Ok friends, in the chapters leading up to this one, we have been on a journey of seeing. We began with the Prophetic Imagination, learning to look beyond the world as it is and to imagine the world as it could be. Then, we explored the two great forces that shape human experience – love and fear – and considered how these underlying motivations influence the choices we make, the communities we build, and the stories we tell ourselves. From there, we examined the role of anxiety, the ways our nervous systems seek safety and certainty, and how scapegoating is the universal, misguided attempt to manage our fears by placing blame on others. Finally, we turned our attention to our images of God, recognizing how often we project our own fears, anxieties, and desires onto the divine. In response, we considered the cruciform God revealed in Jesus – a God whose character is defined not by domination or violence, but by self-giving love.
Each of these themes has been leading us toward deeper questions: If God is truly like this, then what is God doing in the world? What is God’s ultimate dream for humanity and creation? And what, exactly, is the gospel?
In this chapter, I will show that the gospel, or “good news,” is even better than most of us have imagined. That it is not merely about individual forgiveness or what happens after we die, but is the announcement that God’s dream for creation is still alive and we are invited to participate in it. The biblical word shalom captures this idea – a vision of healing, reconciliation, justice, peace, and flourishing in every relationship. If the cruciform God reveals what God is like, then perhaps the good news - the best news! - is that this God has never given up on the world and is even now working to restore all things.
It’s a lie, any talk of God that does not comfort you. –Meister Eckhart
THE GOSPEL WE INHERITED
If someone asked you to summarize the gospel in a couple of sentences, what would you say?
For much of my adult life, I might have said something like this: “I am a sinner. God is holy and must punish sin. Jesus died in my place so that God could forgive me. If I believe the right things about Jesus, I will go to heaven when I die.”
To be clear, this story speaks of forgiveness, grace, and reconciliation, and for many people it has brought genuine comfort and hope.
But, over time, it began to feel incomplete.
As I studied human behavior and reflected on the forces of fear and anxiety that shape us all, I wondered if the version of the gospel I inherited might have been answering a very particular set of questions:
How can I be forgiven? How can I be reconciled to God? What happens after death? How can I know that I am safe?
These are deeply human questions. In fact, they may be among the most universal questions we ask. We long to know that our failures do not define us, that we belong, that our lives have meaning, and that death does not have the final word.
But I also noticed something else: these questions are often asked from a place of anxiety. They arise from our desire for certainty, security, and protection from what we fear most.
Our anxiety does not come from thinking about the future, but from wanting to control it.
–Kahlil Gibran
As we explored in previous chapters, fear seeks certainty, control, clear boundaries, and protection from threat. Fear wants to know exactly who is right and who is wrong, who belongs and who does not, who is safe and who is dangerous. When anxiety becomes our primary lens, we naturally imagine God through that same lens.
The gospel we are drawn to reveals the image of God we carry. And as we also learned in the last chapter, the image of God we carry is a reflection of our own inner-world.
A fear-shaped gospel, then, tends to reflect those concerns. God can begin to look primarily angry rather than loving. Forgiveness can appear contingent upon violence. Humanity becomes divided into insiders and outsiders. Salvation becomes less about the healing of creation and more about escaping punishment. The central question shifts from “How do we participate in God’s restoration of the world?” to “How do I make sure I am on the right side of the line?”
This should not surprise us, though. Human beings have always used simplified stories to manage anxiety. We tell ourselves that we are the good ones and others are the problem. We draw lines between “us” and “them”. We create categories that help us feel secure in an uncertain world.
Yet the cruciform God revealed in Jesus consistently disrupts those categories.
The desire of God’s heart is immeasurably larger than our imagination.
–Fr. Greg Boyle
Again and again, Jesus crossed boundaries that others considered sacred. He welcomed Samaritans, praised Roman centurions, ate with tax collectors, touched lepers, defended those condemned by the crowd, and taught love for enemies. Wherever anxiety drew a circle around who belonged, Jesus widened it. Wherever fear built a wall, Jesus opened a door.
The pattern appears so consistently throughout his life that it becomes impossible to ignore. Jesus refuses to allow fear to determine the limits of God’s love.
And this raises an important question: what if the gospel is larger than we imagined?
What if the good news is not primarily about escaping somewhere else after we die, but about participating in God’s healing and restoration of all things, now, today? What if the gospel begins with personal reconciliation, but does not end there. What if God’s dream has always been bigger than the salvation of isolated individuals?
To explore that possibility, we begin with a word that appears throughout scripture and stands at the heart of God’s vision for the world: shalom.
Shalom is the way things ought to be, inspiring joyful wonder as it’s Creator and Savior opens doors and welcomes the creatures in whom he delights.
