Jesus Is Good For Nothing 3.0
Jesus is Good for Nothing 3.0[i]
Oswald Bayer writes about Martin Luther’s sermon on the Lord’s Supper that was preached before Christmas, 1519: “What I have imagined and seen may instruct me, delight me, touch me, and thus fulfill all three functions of speech (oratio). But how can I be certain that I am encountering God in this? Do I have to determine and decide this for myself, look for an answer within myself? Do I not ultimately have to make myself certain of salvation and know for sure that the ‘Pro Me’ here means me”?
And then this:
“….but it is not clear here how ‘Jesus’s birth’ brings about our ‘rebirth.’”[ii]
Sticking to History As We Do Theology
Most of the time I spend thinking theologically is spent thinking soteriologically regarding Jesus. How Jesus saves. This naturally brings the thinking to how Jesus is the Saving One or how Jesus is God. Christology. I try hard not to make stuff up about Jesus. Granted, the historical record is slim, and even what we have has a way of thinking about God from which it is written or it has an ax to grind. But still, I try to understand the sources we have that cover what Jesus did and who Jesus was.
But it’s because of this attempt to stay grounded in the historical Jesus and not the theological Jesus (“grounded,” not a bad word to use here in that we are working to stay away from ascension as well as resurrection, to say nothing of other supernatural engagements) that I now in my thinking tell the salvation story of Jesus by saying Jesus is good for nothing. By saying this I don’t mean Jesus doesn’t have any saving power at all. He does. He is the salvation story.
I simply want to drop all ascribing to Jesus’ death and resurrection any eternal or metaphysical salvific power. His saving power, if we can call it that, comes not in changing our temporal condition or eternal circumstance but rather delivering to us the Promise from God and of God that all of life and death’s conditions and circumstances were and are unconditional love (grace) before our birth/existence, during our life and after our death. This Promise delivers us from all angst or anxiety about our relationship with the Divine (“what will become of me?”) and to all attention to our relationship with Creation (our neighbor and our earthly ecology). When we stop looking up, concerning ourselves with how we are doing with God, establishing religions (efforts to impact the relationship with God), we can then start looking all around us and seeing the world, friend and foe and flora and fauna, and taking the best care of those relationships that we can. What we do and believe makes no difference to God: we will not and cannot change our standing before God. There is nothing we believe or do that makes God love us less, or more, than God already does. And, what we do and believe does make all the difference in the world: when I am a good neighbor, it’s good for my neighbor! When bad, it’s bad!
Jesus is Good for Nothing in Two Ways
So, back to how Jesus is good for nothing. Jesus is good for nothing in two ways.
One, he did good things for others with no expectation or need of payment or payback. He did good things for the good of the others, not for himself.
Two, there is that unfortunate reality of things about the human condition not really improving because of him. First, his itinerate travels and mission not only dissipated and lost steam after he died. The book of Acts likes to tell of subsequent expansion and success, I know. And there is the history of the Church for the last 2000 years that has brought immense good to the world, I know. But there is just as clearly the other side of that coin. For example, the letters of 1st and 2nd Corinthians reveal early church division and controversy. And, speaking of those 2000 years, one can point to so much death and destruction that has occurred not in spite of the Church but because of the Church that there is certainly a counter-force there to the Church’s good.
Nothing gets accomplished in the death of Jesus. Nothing. Not some meta-physical atonement for sin (of course, I know, that is the primary narrative imposed as a meaning of this tragic and unjust execution, the killing of an innocent and perfectly good man). Ok, maybe some inspiration for like-minded followers to do right and love others, but we all know that’s about as good to last as up to the next threat to bodily harm.
No, truth be told, the death of Jesus at the hands of Pilate and Herod’s minions was tragic and unjust. End of story. It did not get us anywhere.
The life and death of Jesus is a failure – they kill him – but his resurrection is as well. He left us to fend for ourselves.
Nothing gets accomplished in the death of Jesus.
Nothing gets accomplished in the resurrection of Jesus.
