Salvator Mundi (Savior of the World) by Leonardo Da Vinci
After
considering the topic of God in several posts it might be helpful to
look at the other end of the spectrum to the role of Jesus. We looked into the life of Jesus in some detail previously.
Jesus is
regularly referred to as a savior. Mainstream churches use the catch-cry, “Jesus
Saves”. Really! What does he save? Some say, “He saves me from my sins.” I
cannot believe that every time I sin Jesus will save me – and everyone else who
is sinning. What would be the point of that! What would we learn from it – it
seems to me that when people say that they are not really thinking it through.
If I have
learnt anything about the Bible, it is that every word single makes an
important point. The Bible is so clever that no translator has been able to
skew the real meaning. So what is the true meaning of referring to Jesus as a savior?
The idea of
Jesus saving is first mentioned in the New Testament in Matthew chapter 1, when
the angel announces the birth of Jesus to Joseph.
“... she will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins." 1:20-21
Nativity by Giotto
The meaning
of the name Jesus is savior or deliverer. The question is: does the savior do
the actual saving? A deliverer simply takes something from one place to
another. It seems to me that we must save ourselves now made easier because
Christ was able to unite himself with this earth; in fact, Jesus delivered him
here!
We might be
able to make more sense of this if we understand the word ‘sin’ See post about sin. The Greek word for sin is hamartion
and means ‘to miss the mark’. Imagine if we had a quiver full of arrows, and
these arrows represented our thoughts, how often would we hit the mark because
our thoughts were true? We must admit that, left to our own devices, we don’t
know what to think about certain things. There are many things in this world
that we don’t understand. Essentially, the birth of Jesus heralded in a new era
of human consciousness. Unless we understand that human consciousness changes
we cannot understand the significance of the birth of Jesus, or the crucifixion
of Jesus so that he could receive the Christ spirit into himself fully, and the
subsequent resurrection.
In a
nutshell, before Christ (BC) we didn’t think our own thoughts. Whatever
thoughts we had were instinctual and we depended on the tribal leader for
guidance. We did not have the ability to make our own concepts from all that we
saw in our environment. This instinctive process began to fade away and we
started being able to put two and two together in our own minds, a process that
has reached its zenith in present day sciences.
David by Michaelangelo
Now many
scientists are admitting that they see concepts that are beyond their ability
to prove. We could say that a higher instinct is entering into human
consciousness, but this time it must be thought through. We could call this
awareness higher imagining, higher inspiration and higher intuition. These three
represent our ability to create pictures from our own ideas, our ability to
hear new ideas echoing within us, and our ability to experience something new
so that we know it intimately. Many people who invent things will tell us that
this is how they came to understand their invention in the first place.
So the term
“Jesus Saves!” doesn’t mean that we can sit back and hand over responsibility to
him. It means that we must understand what he did, and the implication of his
deed for our consciousness. We could say that Jesus has saved us from the abyss
between the death of unthinking instincts by instigating the birth of these
higher faculties of picturing, hearing and experiencing beyond what physically
meets our five senses.
