Salvation Is Rooted in Transforming the World

	Fr. Roger Vermalen Karban

The readings for Sunday, December 2, 2001, the First Sunday of Advent, are Isaiah 2:1-5, Romans 13:11-14, Matthew 24:37-44.

Paul sets the theme for today’s three readings when he reminds the Christian community in Rome, “Our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed.”

In the context of Advent’s first Sunday, some might reason that Paul is telling us that Christmas is just around the corner. But Jesus’ birth can’t be the salvation he’s referring to. Jesus saves no one by being born. Besides, that event happened over 60 years before Paul writes.
It’s important to recognize that salvation isn’t a static biblical concept. It constantly adapts to the period in which it’s anticipated and the theology which people employ to express their faith. Scriptural salvation means different things for different people.

The eighth century, BCE, prophet Isaiah, for instance, knows nothing of an afterlife as we know it. So when he proclaims Yahweh’s salvation, he’s limited both by the confines of our planet and our natural life-span. If Yahweh saves, Yahweh does so in places we know, using people and circumstances with which we’re already familiar, but employing these people, circumstances and places in a totally new way.

“The mountain of the Lord’s house,” Isaiah announces, “shall be established as the highest mountain . . . All nations (Gentiles) shall stream to it . . . They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. One nation shall not raise the sword against another, nor shall they train for war again. . . .” When Yahweh’s salvation arrives, the characters and scenery will be the same. Only the script will be new.
Paul, on the other hand, can step outside both our world and our human limits when he speaks of salvation. Though beginning to have second thoughts, he still hangs onto the hope that Jesus will return soon in the Parousia and take the faithful with him to heaven. That event certainly is “nearer now than when we first believed.”

Yet even though we can now reach beyond this world for our salvation, Paul believes we can only achieve it by changing the way we relate to this world.

“Let us throw off the works of darkness,” he writes, “and put on the armor of light; let us conduct ourselves properly as in the day . . .” Unless we work at transforming the present, we’ll never experience a different future.

Matthew agrees. Though writing about 20 years after Paul, he’s still looking forward to Jesus’ Second Coming. He believes that when this event finally takes place, it’ll be as unexpected as the great flood. His only advice: Stay awake!

That admonition seems to be the basis for Matthew’s reference to “the two men in the field” and “the two women grinding at the mill.” In each case, “one will be taken and one will be left.” Jesus can’t be referring to the end of the world here. We presume everyone will be “taken” then. It appears that he’s speaking about a phenomenon with which we’re all familiar: one person taken by faith, while someone sharing the same life and set of circumstances is left without faith.

Matthew could simply be reminding his community that, because of their faith, they’ll be awake enough to experience Jesus breaking into their world, while others are never quite alert enough even to notice what’s going on.

Though we Christians sometimes regard our Jewish ancestors in the faith to be inferior to us because they concentrate on this life and know nothing of heaven, the God we find in Scripture constantly expects both us and them to see how his/her presence changes us and everything around us. No matter our concept of salvation, if it isn’t somehow rooted in transforming this world, we won’t ever have to worry about being “taken” to the next world.