I realize by saying this I am taking a blunt force instrument to the Jesus story and bludgeoning it. I could perhaps better use a surgical knife and cut out the cancer in the Story [and what is the cancer? I may be getting a bit ahead of myself here, but it’s this: that part that always leaves room for us to take action and agency in setting right our relationship with God. For example: Jesus is alive now (resurrected!) and gives us that same life when/if we believe he is alive!]. We need to deconstruct, destroy, the Story of Jesus we tell in order to reveal and tell well the Story of God (that is this: Mercy outside of and with no regard for the Law!). I do believe the Story of Jesus indeed tells us this Story of God, but we have lost it and need to reclaim it. And the way to do that is to kill off the Story of Jesus that gives rise to how wonderful it is that Jesus helps us instead of saves us.
So okay, back to the blunt force instrument.
Jesus is no help at all.
He does not answer my questions.
He does not come to my rescue.
The good does no good (metaphysically, spiritually, “relationship to the divinely”) but is only good (that blind man who was given sight by Jesus and that woman whose hemorrhaging was stopped by Jesus certainly would attest to this “good”). Really? That’s the deal? My good gets me nowhere but….dead? Yes.
The good person gets nothing. The good person simply lives in the Promise. The good person dies. It’s the Promise that Lives and it’s the promise that gives life to the dead. To say that Jesus is risen from the dead is to say that the Promise lives. Promise kills Demand.
Excursus on Resurrection
But, doesn’t the Promise given in Jesus and by Jesus, by God in Jesus, have to have some fundamental foundation in the story of Jesus, the account of Jesus, in order to make it hold? In order to make it true? In order to make it actual and efficacious? Well, yes, in the sense that the actual human history of Jesus, how he lived (and taught in that life) and died, is important to recognize in order to substantiate that Promise, rather than Demand, is what Jesus is about (then, and now). And, isn’t this what Paul is saying in 1 Corinthians 15 when he says if Jesus is not raised from the dead then our hope is in vain? On this 1 Corinthians 15 thing, I don’t think so. In other words, I think the power of the Promise that Jesus was in his life and death works, is effective, even if there is no literal, historical, resurrection. And so it’s like what we are talking about in Luther’s use of the effectiveness of the forgiving word spoken in a relationship (see below). It does what it says. There is no need to prove it’s veracity somehow. It is true by being spoken. It happens by being spoken. I’m not saying Paul didn’t think of Jesus’ resurrection as literal and historical. I think he did. I’m saying I don’t. But that doesn’t change the Resurrection’s power and effect.
The new life that was given by Jesus happened in the promises he made, the Promise that he was, not in a resuscitation or even resurrection of a bodily life. For example, Jesus said that God knows you so well and cares for you in such detail that he knows the number of hairs on your head (Matthew 10). He told the story of the Waiting Father who does not wait for contrition and tolerates all hubris by giving care without boundaries (Luke 15). He told the condemned woman she was not condemned (John 8). He told his followers that he was with them forever even though he would be leaving them (Matthew 28). He told God to forgive the people who executed him (Luke 23). He was actually executed for sedition by Rome, cooperating with and urged on by the Temple, for undermining and calling for an end to the hegemony of the economic, social and political as well as religious circumstances that instead of living out the Promise of God for distributive justice for all, leveled the Demand of God against the populace to keep them subordinate and subservient. And On and On. Jesus was about Promise. Jesus was Promise. The very Promise of God breaking in and breaking the back of the Demand of God. He took on Death (what Demand does) and replaced it with Life (what Promise does).
This Promise is true when it is spoken and believed. Then, why this resurrection story tacked on to the life and death? Because the Resurrection account represents the truth of the Promise given in the life and death. The Resurrection is the quintessential metaphor for the ubiquity, veracity and infinity of the Promise given in the Life and Death of Jesus. The Promise is for all people for all time. It never ends and it has no limits. This Promise is true and effective when it is spoken and believed. It does not require proof.
Back to How Jesus is Good for Nothing
Okay, but back to how Jesus brings us nothing. There is a more pointed way in which we can say things have not improved: what has Jesus done for you lately? If you are a person of no faith you won’t even give that a consideration. But even if you are person of faith you will need to be honest and say it’s a mixed bag. Things you pray for don’t happen. Things you pray against do happen.
