I grew up on the Billy
Graham Gospel. Years ago, if you were to
ask me what the Gospel is, I would have said: God loves us and has a plan for
our lives. Yet, we are sinful and
separated from God. That’s why we die. Yet, God in his great love sent his Son to
live a sinless life and die the death we deserve for us. If we in turn believe that Jesus died for our
sins and from henceforth strive to live a faithful life, God’s plan for our
lives will come to pass and we will go to heaven when we die.
Let me tell you something
interesting. That’s not the Gospel your
going to find proclaimed in the Bible.
You can find a snippet of the Billy Graham Gospel here and a snippet of
it there and construct a very persuasive tool to get people to make a
decision. That’s exactly what was done
in the 1930-50’s by a group of American Evangelicals who were all associated
with the First Presbyterian Church in Hollywood, CA who created the message
Billy Graham proclaimed all over the world to great success. (Yes, Hollywood. I’m not making this up.)
The Billy Graham Gospel is
not the Gospel the early church proclaimed. What we read from 1 Corinthians
this morning is the closest thing we’re going to find that looks like a short
form version of the Gospel preached in the Bible. So, the Gospel as we find it in the Bible is:
Jesus died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures; Jesus was buried and
then was raised on the third day in accordance with Scriptures. He physically appeared to, was physically seen
by not only Peter and James and the rest of the Twelve, but to more than 500 people,
and then finally by Paul who didn’t deserve it because he was an enemy of Jesus
persecuted Jesus’ followers. There are
more than 500 material witnesses to Jesus being bodily raised from the dead.
The Gospel carries on
further. In verse 22 Paul begins to talk
about a general resurrection for everybody.
Verse 22 reads, “For as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in
Christ.” There is debate out there as to
the extent of the word “all”; whether “all” is everybody who has ever lived or
if “all” is limited to all those who have been faithful to Jesus. That debate aside, the one thing for certain
we can say is that if you are a faithful follower of Jesus, you are indeed
being saved/healed in the present and when Jesus comes back you will be raised to
partake of his glorious inheritance living a new life in a new body in a new
creation in which sin, corrupted powers, and death no longer exist. Then verses 24-28 say that when the end comes
and all the corrupted powers including death are defeated Jesus will hand his
kingdom over to the God the Father and God will be all in all. The prophet Isaiah sums it up saying: “The
earth will be full of the knowing of God as the waters cover the sea” (Is.
11:9).
Well, this Gospel that
Paul reminds us of is a statement telling us what God has done for humanity and
indeed for the whole creation in, through, and as Jesus Christ to save it from
sin, from corrupt powers, and ultimately from death. Its being this kind of a “God done it”
statement is what makes it a Gospel. The
Greek word for Gospel is euangelion –
eu means good in a blessed kind of
way and angelion means message (like
the kind that an angel of God would deliver). In Paul’s day the word euangelion had a specific purpose.
A euangelion was not simply
good news. It was a message pertaining
to the Roman Emperor that imperial heralds spread throughout the Roman
Empire. A euangelion would have been something like the blessed news that the
Emperor has had a son and the divine patriarchal line of Caesar will continue. Or, the armies of Caesar have won a great
battle in Britain and now his reign extends to the ends of the earth. Or, Caesar Augustus, Son of God, Lord and
Saviour of us all, who gave us Pax Romana has died and Simplicus the High
Priest has witnessed his divinization and ascension to his rightful place in
the Pantheon. His chosen heir to the
throne is his adopted son, the beloved Tiberius.
Now, if you are on your game this morning,
haven’t fallen asleep yet, and are filling in some blanks that I haven’t yet
filled in, then you’ve probably noticed that that last possible euangelion about the death of Caesar
Augustus and his succession by his adopted son Tiberius sounds somewhat like
the Gospel the early church proclaimed about Jesus. Let me fill in the blanks.
Caesars went by the titles
of Son of God, Lord, and Saviour. Part
of the reason early Christians were persecuted was that they applied these
titles to Jesus and refused to honour Caesar with them. They were suspect of treason.
Romans claimed their
Emperors to be gods not because they were divine but because they wielded power
like gods. In the case of Augustus, he
established Pax Romana. Jesus actually
was God become human and did things only God could do: healed people, cast out
demons, forgave sins, calmed the sea, and raised the dead. In everything Jesus said and did the Kingdom
of God was manifest on earth as it is in heaven. Caesar was powerless in comparison to Jesus.
Furthermore, Romans
believed that after an emperor died, he was made actual god, divinized, and
ascended to become one of the Roman Pantheon.
This divinization and ascension was always attested to by the high
priest of Jupiter who alone sat with the body of the emperor until he says he
saw him divinized and then ascend. That testimony
was of course made up. Jesus died, was
buried, and was raised and ascended. More than 500 witnesses not just one shady
high priest could attest to the fact that Jesus was bodily raised from the
dead. Moreover, Jesus is coming back to
establish the Kingdom of God here on earth and bring corrupted power, sin, and
death to an end. Caesar, once dead, ain’t coming back.
The Gospel of the early
church proclaimed throughout the Roman Empire by heralds such as the Apostle
Paul compelled a person to make decision.
The decision was not whether or not to believe that Jesus died the death
I deserve for me so that I can go to heaven when I die. The decision concerned who you were going to
pledge allegiance to and serve at the cost of your own life: Jesus, the true
Son of God, the true Lord of all Creation, who saves you from sin and
self-destruction and makes you godly, who will share his inheritance with you
when he returns, who will raise you from the dead to live life in a body healed
and glorified by God, and who has poured his Spirit into you as a promissory
deposit of that inheritance and glorification; or, are you, in fear, going to
pledge your allegiance to Caesars who are immoral, paranoid and power mongering,
and who don’t care about you.
The early church
proclaimed the Gospel of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ Son of the Living
God during the days of some terrible Roman Emperors. Augustus, who was Caesar when Jesus was born,
was okay. Yet, those who followed him –
Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian – were some sick
puppies. In fact, Tiberius, who was
Emperor when Jesus died, was not attested to being divinized. One could say, Jesus got the “divinization”
that Tiberius was supposed to get. The
early church invited people to come and be a part of the community of believers
among whom there was a living foretaste of the Kingdom of God, where there was
no distinctions between persons, where all are loved as members of the royal
family of Jesus Christ, where all are beloved children of God, where there is
true human community in which the love of God heals you
I’ll end with this
question: Is Jesus for us just a way to get our sinfulness taken care of so
that we can go to heaven when we die or is he the true Son of God, the Lord and
Saviour of all creation whom we will serve at the cost of our dying to our
selves to find the resurrected life now in him by the power of the Holy
Spirit? Amen.
