God Saves

Bishop Scott Bullock
The Fourth Sunday in Advent
December 21, 2025

A businessman well known for his cut-throat ruthlessness once announced to the American writer Mark Twain, “Before I die I mean to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. I will climb Mount Sinai and read the Ten Commandments aloud at the top.” 

“I have a better idea,” replied Twain. “You could stay in Boston and keep them.”

So, what is the motivation for this businessman to make such a pilgrimage? I would suggest it was completely consistent with what he had done with the rest of his life, taking care of himself. For, as the story suggests, he was ruthless in making sure that his business was a success. He would use any means to achieve business success for himself even crushing others. So too, when attempting to assure his favor with God, he would take care of it himself — go to the place of divine revelation, pay lip service to the Ten Commandments that he had ignored in his life, and expect to earn the favor of the one who had appeared there on Mt. Sinai. The one who authored the Ten Commandments that he intended to read aloud on that holy mountain.

However, his scheme had no power to earn God’s favor, of course, nor was such earning even necessary. Why? Because, as the Gospel tells us today. Next week, Christmas Day, is the day that began our salvation, and it is through the actions of God, not ourselves, that we’re saved. We know this because the angel who appeared to St. Joseph to encourage him to go ahead with his plans to take Mary, his wife, into his home and told us not just who this child was to be, the Son of God, but also what the Son intended to do, as seen by the meaning of his name — Jesus,  God saves. What he intended to do was to save us. No pilgrimage to the Holy Land and Mt. Sinai, nor any other effort, can produce our salvation. Rather, any such act as a sacred pilgrimage is solely meant to strengthen our faith in what God has promised and will do in Jesus Christ, Emmanuel, God with Us. Jesus, the one through whom God saves us. 

But Mark Twain’s response to the man, that he remain home and follow the Ten Commandments, is essential advice, not to produce our salvation, but rather it’s how we can receive the gift of eternal life that has already been won for us. And here’s some good news: we can focus just on two of the Ten Commandments. Jesus was asked by one of the religious leaders which was the greatest and most important of the commandments, he replied: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”

The first commandment, it turns out, is how we receive the salvation of Christ. The second is how we live once we have been given eternal life. For, when we love God with all we are, we give ourselves totally to him. We place him first. Remember that our lives came from him and are due to him, and we choose him as Lord. And those who put their trust in Jesus as Lord receive his love and mercy that is eternal salvation, a gift that begins even now. Once we have the conviction that Jesus means God saves, how we live with this truth is to honor God in loving his children he has come to save. 

In the Gospel, the angel announced that the child of Bethlehem is Jesus. A name that tells us what God will do in the child — he will save us, bringing and offering a saving victory over death and the gift of eternal life to those who place their trust not in their own acts, but rather the acts of Jesus’ life-giving death and resurrection. Once we make that act of faith in our saving God, the love that we experience coming back from Jesus, our Savior, necessarily overflows from our hearts in service of others, God’s beloved children. Then, once receiving God’s love, we’re ready to live the second commandment: to love God by loving our neighbor as ourselves. And through this love, others are saved.

The name Jesus means “God Saves.” So, let’s now, once again, make the act of faith that says, not necessarily at the end of a long pilgrimage, but right here, right now. I love the Lord, my God, with all my heart, soul and strength. I need saving from my failings. As my love is reciprocated in God’s love to me, I then can’t stop myself from loving my neighbor. In all this, God’s saving happens in and through us: the eternal Holy Spirit of God coming into me to save me and, through me, showing his saving love to our neighbor.  

Even now, brothers and sisters, we’re on the verge of our great Christmas celebration, God’s salvation is already upon us, for the same Jesus who became flesh in a stable in Bethlehem is now offered and received in his Body and Blood at this altar. Having received once again his supreme gift of himself that is love, let’s go forth and spread Jesus’ salvation to others, to show them the saving love that we have received, literally in the flesh, in the Eucharist we’re now about to receive.