Coming to terms with this can put us in a bad mood. God is just so fickle. We tend to deal with this by telling ourselves (or finding a church where the Preacher tells us) that we just don’t have the right quality or quantity of faith. But this only leads us to do more spiritual calisthenics (pray more, give more, read Bible more, help others more) that never satisfy. Then, too, we do this: we spend an inordinate amount of time validating our faith by telling each other we see God in the good done by and to others. Of course you can say that and believe that. But, too, of course, one can also say of that same act of goodness that that is not God but is rather simply human goodness. The seeing of the good does not by itself show us God. Instead, one is left with trying to name something or someone (God?) who is behind the act or deed. And the deed then is not only a thing in itself but is a sign of something or someone else. The deed is a sign, not the thing itself. It is a sign, not God’s Self. We are left, in our visioning, to speculate as to the real presence of God.
How Jesus is Savior, salvific, a saving One, if nothing actually happens for me in his life, death and resurrection? How is there something there that is, how shall I say it, transformational, when we don’t superimpose supernatural reality (e.g. God is maintaining God’s holiness, that is threatened by our unholiness, by crucifying God’s Son instead of us) on the natural reality of a political prisoner (Jesus) executed by Rome? How does Jesus save if all of the Atonement Theories are muted and shut down?
Maybe if we name how Jesus does the saving by taking us out of the salvation game by being no kind of scripted Savior who wins by winning (not losing) and resurrects himself (and doesn’t have to stay dead until God shows up and does the resurrecting) we can not only set the story straight but we can shut down how the Christian Right today blasphemes God by using Christ to exclude undesirables (Jesus doesn’t like people who don’t believe in him!) and the Christian Left reduces God by using Christ to underwrite their justice projects (what would Jesus do?).
If I clear the deck and tell the truth about what Jesus does for me, including leaving behind all Atonement Theories, I may be then in a position to see clearly what Jesus does to me.
What Is Jesus Doing Not For Me, But To Me?
What does Jesus do to me, not for me?
He kills me with his severe judgments on my lack of love and service to others and raises me to a new and different life with his unearned and unconditional forgiveness. And all this, mind you, is hearing, not seeing. I do not see Jesus, I just hear Jesus by reading the Scripture and listening to a decent Preacher who knows how to deliver the goods (remember: faith comes by hearing, Romans 10).
The Promise spoken is the actual saving thing. He spoke the Promise that killed Demand and it got him killed. When he spoke the Promise, it actually brought a change in lives (e.g. Zaccheus, in Luke 15, who pledged to give so much of his money away). He didn’t illustrate it, he did it. He did not bring us Something to add on to our Something, but rather gave Us Nothing (took away our Something with unbelievably strict Demand, e.g. love your enemies) and God’s Everything (gave us God’s (un)believable Promise, e.g. “who condemns you? Nobody? Ok, neither do I! Go and sin no more!” See John 8 for the whole account).
Listening for God Rather Than Looking for God
This all asks this: what if instead of looking, we listen?
When God speaks, God speaks both Judgment and Mercy.
When Judgment is spoken to me, at me, by God (in “God’s Name” as we often speak of it) in Scripture or Sermon I do not need to nor actually can I speculate as to its reality or efficacy. It simply does its work and is thus present in the auditory words themselves. I am put in my place. You could say I am “put to death” in the sense that I am cornered with no way out.