–Cornelius Plantinga
GOD’S DREAM: THE BEST NEWS
The gospel is the announcement that God’s dream for creation is still alive. Despite all that has been fractured by fear, violence, injustice, and separation, God has not abandoned the world. The story of scripture moves towards shalom – the restoration of wholeness and flourishing in every dimension of life. Shalom is peace between God and humanity, peace within ourselves, peace between neighbors and nations, and peace with the living world that sustains us. It is the healing of every broken relationship and the renewal of all things. This is the good news: God is not merely rescuing people from the world, but restoring the world itself.
Jesus reveals both the character of this God and the shape of this restoration. Through self-giving love, he crossed every boundary fear had put up and continually expanded the circle of belonging. In his life, death, and resurection we see that divine love is always moving towards reconciliation, healing, and renewal. The gospel, then, is not simply about where we go when we die. It is the joyful announcement that God’s kingdom is already at work among us, inviting us to participate in the restoration of shalom here and now. As we learn to love God, ourselves, our neighbors, outsiders, and the earth itself, we become participants in God’s dream for the flourishing of all creation.
As we learn to love God, ourselves, our neighbors, outsiders, and the earth itself, we become participants in God’s dream for the flourishing of all creation.
But what does that flourishing actually look like?
The biblical vision of shalom is not limited to a single part of life, but touches every relationship. Throughout scripture, we see God’s restorative work unfolding in four interconnected areas: our relationship with God, our relationship with ourselves, our relationship with all others, and our relationship with the earth. When any of these relationships are wounded, the effects ripple outward. When they are healed, the benefits do as well. Together, they offer a picture of the wholeness God desires for creation.
Relationship With God
Trust, Communion, and Participation.
The restoration of shalom begins with God. At its heart, this relationship is not about fear, appeasement, or earning acceptance. It is about trust. The cruciform God revealed in Jesus invites us to move beyond anxiety and into confidence that we are deeply loved and welcomed. As trust grows, so does communion – a lived awareness of God’s presence, guidance, and companionship. Yet the relationship does not end there. We are also invited into participation, becoming co-laborers in God’s ongoing work of healing, reconciliation, and renewal in the world.
Relationship With Self
Healing, Freedom From Shame, and Integration.
Shalom also transforms how we relate to ourselves. Many of us carry wounds, false stories, and burdens of shame that keep us fragmented, disconnected, and strangers to our true selves. God’s desire is not merely to forgive us, but to heal us. As we encounter divine love, shame begins to lose its power, and we discover that our worth was never something we had to earn. Gradually, the divided parts of our lives begin to come together. What was fractured becomes integrated. We learn to live with greater honesty, freedom, and wholeness.
Note that this healing rarely happens in isolation. Instead, divine love leads us toward wise companions and healing resources: Therapists, recovery groups, spiritual directors, trusted friends, and supportive communities. Seeking help is an act of courage and participation in God’s ongoing work of restoration.
Relationship With Others
Reconciliation, Justice, and Peacemaking
Because human beings are created for connection, shalom inevitably extends beyond the individual. The restoration of relationships with others involves reconciliation where division exists, justice where harm has occurred, and peacemaking wherever conflict threatens flourishing. This does not mean the absence of disagreement or the avoidance of difficult truths. But it does mean learning to relate to one another through the lens of dignity, compassion, and love. The cruciform pattern invites us to move beyond hostility, scapegoating, and exclusion, participating instead in God’s work of healing communities and restoring relationships.
Relationship With The Earth
Stewardship, Care, and Flourishing
Finally, the biblical version of shalom includes the earth itself. Creation is not merely the backdrop for the human story; it is part of God’s beloved creation and an object of divine care. From the opening pages of scripture, humanity is entrusted with the responsibility of stewardship. To participate in God’s dream is to cultivate, protect, and nurture the world we have been given. As we learn to see the Earth as a gift rather than a resource to exploit, we join God’s desire for the flourishing of all living things and for future generations who will inherit what we leave behind.
These four dimensions of shalom cannot be separated for long. Our relationship with God shapes how we see ourselves. How we see ourselves influences how we treat others. How we treat others affects the communities we build. And the values of those communities shape the way we care for the earth. Together, they form a single interconnected vision of flourishing. This is God’s dream. And this is why the gospel is such good news: wherever relationships are being healed, justice is taking root, peace is growing, and love is expanding, shalom is breaking into the world.
