by Zack Hunt
The lunch line was chugging along when a youth worker and I noticed that every once in a while, a kid would grab a bag of food and, instead of finding a place to sit on the church floor, would dart outside and run away as fast as their little legs could carry them. Being oblivious American short-term missionaries, we were a little miffed. I mean, we had come all this way from Tennessee to hang out with them. Heck, we had even footed the bill for their lunch, and they didn’t even have the decency to say thank you, let alone stay and talk? The nerve! How were we going to save their souls if they wouldn’t hang around long enough to learn how sinful they were?
So after the fourth or fifth kid had darted out of the church, we decided to follow them, assuming they were probably gathering just around the corner with their co-conspirators, reveling in their mischief of having pulled one over on the dumb gringos.
We waited by the door of the church until our moment came. It didn’t take long before a small boy, maybe seven or eight years old, went running outside, blowing by us so fast we could barely keep up. Thankfully, for my pathetically out-of-shape self, he didn’t go far. We followed him down the road, around the corner, and down a small dirt path, thinking we were just moments away from stumbling upon the group of lunchtime hooligans we knew had to be lurking somewhere close by.
Then all of a sudden, he disappeared inside one of the small wooden houses.
From a distance, we couldn’t see exactly what was going on, but we could see what looked like another pair of hands reaching out from the darkness to take the bag of food.
“Aha! We’ve finally found them!” I thought to myself.
But as we got closer to the house, a bit of light began to break through the space between the corrugated steel roof and the wooden planks precariously holding it aloft. There wasn’t a lot of light, but there was enough to illuminate what was really going on.
There was indeed another set of hands reaching out to grab the bag of food, but they weren’t the hands of his co-conspirators.
They were the weathered hands of his mother. He was bringing his lunch home to share with her and his baby sister. It was likely the only meal they would have that day.
We stood frozen in our tracks, slack-jawed and dumbfounded. As we tried to regain our bearings, we looked around and realized this lunchtime ritual was playing itself out all throughout town. It was why all those kids grabbed their bags of food and ran away so quickly. And it broke me completely.
Even as I write this now, nearly a decade later, the tears flow as freely as they did that hot and humid afternoon in the Nicaraguan countryside. Tears of heartbreak that any family anywhere would live that close to the brink of starvation. And tears of humiliation and shame as it finally dawned on me just how privileged I really am, how ignorant I am of the struggles and hardships the rest of the world faces, and just how fundamentally I don’t understand the gospel.
I was there to save Nicaraguan souls, but what they really needed was their daily bread.
Salvation now
Before that moment, salvation, or “getting saved,” had always been something I thought of in strictly spiritual terms. Salvation affected my life in the here and now only insofar as it ensured I didn’t do this or that so that I could go to heaven after I died. Growing up, my family was far from well off, but I was a white, middle-class kid who never worried about where my next meal would come from, never thought twice about being able to afford a doctor’s visit, and never set foot on a dirt floor. The only thing I needed saving from was hell. The gospel was good news to me only because of what it did for me in eternity.
I was a pastor and lifelong Christian when I went to Nicaragua, but I was still clueless about the gospel. I was clueless about why Jesus called the gospel good news for the poor (Luke 4:18). I was clueless that “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” was anything more than a fancy way of saying “Bring on the second coming!” I had no real need for the kingdom to come in my life. I had my daily bread. My life was comfortable, safe, privileged. The only thing I thought I needed saving from was an eternity in hell.
I had long ago asked Jesus into my heart, but he had stayed there. Transformation, to me, was about making a person sinless, entirely sanctified, perfect. It never occurred to me that transformation might be something that happens here and now in ways other than not drinking, swearing, or having premarital sex.
I didn’t understand the real promise of the end times, because I didn’t understand the sort of salvation it was promising. I didn’t understand that the salvation it promises isn’t waiting till the end of time; it’s breaking into the here and now, on earth as it is in heaven. My faith had been so self-centered and so spiritualized that aside from imparting a great deal of guilt and shame, it had no real effect on my life in the present. For all my self-professed expertise on the gospel and the end times, it turned out I knew very little about either. This boy and his family and his entire neighborhood understood what made the promises of Jesus good news far better than I did or ever could. They were the ones who had been blessed and told that theirs is the kingdom of God. They were the ones who understood the hope that came with Jesus’ promise that the first would be made last. They were the ones who could truly appreciate the coming of a new world where pain and sorrow are no more, where every tear is wiped away and the tree of life is open to all so that none go hungry ever again. They understood that salvation and the hope of Revelation are good news because of what they promise in the here and now, not just after we die.
I knew nothing. For me, Christianity was a religion of ideas and the end times a puzzle to figure out. I was so fixated on avoiding hell and not being left behind that I never stopped to consider anyone’s needs but my own. My faith had been unraptured long before I went to Nicaragua. But when I watched that little boy give up his lunch to feed his family—people I had come to “save”—the rest of my faith began to unravel too. I realized just how little I really understood about salvation, and how clueless I was about what made the gospel truly good news.
