Sept. 20, 1981

In his book The Magnificent Defeat, Frederick Buechner tells a Hindu story about an orphaned tiger cub. While still a baby, a herd of wild goats took the little tiger in and raised him as one of their own. The little tiger learned to eat grass, go "bleat-bleat", and do whatever else wild goats do in the jungle. In fact, apparently it never occurred to him that he was anything but a goat until one fateful day when a great tiger came upon the goats. He roared and all the goats scattered. The massive tiger cornered the young goat-tiger and asked him why he, a tiger, was acting like a goat. At first, the young animal tiger did not know what he was talking about. But the giant tiger took him to the stream and let him see his reflection in the water. Then the tiger who had always eaten goat grass was given some meat. A strange surge of rightness coursed through him. Finally, he held back his head and heard for the first time a roar instead of a bleat coming from him. He was a tiger not a goat. He was saved from being less than he really was by the tiger who came to show him the more he was meant to be.

Buechner, like others, refers to Jesus as God's tiger in the world. Christ the tiger shows us who live like goats, the creature God meant and means for us to be. And that is salvation. 

Our English word salvation goes back through the Latin word "salvatus" to the New Testament Greek word "soteria". We have erroneously dwarfed the definition of this giant word "salvation," "being saved," and its other linguistic kinfolks by making it some semi-magical heavenly insurance policy for when we die. Soteria in the New Testament certainly means that God, not death, will get us in the end. But it means so much more. And until we learn what it means for NOW, we will never understand or really believe what it means for THEN. Soteria in New Testament Greek means being made healthy after having been sick, being made whole after having been a broken part, and by a not too far-fetched extension, being made into a tiger after having lived like a goat. In short, it is like the Biblical word "eternal life" which our John 3:16 talks about today which has so much to do with the QUALITY of our life now as well as with the QUANTITY of our life in the bittersweet by and by.

Join me today in a journey into the land of salvation. 

1. "...there was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. This man came to Jesus by night...." First, let's talk about the Nicodemus predicament. To say that Nicodemus was a leader and Pharisee in the community indicates he was what amounts to a respected and successful person. Picture it if you can. Since we don't know what Nicodemus looked like, visualize your face on his face, as he-you slips through the night to talk to Jesus, the strange outsider who seems to know so much of the insides of life. 

Exactly why Nicodemus took the risk of going to Jesus, we don't know. Something compelled this man out into the night while everyone else was either asleep or sleepily watching Johnny Carson or the late movie. Something evidently forced him to realize that there had to be more to life than what you can park in a garage, put into a bank safety deposit box, wrap around your body, or get into bed with you. Nicodemus was in a predicament and wanted help.

That's where you and I, if not already, come in. Each of us human tiger-goats are individually and corporately in some sort of predicament in our lives. We're sick and we want to be well.... We're so afraid of dying that we have trouble really living.... We want to love and be loved yet fear being hurt if we let the love in or out of us.... We work and worry, work and worry, and all we seem to accomplish is getting more tired and more fatigued.... We have everything and feel like we have nothing.... Or we are somewhere in between having nothing and having everything and we feel threatened by those who have less and hostile toward those who have more.... We feel guilty, we feel grief, and wonder if there is any relief.... We want to appear competent and confident and fear others will discover the bumbling-screwup we are inside.... We are bored and lonely and want someone to come and care.... As a society, we are so afraid that we are willing to sacrifice the poor and risk blowing up the rest of us for some elusive butterfly of security that neglects the needy and bombs for our enemies will never bring....

Somehow, someway, we are all in a Nicodemus predicament. We are caught in a limping-out of whack here and long for some bridgeless, impossible there. Some of us don't realize it yet. Others of us are afraid to admit it. And most of us languish to cry out our hurt if we thought we could trust someone to listen or if we thought someone could help. Somewhere in you and me, close to the surface or down so deep is the question: Can I be helped? Can I be saved? Can I be a whole instead of a part? Can I be a tiger instead of a goat?

2. "And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be LIFTED UP, that whoever BELIEVES in him may have ETERNAL LIFE." Second, we answer the predicament question of can I be helped with a "Yes, Jesus saves but not in the way we want or expect." Being saved does not mean being safe, and being helped does not mean being pain-free. And how complicated that is to talk about. 

John, like the other Gospels, communicates that Jesus is God's tiger. He is the one who can rescue us from our fears of death, our loads of guilt and grief, and from our feelings that our lives are pointless and without meaning. Yet the way Jesus shows us how to help and be helped is in a way that seems so contradictory. For what seems to be the ugliest example of the painful, predicament of life – THE CROSS – becomes the mysterious help and answer we long for. The crucifixion appears to be the ultimate defeat because it shows clearly that not just the bad guys but even the good guys – even perhaps more so the good guys – get zapped in this world. That's what goats do to tigers on this earth.

You and I may miss the meaning if we are not careful. The reference to the Son of Man being 

"LIFTED UP" is talking about Jesus being lifted up on a cross. In that day, it was a term for nailing criminals on crosses so they could be raised up for the culprit to hang and die as his flesh tore little by little and his lungs filled with fluid.