Conversely, Mercy is spoken to me from outside any Law. That is to say, the mercy is not letting me off the hook that is real in the legal infrastructure itself. The mercy is not part of the legal system, it’s not forgiveness for things done or left undone within or against the law. Its rather forgiveness for living as if my life in God depended on obeying or disobeying the Law, for living in the Law alone. And, like Judgment, the Mercy spoken does what it says. Again, I am put in my place. I am forgiven. I do not have to wonder if it’s true. It’s true because it is spoken by God to me. When Mercy is spoken to me by God I am not invited to wonder or speculate about it. I am not now to engage in a spirituality of practice of some sort to make it real or efficacious. I am simply invited to believe that what is said is true.[iii] What is critical to understand here is that we are invited to believe not in something or someone that sets us apart from others on the basis of believing or not believing, behaving or misbehaving, but rather we are invited to believe that there is no basis, no foundation, no reason for us to be set apart from others (to be “saved” versus being “unsaved”). We are invited to believe that religion is not only a dead end, it is itself dead.[iv] “Christ is the end of the Law,” is the way Paul put it in Romans 10. If we believe that we are given life, outside of any legal or transactional relationship, we have it. If we don’t believe this, we are left to our own condemnation.[v]
Why Bother with A Church Service?
I go to a worship service in order to be given God, all of God, Judgment and Mercy, in real time and space. The real presence of God. I don’t use the worship for my own spiritual calisthenics to get close to God. By this I mean the kind of thing that we do in positing worship services as places and times to love God for all the love and kindness God gives for forgiving us for letting God down and for doing all that love and kindness in the sacrificial death of Jesus and resurrected life of Jesus. In all of this spirituality the key thing is our agency with God, our contrition for our wrong and our adoration for God’s right. But no, worship services of Scripture/Sermon and Sacrament are not my spirituality where I see God doing something for me and I leave with my appreciation. They are time and space where God does something to me and I leave with nothing but God.
It’s in the words actually spoken to me in the first person, not the story told to me in the second or third person. “I forgive you in Jesus’ Name,” or “You are forgiven in Jesus Christ.” I don’t need to believe that Jesus did something for me in 33 CE. He just did something to me right now. When someone says to you “I forgive you,” it’s a rather strange thing to ask, “but how does that work?” or “how am I actually forgiven?”
In the words themselves, spoken in first person to me, the real thing happens. What’s next for me? I don’t figure it out, I rather believe it or not. And what comes with that is my living as if it’s really true. I don’t improve on it or make it real somehow by doing something. I am “made right with God” by God, and now all I do is get used to it! In theological language it’s this: Sanctification Is Getting Used To Justification![vi] Being Holy is Getting Used to Being Made Holy by God Alone.[vii]
Why the Pastor?
All of this is God as Mercy revealed to us in Jesus Christ and now the Church says that God says that there are particular persons, not in essence better persons, but simply particular regular people, whom God ordains, through the Church, to make sure God as Mercy is delivered to all.[viii] Hence, pastors.
Our Actual Life in Christ Jesus: Totally Dependent on God
Jesus does not help me through life. He destroys my life of trying to have a life that is more than my actual life (My actual life: “I have issues and challenges! The world is going to hell in a handbasket! Can we talk!?” My actual life: “I have so many great things going on! Can we celebrate!?”) and gives me a new and different life that is comfortable in my own skin (it’s ok to say “I need help!” as well as to say “let’s party!”).
I wonder if deep down inside, the place we tell the truth about ourselves about being mortal rather than immortal,[ix] we realize not only that we are not superhuman but there really is no Superman to come and save the day either.
And so maybe the reason the story of Jesus is so compelling is not because it’s a superhero story where the good person wins the prize, that story that most Preachers tell, but because it’s a story where the good person gets nothing. And, truth being told, we can relate to this!
All he, Jesus, can do is be dead and wait until Somebody might decide to do the good thing and raise him from that dead! He is totally dependent on God.
Jesus’ story, if you are with me on this, is our story. Our good gets us nothing but dead. And all we can do is wait until Somebody raises us from that dead. And that is what it is be a Christian: being totally liberated from any need to be good for the sake of any truck with God (the New Testament, and writer Paul in it, calls this being freed from “the curse of the law.” See Galatians) and being totally dependent on God to give us Anything and Everything, including wherever we might think an “eternal salvation” might be.
So, where are we? Jesus is not helpful in our relationship with God. He is our relationship with God! This, too, by the way, is what I believe John is trying to tell us when he writes that Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life. Nobody comes to the Father but by me” (John 14). This is not meaning what the church mostly has said it means: Jesus is the only correct path, among many wrong ones we might choose, to get to God. This means, instead, that Jesus (alone among “spiritual leaders”) gets us nowhere with God because there is no path to God. There is only God getting to us. And that, uncomfortably for us, too, in God’s good time.
