What did Jesus mean when he said “salvation”?

Recently the story of Jesus’s encounter with Zacchaeus appeared on pray-as-you-go at this link for November 19th; “coincidentally,” Menlo Church’s November 24th sermon covered the same passage. The lovely Carol showed me a page from her devotional guide that also focused on this passage, and encouraged its readers to write a few paragraphs about salvation: what does that mean to me? Following are a few thoughts.

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⁹Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. ¹⁰For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”

Luke 19:9–10, NIV (2013)

Perhaps you know the story: Zacchaeus, a rich and corrupt tax collector in first-century Israel, encounters Jesus in Jericho; Jesus goes to Zack’s house for a meal, Zack repents, and Jesus says that salvation had come to the house. The full text is here.

Reflecting on this story, and particularly what Jesus says about salvation, it struck me that my understanding of the passage is quite different from the way I understood it 20–30 years ago. Back then, as a young evangelical, I would have had a very narrow idea of “salvation”: I thought it meant the shift from a dim eternal destiny to a bright one. Before salvation, Zacchaeus was headed for hell; once saved, he was headed for heaven.

The way this happened, I would have said, was that some time during the visit, Zack came to “believe in Jesus” (in a John 3:16 sort of way), and at that point, became a child of God, as John 1:12 promises. Being thus adopted by God, he was now destined for heaven. And I would have said that his proclamation (“Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor…”) was evidence of Zack’s belief and perhaps of an incipient transformation wrought by God.

That belief somehow caused God to change his mind about Zack; God’s view used to be that Zack was deserving of hell, but after Zack came to believe, God saw him as forgiven: in the words of the hymn, “clothed in His righteousness alone / faultless to stand before the throne.”

OK, that explanation wasn’t as clear and crisp as I’d have liked, though, because as Romans 3 teaches, nobody ever looks for God. Ephesians 2:8 says we’re saved by grace through faith, but even faith is a gift from God; we can’t generate that faith by ourselves.

Suppose that Zacchaeus had said nothing about providing for the poor, or about making restitution to those he cheated? It would not have made any difference to me back then; my view, based on verses like John 1:12 and John 3:16 and John 5:24, was that basically “all you need is to believe.”

Although there was some muddiness in my understanding, that’s how I thought about the “salvation” thing.

Thirty years later…

How is my thinking different today? For one thing, my understanding of “salvation” is broader and with a different focus. As I understand it, in first-century Israel, Eternity-in-Hell-after-you-die was not the thing people would feel most in need of being saved from. They would be thinking of how to be saved from oppression, poverty, fear or shame. Or from being a pariah in the community.

Which Zacchaeus was. I wonder how his short stature affected his experience growing up. Was he ridiculed or bullied? Is that why he he decided to collaborate with the Roman oppressors to exploit his own people? And to cheat them besides?

So he became a tax collector, then chief. He got money, and maybe some sort of revenge against his persecutors, but his wealth didn’t gain him respect within the community. I see him as caught in a viscious cycle partly of his own making. And I think that when Zacchaeus saw Jesus, he didn’t see the kind of hate and judgment that he saw on the faces of those around him. Somehow, during the party, he was enabled to see a way out of that viscious cycle—he saw a better way to be. This is the kind of thing that can happen when Jesus encounters us: we find ourselves suddenly able to take a step we had not previously imagined.

As Paul wrote in Titus 3: “For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, spending our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another. But when the goodness and mercy of God our savior appeared, he saved us, not on the basis of our good deeds, but according to his mercy…”

God, in the person of Jesus, made it possible for Zacchaeus to escape the slavery of those various passions and pleasures—or at least, to begin the journey. How could Zacchaeus keep on the journey? How can any of us do so? The author of Hebrews exhorts us to pay attention so as not to drift away.

¹We must pay more careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away. ²For if the message spoken by angels was binding, and every violation and disobedience received its just punishment, ³how shall we escape if we ignore such a great salvation?

from Hebrews 2

She writes that Jesus is “the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him” (5:9). She exhorts us to be diligent in pursuing our hope, that we may not be sluggish, but “imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises” (6:12).

What does this look like? Suppose I fall into the ocean at night. I can’t touch bottom. Suddenly I hear a life preserver splash in the water but I can’t see it. A voice tells me to swim ahead. It tells me to turn right; I pay careful attention and do what I’m told. Eventually I grab it. In this story, I have a big problem: I’m helpless in the water. Do I want to be saved? Well, yes—but I’m way more concerned about drowning than about eternal destiny. I had to pay attention; I couldn’t ignore such a salvation. I had to obey.

But I might also be worried about eternal destiny; it’s the kind of thing we tend to postpone thinking about until the last possible moment. And a first-century Israelite might very well be thinking about sin and forgiveness. The book of Leviticus has the most instances of “forgiven” of any in the English Bible. John baptized people “for the remission of sins.”

So I think people would be concerned about both. Actually, as I was thinking and writing about this, I remembered that first-century Greek has a lot fewer words than modern American English. The word translated “saved” can be (and sometimes is) translated “healed.” And in Matthew’s gospel, we read that the angel told Joseph to call the baby Jesus, “because he will save his people from their sins” (1:21).

I now think of salvation as being much broader: as saving the whole person from every kind of hurt: ostracism, drowning, cancer, PTSD, guilt and shame, loneliness, depression, famine, sword. Ultimately, from death: as the Apostle Paul writes, we are destined not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us so that whether we are awake or asleep (a euphemism for dying), we may live together with him. I think that’s in 1 Thessalonians… yes it is: link here (NASB)