What is salvation for us?

Therefore, my beloved … work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure. Phil 2, 12b-13.

“Work out your own salvation”: the word ‘salvation’ is one of the markers of difference within the Christian church in the present day. There are some churches where you hear the word all the time; you will be asked if you have been saved. There are others, among them many Anglican churches, where the word is heard rather infrequently. We say, in the creed, that Christ came down ‘for us and for our salvation’; but we tend not to dwell too much on the word. It even makes us uncomfortable, reminds us of a Christian style that seems over-intrusive, too confident on issues that are, in the end, rather private and mysterious.
But open Paul’s letters and there is little getting away from the word. Paul speaks all the time about salvation; it is clear that, for him, salvation is the point. The good news of Christ, the gospel, is the good news of salvation. We can’t deal seriously with Paul, or the rest of the New Testament, without dealing with this word. If we try to avoid it, we risk making our faith a vague spirituality, a source of uplift, perhaps, but nothing very decisive in our lives.
Whether we feel comfortable about it or not, the story that Christianity tells is a story about salvation; salvation gained or lost. That is clear from the preaching of Jesus himself: his parables, whether of the lost sheep or the Good Samaritan, are episodes in the history of salvation. But that doesn’t mean that we have to go around buttonholing each other about the state of our souls. It doesn’t mean that every service has to end with a call to ‘accept Jesus Christ as my personal saviour’, as though salvation could be assured by a verbal formula or a single moment of decision. It does mean that we need to place our lives at some point in that narrative of salvation which Paul, and the other writers of the New Testament, are concerned to tell.
But all this assumes that we know what salvation is. Paul’s answer is clear: we are saved from sin and death. From sin: not in the sense that our lives become instantly perfect, but that they are no longer governed by our separation from God. From death: not in the sense that we escape mortality, but that the power of death to separate us from the love of God is overcome. To put the point more generally: for Paul we are saved from everything that separates us from God and so makes our being partial and incomplete. Salvation is from the fragmented, the imperfect, the incomplete; we are saved to the wholeness and fulfilment of our being that comes through knowing God in Jesus Christ.
But notice one point here: salvation is not in the first instance a moral matter. It is not primarily about exchanging an evil life for a good life. Salvation has to do with the whole of our existence, its fulfilment or otherwise; it is only moral in that our moral failings are part of the incompleteness, the frustrated struggling, from which salvation frees us.
To see salvation in this way makes it, perhaps, a less alien concept, even for the world today. Understood as the quest for wholeness, we see people struggling for salvation on every side; from the joggers in the park to painters in art classes to those who head off to the mountains for a Buddhist retreat. People feel that their lives are incomplete; that they are living only partially what might be lived more fully. As the bookshops give fewer shelves to Christianity, so the sections for self-development and the innumerable life-therapies expand. We may have stopped talking about salvation, but the world goes on looking for it. Paul would have found that quite familiar.
What would he say to the searchers of our time? He would begin, I think, by suggesting why our lives are partial and lacking in wholeness. Paradoxically, what makes our lives incomplete is the very effort to be complete, but to be complete within ourselves. We aim for a life that is complete from its own resources, a life that has, within itself, all that it takes to make us fully human: enough skill, enough self-confidence, enough knowledge, enough appreciation of the good things of life; enough love. If we lack some of those, we look to the various therapies to fill the gaps, to confirm us in our inner sufficiency as human beings.
But for Paul, this self-resourcing, self-confirming life is the root of the problem. For him, the goal of completeness within ourselves is self-defeating, because we find our completeness only beyond ourselves. On one level, we understand that very well: we know that we need others to live a properly human life. But we also know that there are dangers down that road; in looking for completion through others, we can end up consuming their lives to fill out our own, like the father who looks to his son for a success he never had, or the romantic lover who makes the loved one into a fantasy of every fulfilment.
For Paul, the other who completes us, the other whom we cannot exploit or consume, is Jesus Christ. The meaning of Christ’s life is simply and purely that: the giving of what is needed to fulfil the lives of broken, fragmented, incomplete human beings. In a famous passage just before the one that we read this evening, Paul gives an account of Christ that is also an account of salvation. He describes how Jesus, though sharing the nature of God, laid that nature aside, and, in an act that was pure gift, took on the brokenness and limitation of a human life and a human death; how God then raised him to the heights and gave him supreme power over all being.
Notice, though, the way that Paul introduces this account. He says, ‘Let the same mind be in you, that was in Christ’; in other words, think of your salvation in this way, as giving up the claim to self-sufficiency, as self-emptying, as looking beyond your own being, however glorious that may be, to its fulfilment in God.
Well, how do we do it? It would be good to have Paul here to ask. He offers some clues, though they may at first sight seem contradictory. He tells us to ‘work out [our] own salvation with fear and trembling.’ Apparently it is up to us. We should set about doing what he tells the Philippians to do: treat each other with respect, avoid squabbles, look after the interests of others. But that takes us back to salvation as a moral matter; and if we have the power to save ourselves through good actions, then we can live self-sufficient lives without any need of Christ.
But he goes on, in the very next phrase, to say that ‘it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.’ Yes, we have to lay out some effort; but this helps only because God has laid out some effort already. It is God who moves us toward salvation. Even the vaguest longing for wholeness, for completion, is God already working within us. For Paul it is impossible to draw a line between our being and the being of Christ, which is the being of God. If one of Paul’s great themes is salvation, his greatest is that the Christian shares the life of Christ. We are in Christ and Christ is in us, already leading us beyond ourselves to the fulfilment of our being. We no longer need to look for completeness within ourselves. Rather, we need the recognition that, because Christ has come close, our being is already extended in an infinite completeness toward God himself. And when we know that, we have wholeness and salvation.