort in the idea that someday the suffering of existence would end, and thus the idea of an afterlife was not even particularly attractive. About half of the Hebrew people chose to believe that there was no resurrection.  The Sadduccees differed from the Pharisees in that they simply believed that when you died you ceased to be.  It did not, as some might argue, make them inherently immoral people, in fact they were rigorous observers of the law and believed in God.  They just could not come to accept that God would make this thing called existence go on forever, and they are not alone.  Indeed, I would offer that many versions of eternity are not something I would really much want.  The "trial" that infinity undergoes is whether or not the infinite is trustworthy.  Is the infinite (the thing that many people call God) something we really want?

The somewhat cryptic lyric about the Mona Lisa speaks to our nature as human beings.  The "highway blues" are our sense of never being at home.  Mona Lisa's famous and seemingly inscrutable smile seems know something about that in the mind of  poet.  We are, even the homebodies among us, made for a journey.  An idea of salvation that does not account for that is sure to be a failure in the long run.  What Jesus, the incarnate Word, the Son of God, the Christ, does for us is show us the validity of our journey, by walking it with us, including death and into resurrection.

Even in the resurrection, his physical nature remains, including the wounds he suffered. Loving the world means loving it the way it actually is, crosses and all. This is only possible in a world where the infinite is in love with the finite, where the creation is an act of love. Sometimes we say those words so much that we lose their impact, "God so LOVED the world..."

Salvation is knowing that God loves you, that God not only forgives you, but does not, in fact, condemn you in the first place. When you get there, you can actually, maybe, start loving God back. If you were to enter into eternity without this, you would, in fact, be in hell, what Jesus calls "the outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth," separated from the nature of God by your own blindness.  Many early Christians felt this to be so tragic that they held the belief that, because God is merciful in God's love, God would simply allow such a creature to cease to be, rather than to go further on the journey into infinity in fear and pain. Others felt that, eventually, God's love would redeem even the most wretched sinner, so that what Paul writes to the Philippians would be true: "every knee will bow and every tongue confess... that Jesus Christ is Lord." 

Eventually though, our tendency to underestimate the love of God, led to a good deal of extra-biblical extrapolation about hell, purgatory and suchlike.  Poets like Dante and Milton found fertile ground to tell epic sagas about Infernos and Paradises Lost and Regained, before too long people took these epics and believed them in the same sort of way they believed John 3.  It wasn't one or the other, but a chimera of the two things.

Some of the less medieval visions of hell have simply said it is "separation from God," without a particular emphasis on being tormented by fire and demons.  C.S. Lewis in his little novel The Great Divorce, describes it as a grey city, where shades go about doing whatever seems best to them, but ultimately having an entirely insubstantial existence.  All of this gray city that seems endless, exists beneath the grass of the fields of heaven, to enter into eternity, one must accept that God loves them and take on a substance they did not have before.  Not all of them are willing or able to do it.  In true 20th century fashion, hell is choice. I'm not sure if it is possible to really be separated from God, but I do know that it is possible to feel that way, and in my experience it's not particularly pleasant.

The long and short of it is that none of the stories that we tell about such things, while they all have their own value, approaches the deep reality of God's love for creation.  Christ is the love of God, because God loves Christ is, and because Christ is we can trust God's love. Too many Christians miss this connection, and so churches are often places where one encounters judgment instead of grace, guilt instead of forgiveness, shame instead of a genuine offer of a transformation, which is what repentance is really supposed to be.

The "Good News" is that God gives us this gift, his Son, the Beloved, regardless of whether or not we deserve it. Good thing too, because if we had to earn it, we would really be up a crick without a paddle. That's why 3:17 is crucial, to know that this love does not condemn us, but saves us. Salvation is a gift from a trustworthy and loving God, anything else is not really salvation, and without salvation I want no parts of infinity.