I had left the rapture behind, but I hadn’t abandoned the rapture mentality. Christianity, for me, was still all about getting to heaven. The myopic focus of end-times theology is but the by-product of the American Christianity that has fostered it for so long—a Christianity focused on the future like a zero-sum game, a faith so overspiritualized and focused on heaven that it has no practical relevance for the here and now. So even though I had abandoned the rapture, I never really gave up the mentality from which it sprang.
That’s why folks like the families in that small mountain town in Nicaragua understand the book of Revelation far better than I ever did or will. It was written to people like them: people in need of hope and salvation, not from eternity in hell, but the hell of this life—the hell of poverty, oppression, and injustice. People who know what hunger is and can actually appreciate the miracle of being able to eat freely from the tree of life. People who by accident of birth don’t have the “right” nationality, “right” skin color, “right” socioeconomic standing, or “right” language and are effectively barred from participating in the economic and social systems that gave me comfort and privilege. It’s almost as if they hadn’t even been given a chance to take the mark of the beast so they could buy and sell and have a shot at a comfortable life. I, on the other hand, bore the mark obliviously. Born by chance into the privilege of the empire, I never stopped to consider that so many of the opportunities I take for granted every day are out of reach for countless people simply because of who they are, where they’re from, and what they look like.
I always thought gold streets and pearly gates sounded neat, like icing on the cake of my well-deserved heavenly mansion. I couldn’t even begin to imagine the hope those iconic images inspired in people whose floors were literally made of dirt and whose walls were built from whatever scraps of wood they could scavenge together. When Jesus said he came to proclaim good news to the poor, set the priso
ner free, heal the sick, and rescue the oppressed, I thought he was being poetic. That family in Nicaragua heard a gospel whose good news didn’t wait for them on the other side of death, but affected their lives now to transform and save them from the hells of poverty, oppression, racism, and injustice.
It had been nearly a decade since I lost my faith in the rapture, but Nicaragua taught me that I still had plenty of my end-times faith left to be unraptured. Being raptured hadn’t been my goal in a long time, but I still saw getting to heaven as the whole point of being a Christian. Christianity was still all about me and my eternal reward. After that day in Nicaragua, I had to face the fact that I hadn’t just been wrong about the rapture. I had been wrong about Christianity, wrong about the gospel, wrong about salvation, wrong about what it means to be a follower of Jesus. Christianity wasn’t all about me and my reward. It couldn’t be that self-centered and that self-serving. If it was, it wouldn’t be worthy of bearing the name of Christ.
So if the rapture was no longer my hope, and heaven alone wasn’t the goal of salvation, then what was left?
What was the point of being saved?
What was the point of being a Christian at all?
Red-letter Christianity
To my surprise, the answers to my post-rapture questions of faith came not from a theology book, but from an old man with a spitting problem.
That man was Tony Campolo. Campolo is a professor emeritus at Eastern University and a prolific speaker, writer, and former spiritual advisor to President Bill Clinton. When I first heard him speak at the National Youth Workers Convention, I was familiar enough with his reputation to know not to sit too close. Campolo is notorious for spitting when he talks. Not on purpose, obviously, but the guy is a one-man Bellagio fountain when he talks. That night a group of smart-aleck youth workers staked out front row seats for Campolo’s talk and arrived dressed in yellow ponchos to protect them from the imminent saliva storm. Campolo got a good kick out of it.
The theme of Campolo’s talk that night was the same theme he’s preached on for years: red-letter Christianity. It’s the same theme that led him and Shane Claiborne to create an organization called Red Letter Christians. As the name implies, it’s a conviction that the words of Jesus that are often represented in red letters in our Bibles should drive our understanding of the gospel and, with it, the Christian life. In other words, our understanding of Christianity should fundamentally be a red-letter theology.
“But what about Paul and the rest of the New Testament?” you ask. Or at least I did that night, in the form of a snarky text message to Campolo I started to type out when he opened the floor to digital questions. The short answer is, Campolo and Claiborne love the apostle Paul. They love the rest of the Bible too. They’re not dismissing Paul or any other part of Scripture. What they’re trying to do is live like Christ as authentically as they can. To do that, they make the actual words and teachings of Jesus, the red letters, the lens through which they understand not just the rest of the Bible, but the faith itself.
But I was too busy that night trying to formulate my snarky text message to hear that explanation. I was just about to hit “send” on my phone when Campolo began telling a story that made me forget all about trying to anonymously debate him and had me considering the possibility that maybe they were onto something with their whole “let’s take the words and actions of Jesus seriously” pitch.
The story Campolo told that night was of a meeting he once had with a student and the student’s father. I’ve since heard other people tell a similar story, so perhaps it was more anecdote than autobiography. Or maybe it’s just a common occurrence when people come face-to-face with something Jesus said that they don’t like. Either way, as he told the story, the student’s dad was angry with Campolo for teaching all that red-letter nonsense in class. Or more accurately, he was angry that his son was taking it too seriously—especially the stuff about nonviolence and giving what you have to the poor. The father had demanded a meeting with Campolo to find out exactly what he was teaching his son and whether it really was as “extreme” as what his son was telling him.
