The Baby in the Manger #2: Saviour

Saviour (grk: sōtēr, heb: yēša)

Today in the town of David a Saviour has been born to you; (Luke 2:11)

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. (John 3:16-17)

The word saviour possibly not a popular one. There are those that think they are the means to save others - others who do not believe themselves needing to be saved (phrases like 'white saviour complex' spring to mind). Of course, over the centuries there is much that has been incorrectly or disproportionately labelled as 'broken' and 'needing to be fixed', as well as salvation sought in the wrong things.  Have we now gone the other way?  You are enough - perfect as you are.  You do not need to be 'fixed'.  You have all the power within you to achieve all of your goals and desires.  These seem to be the words preached.

But the fact remains - whatever our culture or background or ability, we are all in need of a Saviour.  John 3:16 makes the alternative clear - to perish.  We are broken and dying - and not just in a very literal, physiological sense.  Turn up the pressure under any of our lives, and the cracks of sin, fear or bitterness, start to show.  Our struggles to be the people we were made to be may be different, but they are all there.   One only has to look at our world, the result of thousands of decisions and actions of broken human beings stuck in cycles of sin, to see that this need is not just individual - it's corporate too.

When the angels announced to the shepherds: Today in the town of David a Saviour has been born to you (Luke 2:11), the saviour was longed-for and much awaited by God's people, as promised through the prophets.  For example, Isaiah wrote:

The Lord has made proclamation
to the ends of the earth:
‘Say to Daughter Zion,
“See, your Saviour comes!
See, his reward is with him,
and his recompense accompanies him.”’
They will be called the Holy People,
the Redeemed of the Lord;
and you will be called Sought After,
the City No Longer Deserted."

Did Isaiah's hearers really understand the depth of their need for salvation?  We know that many of Jesus' contemporaries had, after the passage of 400 years, reduced God's promises to a political salvation and restoration of the Jewish nation, not realising that this salvation heralded in something far bigger, for all nations, in the future and restored world.  However, of this they were sure - they needed a saviour.

But this saviour does not rob us of our beauty and identity - he restores it.  It is that salvation that can say: you are perfect in his sight, or, to use the words of Isaiah quoted above: Holy People, Redeemed of the Lord, Sought After, and City No Longer Deserted.  

Yes, we need to acknowledge that we are broken, that we are not 'whole', and that we are in need of a saviour.  But that saviour has come - he lay in the manger in that first Christmas.  He offers us a new identity, a new purpose, and eternal life: restored, renewed and mended; promised and revealed in part in this life, and brought to fullness in the next, when the saviour will come again in all his glory.