Surprise!

Sometimes God surprises us.

Sometimes?

Well, maybe he surprises us more often than that. Or it could be too that things that should leave us surprised and even gasping in wonder instead become commonplace to the point of being mundane. Those of us who follow Jesus can, over time, come to take certain realities for granted. Good news becomes old hat. This is unfortunate, because there is hardly anything more surprising than salvation. But having been raised in church and in having gone to church essentially my whole life makes it more difficult sometimes to appreciate what in Christ I have been given. I think this is true of more people than just myself. And so we almost stop believing that God can surprise us.

I've been reading great book recently by Miroslav Volf called Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace. Once I am finished, I plan on posting a fuller book review. Right now I'm only about halfway through. But his description of God's nature as Giver and Forgiver is worth its weight in gold. It can occasionally take someone else to stir your heart and mind and remind you, and perhaps teach you anew, about the heart of the good news and the person and work of Jesus Christ. While my family attended a tea party on Sunday afternoon, I took some time for myself to relax and read more of this book. And in the process God surprised me, reminded me, and even brought me something of a fresh understanding of the reality of salvation.

Here's just one example: We often talk about Jesus' death for our sin as replacing ours. Jesus died for our sins, in other words, so we would not have to. And Christ is indeed our substitute. But, as Volf points out, this is not quite how scriptural logic and theology runs. In 2 Corinthians 5:14 Paul says, "One has died for all; therefore all have died." Then Volf says this: "Christ's death doesn't replace our death. It enacts it, he [Paul] suggested . . . Now we see that we were also in Christ. What happened to him, happened to us. When he was condemned, we were condemned. When he died, we died." Volf observes that this what our union with Christ entails. This is what it means to be in Christ. This example connects to Volf's discussion of forgiveness, God's justice, as well as a couple of false images of God that people sometimes gravitate toward.

Anyway, this may or may not genuinely convey my reason for surprise, but it reminded me of how some of our more common ways of speaking about salvation miss the mark or at least the depth of the biblical presentation. We can have very cliched and formulaic ways of talking about salvation in our churches that in their own way diminish the staggering reality of what God has done in Christ. A part of our being able to not only appreciate this reality ourselves but to proclaim this reality to others means recovering a deeper biblical understanding built on the very language Scripture uses. We can hardly expect other people to see salvation in Christ as good news, when for us it continues to be old hat! We, too, need to be surprised (again!) at who God is and what he has done.