So Campolo calmly explained red-letter theology to the father, and the father not-so-calmly let him know what he thought. “I’m a Christian too,” he said, “and I’m fine with all of that stuff in the red letters. But only up to a point!”
“And what point is that?” his son interjected. “The cross?”
It was as if that kid had reached out of the story and punched me right in the stomach.
Here I was, texting away with my theologically superior insight, when I suddenly came face-to-face with two realizations: one, I was far more passionate about talking about faith than living it out; and two, as much as I’d like to be the student with the zinger, the reality is I was much more like his dad, following Jesus . . . up to a point. For me, that point was turning my faith into real, Christlike action. I mean, feeding the homeless at Christmas or going on a short-term mission trip or faking a famine for thirty hours with my youth group? I was there. But real, lasting Christlike action in the way I lived and moved and had my being in the world each and every day? Not so much.
Naturally, I was mad at Campolo for his surprise checkmate right when I was trying to checkmate him with my text message. But I was also intrigued. So when I got back to my office at church the next week, I decided to do a little digging and find out what else this crazy, spitting preacher had to say.
Judgment day
My search led me to YouTube, that great bastion of randomly uploaded videos. It wasn’t quite as vast back then as it is today, but it was still wide enough in scope to house a few Tony Campolo videos. I found several clips of him going more in depth about what it means to be a red-letter Christian. And then I found the one video that I still can’t stop quoting to this day.
It was an interview Campolo gave to a Canadian television show called The Hour. The show opened, as most talk shows do, with the host introducing Campolo. The two of them chitchatted about Campolo’s time as spiritual advisor to the president before they started talking about Red Letter Christians. And that’s when Campolo began to rebuild my shattered understanding of the gospel and salvation.
The only description that Jesus gives of judgment day is how we treated the poor. On that day, he’s not going to ask you theological questions. He’s going to ask—you know, it’s not going to be “Virgin birth? Strongly agree? Agree? Disagree? Strongly disagree?” You know . . . it’s going to be, here’s what it’s going to be—the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew: “I was hungry. Did you feed me? I was naked. Did you clothe me? I was sick. Did you care for me? I was an alien. Did you take me in? What you failed to do to the least of these you failed to do unto me, because I’m not up in the sky somewhere, I’m waiting to be loved in people who hurt, and as you relate to people who hurt, you’re relating to me.” There is no Christianity that does not tie us up with the poor and the oppressed of the world.1
Here, at long last, staring me right in the face, was the key to surviving judgment day. I had spent so many years trying to find it, trying to figure out how to make sure my name was written in the book of life. I had searched high and low, turned to every expert I could find, but the answer wasn’t written in black-and-white propositions of theological dogma. It was in the red letters of Jesus. The answer was here, in the words of Christ, who could actually tell me with real authority what would happen on judgment day.
According to Jesus himself, when judgment day finally rolls around, he won’t be standing at the pearly gates, asking us what we believe; he’ll be asking us what we did. Specifically, he’ll ask how we cared for the least of these. My theology should inspire me to care for the least of these. If it doesn’t, then I can have all the right theological answers but still not love my neighbor. In that event, I will find myself shouting back to Jesus like a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal: “Lord, when did I see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick o
r in prison, and did not help you?”
This was a radically different version of both salvation and faith than I was accustomed to. As I had understood it, Jesus died to save me and to keep me from going to hell. My job was to “accept” that gift by not sinning too much so I could go to heaven. But here, in the Little Apocalypse of Matthew 25, I saw a version of Christianity defined by earthly concerns. It was a form of salvation focused not on me and what I believed but on others and how they were cared for.
If what Jesus said in Matthew 25 is true, then Christianity isn’t defined by the sort of individual, personal relationship with Jesus that I had always been told was what makes Christianity so great. If the red letters of Matthew’s apocalypse are true, then Christianity is about a communal relationship with Jesus and the ones he came to serve and save. Christianity is personal; it’s just not private. It’s personal in the sense that it drives us towards loving, personal relationships with others. Salvation isn’t about “Jesus and me.” It’s about us and all of creation. Which makes sense if you think about it: to be Christian is to be Christlike, and Christ came not for himself but to give his life for others because God so loved the world.
If the apocalyptic vision of Matthew 25 is true, then serving others isn’t a secondary response to our salvation; it’s how we are saved. Not in the sense of how I get to heaven, but in the true biblical sense of salvation. Salvation isn’t an individual reward but a creation-wide act of God’s grace into which we’ve been invited to participate by incarnating God’s love to the lost, the least, and the dying. If following Jesus means being Christlike, and if Christ came to incarnate the love and grace of God to a broken world, it only makes sense that salvation wouldn’t be a moment of instantaneous personal reward. Salvation is an invitation to die with Christ to our self-centeredness in order to devote our lives to others and their needs just as he did. In this way we are all together transformed through the power of the Holy Spirit into the new creation promised in Revelation and realized in the resurrection.