We are co-creators with God in creating a better world. –Henri Nouwen
A Note On Sin And Repentance
If the gospel is the restoration of shalom, then it may be helpful to rethink two words that have often been associated primarily with guilt and shame: sin and repentance. Sin is not simply the breaking of rules. At its deepest level, sin is anything that fractures, wounds, or opposes shalom. It is whatever damages or diminishes God’s dream of goodness, peace, wholeness, and flourishing. Sin wounds our relationship with God, ourselves, others, and the earth.
Repentance, then, is the ongoing invitation to turn back toward God’s dream. It is not about shame, but about reorientation. It is the courageous and hopeful act of recognizing where we have wandered from the path of love and choosing to move once again towards healing, reconciliation, justice, and flourishing. Repentance is not about shame or self-loathing. It is about remembering who we are and who we are becoming.
Repentance is the continual choice to turn away from fear and towards love, away from exclusion and towards belonging, away from anxiety’s narrow vision, and towards God’s dream of shalom.
The romance of the Creator and creation is far more wonderful and profound than anyone can capture in words.
–Brian McLaren
Seen this way, neither sin nor repentance needs to be understood through the lens of condemnation. Instead, they become part of God’s invitation into greater wholeness. The goal is not shame, but transformation. Not self-hatred, but healing. Not punishment, but the ongoing journey of restoration.
This understanding also helps explain something remarkable about the life of Jesus. He often violated laws, cultural norms, and religious expectations because the ‘rules’ themselves were sinful and in opposition to God’s dream. He consistently acted in ways that restored dignity, healed wounds, welcomed the excluded, and brought life where others experienced burden and exclusion. Again and again, Jesus challenged laws, rules, and interpretations of religion that stood in the way of human flourishing.
The religious and political leaders of his day – as in our day – often focused on protecting boundaries, preserving systems, and enforcing rules. Jesus focused on people. Whenever a rule, tradition, law, or interpretation was used to diminish human dignity or prevent compassion, Jesus exposed the contradiction. By doing this, Jesus revealed that God’s deepest concern has always been the restoration of shalom.
Heaven, then, is not a promise we await, but a practice we fully engage in.
–Fr. Greg Boyle
HERE, NOW
Our understanding of the gospel inevitably shapes how we imagine the future. If the gospel is a restoration of shalom, then its primary focus cannot be somewhere else, someday. God’s dream has always been rooted in the healing and renewal of life here and now.
This does not mean that Christians have no hope beyond death. The Christian story has always included the promise of resurrection, restoration, and life with God. But the hope of the gospel is not escape from creation, it is the redemption of creation.
From the opening pages of Genesis to the closing vision of Revelation, the movement of Scripture is remarkably consistent – God is with humanity here, on earth. From walking in the garden in the “cool of the morning” to Jesus – Emmanuel, God with us – to Revelation, the story culminates not with humanity abandoning the earth, but with God making his dwelling among humanity. Again and again, the direction of the story is toward presence, restoration, and communion.
Jesus reflected this vision throughout his ministry. He spoke of the Kingdom of God as the present reality breaking into the world. He taught his followers to pray, “Your Kingdom Come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” The invitation was never merely to wait for another world, but to participate in God’s healing of this one.
God loves us deeply, and the vision for the future is more vast and more magnificent than we can ever imagine.
–Richard Rohr
This is where prophetic imagination becomes so important: seeing beyond what is to what could be. Fear imagines catastrophe and escape. Love imagines restoration and participation. Fear asks, “How do I get out?” Love asks, “How can I help?” Fear focuses on survival. Love focuses on flourishing.
The cruciform God revealed in Jesus consistently invites us into the second vision.
Many Christians have inherited a different understanding of the future. They were taught that faithful believers will be removed from the earth before a period of catastrophic suffering, while the world itself moves towards destruction. For many, this belief has provided comfort and reassurance in uncertain times.
Yet a growing number of biblical scholars and historians point out that this understanding is not as ancient or universal as many assume. The specific doctrine of a pre-tribulation rapture emerged relatively recently in Christian history through the work of John Nelson Darby in the 19th century. It later spread widely in North America through popular teaching, prophecy conferences, study bibles, books, and films.
The purpose here is not to criticize those who hold this view. Many faithful Christians continue to do so. Rather, it is to recognize that sincere followers of Jesus have understood these passages differently throughout most of Christian history.
More important than the details of any prophetic timeline is the kind of imagination it produces.
If we believe the world is merely a temporary waiting room destined for destruction, it becomes easier to disengage from its care. Why invest deeply in healing communities, pursuing justice, caring for creation, or working towards peace if everything is simply going to be “burned?”
But if creation is beloved by God and destined for restoration, everything changes. We begin to see ourselves not as evacuees waiting for departure, but as participants in renewal.
No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.
