Reimagining the Gospel

I was taught that the gospel began with a problem. Humanity had sinned against God, God's justice demanded satisfaction, and Jesus came to pay the penalty that humanity could not pay. The good news was essentially that because Jesus died in our place, those who believed the correct things about him could be forgiven and eventually go to heaven rather than hell. I understand that story. I lived within it for many years. But the longer I have studied Jesus, Paul, the Gospel of John, the early Christian writings, and the broader spiritual traditions of humanity, the more I have come to believe that the gospel is much larger than the story I inherited. Perhaps the gospel does not begin with how bad humanity is. Perhaps it begins with who we are, who God is, and what Jesus came to reveal.

Jesus proclaimed what he called the kingdom, or realm, of God. Yet when he spoke about this realm, he did not consistently describe a place to which people would someday travel after death. He spoke of something arriving, something present, something breaking into human experience. In Luke 17:21, the Greek expression can be translated as the kingdom of God being “within you” or “among you.” I am increasingly convinced that both ideas point toward the same profound reality. The realm of God is not simply somewhere else. It is present within and among humanity. Jesus was awakening people to a divine reality that was already closer to them than they realized. The problem was not that God was absent. The problem was that humanity did not recognize the divine presence already in its midst.

Paul approached the gospel from another direction, but I believe he ultimately arrived at much the same place. When Paul summarized the gospel in 1 Corinthians 15, his emphasis was resurrection. Christ died, was buried, was raised, and appeared. That is striking because modern Christianity has often made the mechanism of Jesus' death the center of the gospel, while Paul places enormous emphasis on what happened afterward. “If Christ has not been raised,” he says, the proclamation is empty. Resurrection changes everything. The resurrection declares that death does not have the final word. Something within us transcends the temporary boundaries of biological existence. Jesus becomes the great demonstration that life is larger than death and that what we presently experience as physical existence is not the totality of who we are.

But Paul goes even further. In 2 Corinthians 5 he describes the gospel as a ministry of reconciliation. His language is extraordinary: God was in Christ reconciling the world to Godself, not counting people's trespasses against them. Notice the direction of movement. God is not standing at a distance demanding that somebody change God's mind about humanity. God is in Christ. God is the one doing the reconciling. The initiative originates in divine love. This is very different from the picture of an angry deity whose wrath must somehow be satisfied before forgiveness becomes possible. The cross can instead be understood within the larger drama of divine reconciliation: God entering fully into human existence, suffering, violence, rejection, and death and overcoming them through love and resurrection.

This also changes what reconciliation means. Reconciliation does not necessarily mean persuading God to accept us. Perhaps it means awakening humanity to the astonishing reality that God has never abandoned us. The alienation exists primarily in human consciousness. We experience ourselves as separated—from God, from one another, from nature, and even from our deepest selves. Religion itself can reinforce that separation when it tells us that God is somewhere above us, outside us, watching us and keeping score. Yet Paul speaks of something radically different. He speaks of Christ in us. “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” That is not merely a theological doctrine to believe. It is a reality to awaken to.

This is where my understanding of the Logos becomes important. The opening of John's Gospel tells us that the Logos was with God and was God, that everything came into being through the Logos, and that the Logos was the true light enlightening everyone. Then the Logos becomes flesh. I no longer read this simply as a statement that a divine being named Jesus traveled from heaven and became human. I see Jesus as the extraordinary embodiment and revelation of something universally true: humanity participates in the divine Logos. Jesus uniquely and perfectly manifested what humanity carries within itself. He did not merely come to tell us how different he was from us. He came to reveal what humanity looks like when the divine life within us is fully awakened.

This brings me to one of the most fascinating early Christian texts, the Gospel of Truth. Whatever we may conclude about its historical relationship to emerging Christian orthodoxy, it preserves a beautiful alternative way of imagining salvation. The fundamental human problem is described in terms of ignorance, forgetfulness, and estrangement. Humanity has forgotten its source. Salvation therefore involves knowledge, awakening, and remembrance. We remember where we came from. We remember whose children we are. We remember our participation in divine life. In that sense, Jesus does not merely rescue humanity from something. He reminds humanity of something.

Perhaps this is why so many sayings attributed to Jesus have the quality of awakening rather than merely instruction. “Let anyone with ears to hear listen.” “The kingdom of God is among you.” “You are the light of the world.” Jesus continually invites people to see what they have not seen before. The transformation he announces begins with a changed consciousness. The Greek word metanoia, usually translated “repentance,” literally carries the sense of a changed mind or transformed way of seeing. What if the gospel invitation is not primarily “admit how terrible you are,” but “awaken, because you have forgotten who you are”?

This does not mean that human selfishness, cruelty, violence, and injustice are illusions or that morality does not matter. Quite the opposite. Forgetfulness has consequences. When I believe I am fundamentally separate from you, it becomes easier to exploit you. When nations believe themselves separate from other nations, violence becomes easier. When humanity believes itself separate from nature, the earth becomes merely something to consume. But if the same divine ground sustains all of us, then love is not merely a religious rule imposed from outside. Love becomes the natural ethical consequence of awakening. To love my neighbor is ultimately to recognize that my neighbor and I participate in the same divine reality.

I therefore find myself reimagining the gospel as awakening, resurrection, reconciliation, indwelling, and remembrance. Jesus announces that the realm of God is already present within and among us. His life demonstrates what humanity can look like when completely surrendered to divine love. His death reveals the violence produced by human fear and separation. His resurrection proclaims that death does not possess ultimate authority over life. Paul declares that God was in Christ reconciling the world and that the great mystery is Christ in us, the hope of glory. And the Gospel of Truth adds another beautiful possibility: salvation is remembrance. We awaken from forgetfulness and rediscover our origin in the Divine.

Perhaps, then, the gospel is much better news than many of us were taught. We are not abandoned creatures desperately trying to reach a distant God. We exist within God, while God infinitely transcends us. The realm of God is already here. The Logos is already enlightening humanity. Christ is within us as the hope of glory. Resurrection tells us that death is not the end. Reconciliation tells us that separation does not have the final word. Jesus shows us the way into conscious participation in the divine life that has been present all along.

The gospel, reimagined this way, becomes an invitation to remember.

Remember where you came from.

Remember what lives within you.

Remember that you belong to God.

Remember that your neighbor does too.

And then live as though you finally remember.