But, have no fear! That “time” is now! Be baptized and come as often as you can to the Eucharistic (“give thanks!”) Table where God gives you your relationship with God! Jesus is no helper there. He is Lord and Savior. And then, after, always, that feast at the Table, get on out there and do the good the world needs so badly but that you don’t need (for that “relationship to God” thing) at all.
Being totally dependent on God is not a fall back measure from or for being a strong person. It is the strong person. God is all a person has…..and this is not saying God fills a deficit.
It is saying God creates (and to use the filled/unfilled picture, is the “surplus”) and is all a person needs. God is all we have but is all we need. God is all we need and is all we have.
Jesus is no help at all.
He does not answer my questions.
He does not come to my rescue.
Jesus is no help at all. Jesus is good for nothing.
He is everything.
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[i] Some time ago I published “Jesus Is No Help At All” and then, later, “(More On) Jesus Is No Help At All.” So, this, Jesus is Good for Nothing, would be the third iteration. 3.0. Hmmm, Trinity. Fitting. But also this means this: this may not be the last from me on the subject since my thinking likely has holes in it that I am happy to hear about from you.
[ii] Promissio, Oswald Bayer, 1971, Translated by Jeffrey Silcock in English 2025 (Fortress Press), pp 325-326
[iii] “The difference between Luther’s early theology and his reformational theology lies in the different way in which faith is understood. It follows directly from his discovery of the oral word of salvation, the basis and form of which he found in a new understanding of the sacrament of penance. It is the orally and audibly proclaimed promise of the forgiveness of sins, in which Matthew 16:19 is taken as a sentence of holy law, that gives certainty to the penitent. Only in this context can that famous saying ‘If you believe, you have it; if you do not believe you do not have it’ of the freedom tractate also be properly understood. As a sentence of holy law, it is nothing other than a formula of blessing and curse, which is exactly what we have in Mark 16:16 (in the baptismal promise in The Babylonian Captivity of the Church). The formula divides people into two categories in regard to their final destiny, the saved and the unsaved, corresponding to its two parts. The first part gives the saved the certainty of salvation, understood as the community of God and humans in the word, while the second part leaves the unsaved in no doubt about their condemnation.” IBID, pp. 224-225
[iv] It’s important to understand what is meant here by “religion.” I think most people these days equate “religion” with formal God-minded organizations and the member disciplines there found. This, contrasted to what many then call “spiritual,” many want to stay away from because those organizations and disciplines are too restrictive and constrictive. People want instead of being “religious” with a “religion” want to still appreciate the metaphysical and God. So, what to call this? Usually people say they are spiritual and not religious.
And so when one hears “religion-less” many would think that’s exactly what they are: spiritual, or in other words, down with religion that is a confining life, up with spirituality.
But no, that is not what I mean by “religion.”
“Religion-less” is taking the term “religion-less Christianity” named by theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (see Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers From Prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 8, 2010, Fortress Press). It is a specific way of understanding/knowing God (and Jesus Christ), a specific consciousness of God and the world that Bonhoeffer called a “world come of age consciousness.” This “world come of age consciousness” is contrasted with “religion” or a “religious consciousness.” Religion (religious consciousness) can be characterized if not defined by a couple of significant ways of seeing God (and thus, too, the world): 1) God is a supernatural being if not simply a theological hypothesis to explain all the unexplainable things in life 2) God is a “deus ex machina,” a supernatural being who is called upon to be involved and intervene in human affairs to correct or make right what has gone wrong. A world-come-of-age consciousness can and does see the world and all its natural and social processes but does not need to posit or turn to divinity to face or answer life’s questions and challenges.