Who was this Jesus who was nailed? Who was this one we are called upon to BELIEVE if we are to have eternal life? You have heard it all before. He cared about the people it was not popular to care about: the half-breeds, the quislings who cooperated with the hated Romans, the poor, and stinking sick. Jesus announced that the raunchiest sinner was loved by God just as much as the self-righteous Pharisees, scribes, and the rest of the ultra-religious "God Squad" of that day. He announced to a world run by the force of Roman militarism that God's love not Caesar's sword was due ultimate allegiance. Oh, they warned him. He could have backed off. Maybe even managed a way to do it by saving face. But the fierce love of Jesus would not back off. And so they nailed him. Jesus, God's tiger, would not compromise the tough love that filled every inch and ounce of his flesh.

To believe in Jesus means then not what you believe about how he was born, not what you believe about that water into wine business in Cana, nor what you believe about how humanity and divinity cohabited in him. To believe in Jesus means that you believe the truth about you and me. Jesus was fierce, servant, sacrificial and suffering love in the flesh. To believe in him means that you believe his way of living is THE way of living for any human who wants life to be worth it, to have purpose, to have any chance of happiness in it. 

And that brings us back to ETERNAL LIFE – "zoe aionios" – in Greek – which means as I keep saying not just life after death but the kind of life worth having before death, the kind of life that makes you able to look yourself in the mirror and able to look at yourself in the mirror of your fellow human beings' eyes. Jesus, the crucified tiger, shows that suffering love for God and others is the way God means for us all to live. Life lived to hug the hurting, feed the hungry, and to melt down the missiles into tractors is the only life that has a chance of being worth the effort before death and has a chance of being with God after death. The help of salvation, the making of us into wholes instead of parts, the creation of God's tigers out of us grovelling goats, comes in that we feel the rightness in our guts of being the way God created us to be. But the crucified savior reminds us that being saved does not mean being safe and that eternal life is not painless. Jesus the tiger shows us a life in which the pain is worth it, a way of life lived for others that is worth the danger, a kind of life that will make you and the world better because you were here.

Think about how you feel at the end of a day you have spent on things that really don't matter, much ado about trivia. It is a tense, gnawing tiredness. You feel grouchy and usually don't sleep well. Think about the days you have really worked hard but for someone or cause that matters, that is usually always something beyond yourself and making a buck. Oh, you are tired for sure. But what a different sort of fatigue, well earned achy muscles, a sleepy exhilaration which falls easily into dreamland. Salvation life from Jesus is like that. The risk and pain of life are not taken away, we are simply given reasons to endure it and strength from God to love beyond our own strength. No wonder that many really don't want to be saved and many try to pervert Jesus' salvation into something neat, sweet, superficial and selfish. Tell us about it John…

3. “He who believes in him is not condemned; he who does not believe is condemned already... This is the judgement, that the light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness more than the light, because their deeds were evil." 

As Buechner called Jesus the tiger, John calls Jesus the light who shows us up in who we are meant to be and fail to be unless we are like him.

When I was about 5, matches fascinated me. One windy, leafy fall day, I sneaked some matches out into the backyard and back behind the garage. I racked a nice pile of leaves up against the wooden garage so they wouldn't blow away and struck one of my matches to them. Pretty soon, I had a dandy fire that deserted the leaves for the garage. Smart kid that I was, I realized I had a problem. I quickly ran into the house, closed all the blinds and drapes and jumped face down on the sofa. I didn't want my mother to see outside, and I wanted it dark inside so she could not see my face. At the time she had me convinced that she could look into my eyes and see if I had done something wrong. Talk about loving the darkness and hating the light describes me perfectly on that day. The pulled curtains, however, could not keep out the sound of the fire engine's siren. 

We prefer the dark comfort of our predicaments. We don't want relief from our misery as much as we want company, attention, and pity. It is hard to give up my poor me routine and worry about the you's of the world. The fashionable treadmill of getting more and more is a lot more fun than giving more and more. It is a lot more exciting to hate people who are different colors and to demonize people of rival nations than trying to understand them as humans just like us who are running scared, too.

John is clear that we humans ultimately judge and punish ourselves when we go on living in our dark predicaments with our selfishness, number one mania, and violence. When you worship self and stuff then you have gods which will wrinkle and rot. And who needs hellfire when we build three nuclear bombs a day?

Being saved does not mean being safe in this world. Every bit of love you give opens you to that much possible hurt. It is not easy even to love our children and spouses on some days, not to mention the person who gets your goat or lives on the other side of the tracks. Salvation life forces us to keep on keeping on with ourselves and others when we would rather cut out. Love compels us to risk our money, our life's limited allotment of time, our reputation. Love can push you out onto a limb that can be sawed off and turned into a cross custom made for you. But to live in any other way is little more than being a walking corpse, dying by inches. Love is the only force on earth that cannot be killed or controlled by violence. It cannot be forcibly given or taken. It is a gift. Those who live with the fierce love of Christ the tiger are the only ones who despite wounds galore have any chance of really staying alive on BOTH sides of the grave. 

Do you – do I – have the guts to be saved and helped by Christ the tiger? Is our answer YES or bleat-bleat?