Bonhoeffer engaged and embraced this world-come-of-age consciousness but simultaneously embraced and engaged God. He asked, in the letter of April 30, 1944 to his friend Eberhard Bethge, where he first mentions his developing thought on a “religion-less Christianity,” “…who is Christ actually for us today?” In other words, who is Jesus in our world-come-of-age consciousness. It was not “in this world-come-of-age there is no Jesus and no God.” It was rather in this world (come of age, not a world of religion) who is Jesus and God? Bonhoeffer rejected a religion that saw persons at the center and God on the periphery where God is called upon to assist the human endeavors, however laudable, or where God is called upon to redeem human failures, however actual. Instead, Bonhoeffer saw faith as the experience where God is at the center of all things, good and bad and indifferent, and God is trusted (faith) and followed (love).
So, back to “religion” vs. “spirituality.” Here’s what I have shared before about this: “Unfortunately, what happens more than not is that folks who believe they are now engaging ‘spirituality’ instead of ‘religion’ have more or less simply acquired another form of religion as we have defined it here.
When people state they are tired of ‘religion’ but they still believe in God and are thus ‘spiritual,’ what they normally mean is not that they are tired of religion (God is the supernatural that explains the unexplainable and God is the ‘deus ex machina’) but rather that they are tired of religious practices (e.g. worship services, prayers, church membership and its requirements) and want to find or experience the God of religion (again, supernatural rescuer) in some more palatable if not enjoyable format. Most folks today are tired of the way of being religious but they are not tired of religion” (Religion-Less Christianity and Renewing the Church: On Being a Follower of Jesus in God, for God, without God, Johan Bergh, 2018, Amazon).
Rather than being an approach to the Christian faith that diminishes or drops bible, prayer, sacraments and service to others, religion-less Christianity embraces all of that while serving God who lives in the world, incarnationally so.
[v] The “freedom tractate” referenced in the second Endnote refers to the document Luther wrote in 1519 (full title is "Pro veritate inquirenda et timoratis conscientiis consolandis" and is shortened to “Pro Veritate.” In English: "For the sake of investigating the truth and comforting terrified consciences."
[vi] Gerhard Forde defines and describes sanctification as “getting used to being justified totally by faith.” (Gerhard Forde, Justification By Faith: A Matter of Death and Life, 1982). I have been a student and mentee of Forde, in his writing, not in person, since early 1982, and continue to have the Grace of God (Demand and Promise, Law and Gospel) clarified by Forde’s work. And while I’m making this reference, let me add, that although not referenced specifically in this piece, another who doggedly keeps me straight on grace is Steven Paulson, particularly in his trilogy The Outlaw God (Volumes 1-3), published in 2018, 2019, and 2021, Fortress Press) and currently (2026) in 1517.org’s podcast The Outlaw God. And while I’m at it, let me share another Mentor in my thinking who is a key reason I am committed to sticking to history in my theologizing: all of John Dominic Crossan’s work over the years (lately: Paul the Pharisee: A Vision Beyond the Violence of Civilization, 2024).
[vii] Here’s Luther in the Heidelberg Disputation of 1518, Thesis 28: “The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is lovable. The love of man [sic] is made up of those things which it loves.” You can say it this way: “We are not loved because we are lovely. We are lovely because we are Loved.” As so I would exclaim to God: Who, Me? And God says: Yes, Get Used to It!
[viii] In The Augsburg Confession of 1530 there is Article 5 describing the Office of Ordained Ministry put in place in order to deliver what Article 4 named as the gospel (Promise of God) itself: Jesus Christ bringing the forgiveness of God (Mercy) outside and without any relationship to the Law (Demand of God). The Ordained Pastor is to deliver the goods. Along with the whole idea of attending worship services (why do I need to attend worship to receive Word and Sacrament?) there is here the question: “why do I need a Pastor?” It comes down to this: we can’t give ourselves the Promise of God. It’s not our Promise, it’s God’s Promise. God must deliver it. And because we will not trust God (we not only cannot have faith, we will not have faith because that takes us out of the salvation game and leaves everything up to God) we need to come back again and again to the Promise that gives faith. So we keep on attending Services that deliver the Promise in Word and Sacrament. We don’t attend to get Right or sit up and fly right. We attend because we are desperate to hear again the Promise.
[ix] What comes to mind here is Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death. A Classic.