–Dorothy Day
The first vocation given to humanity was not escape, but stewardship. Humanity was entrusted with the care of creation. We were called to cultivate, protect, and nurture the world entrusted to us. Like caretakers entrusted with a beloved home and pets, we honor the Creator by caring for what belongs to him.
The differences between those visions is ultimately a question of love and fear.
Fear longs for rescue from a threatening world. Love moves towards the healing of a wounded world.
Fear narrows our concern to the safety of our own group. Love continually expands the circle of care.
Fear asks who will be saved. Love asks how shalom can grow.
And throughout the life of Jesus, we repeatedly see the cruciform pattern: not withdrawal from suffering, but loving participation in the midst of it.
Jesus did not escape the pain of the world. He entered it. He healed within it. He loved within it. He suffered within it. And through that self-giving love, he revealed the heart of God.
If we are following the cruciform God, then our calling is not to abandon the world but to participate in its restoration.
The earliest Christians understood themselves as citizens of God’s coming kingdom and participants in its arrival. Their hope was not that God would give up on creation, but that God would finally heal it. They believed that the future belonged not to destruction, but to restoration. And because of that hope, they sought to embody God’s dream in the present – living as signs of the world to come.
Paradise is not a place that awaits our arrival but a present we arrive at. A place, in fact, we are already in.
–Fr. Greg Boyle
THE EXPANDING CIRCLE OF LOVE
If the gospel is the restoration of shalom, then one of the clearest signs that it is taking root within us is that our capacity for love continues to expand.
Throughout scripture, the direction of divine love is outward. God’s concern moves from the individual to the family, from the family to the tribe, from the tribe to the nation, from the nation to the stranger, the foreigner, and even the enemy. Ultimately, the story culminates in the reconciliation and flourishing of all creation. This is the pattern.
As we have seen throughout this series, the cruciform God is revealed not through domination, exclusion, or violence, but through self-giving love. And self-giving love has a particular trajectory: it continually widens the circle of concern and compassion.
This does not mean that our love for family and friends becomes less important. Quite the opposite. But if our love never grows beyond those who are familiar, comfortable, or similar to us, we risk mistaking tribal loyalty for divine love.
We cannot love God unless we practice love for others.
–St. Teresa of Avila
Fear naturally narrows the circle. It divides the world into “us” and “them.” It encourages us to reserve our compassion for those who think like us, believe like us, or belong to our group. Love moves in the opposite direction. Love continually invites us to recognize the humanity, dignity, and sacred worth of people we might otherwise overlook, misunderstand, or avoid.
One way to discern whether love or fear is shaping our understanding of God is to ask a simple question: Does my vision of God continually expand the circle of belonging or continually shrink it?
Not because boundaries never matter, but because divine love consistently moves towards those who have been excluded. Again and again, this is what we see in the life of Jesus. He crossed social, religious, ethnic, moral, and political boundaries, not to erase human differences, but to reveal that no one stands outside the reach of God’s love.
The restoration of shalom, then, is not simply about loving God more. It is about allowing God’s love to transform how we relate to ourselves, to our neighbors, to outsiders, foreigners, those who may not like us, and to the living world around us. As the circle expands, so does our participation in God’s dream.
In these moments ... we are awakened to the divine presence and see that the Kingdom of God is coming and yet is already here.
–Richard Rohr
SELF-REFLECTION EXERCISE
For this exercise, as with the others in this series, take a few moments to become still. Take slow breaths, and remember that you are deeply, deeply loved by God and that this is not a time for judgment or self-condemnation. It is an invitation to notice where God’s dream of shalom may be unfolding in your life and where you may be invited to participate more fully in it.
When you are ready, reflect on the following questions, paying close attention to your body and being as open, honest, and specific as you can:
Relationship With God
Do I primarily relate to God through trust or through fear? Where do I sense God inviting me into deeper communion? How might I participate more fully in God’s work of healing and restoration?
Relationship With Self
What wounds, fears, or burdens of shame am I carrying? Where is God inviting me toward healing, freedom, or greater wholeness? Are there people, practices, or resources that could support that healing journey?
Relationship With Others
Who is difficult for me to love right now? Where might reconciliation, forgiveness, justice, or peacemaking be needed in my life? Is my circle of concern expanding or shrinking?
Relationship With The Earth
How am I caring for the world that has been entrusted to me? In what ways can I become a better steward of creation? How might I contribute to the flourishing of future generations?
Other questions may be:
Where is God inviting me to help restore shalom?
What area of Shalom feels most fractured in my life right now? God, self, others, creation?
Who have I been tempted to exclude from God’s love?
Where do I most experience shalom in my life?
Do not worry about changing everything at once. The restoration of Shalom happens one act of love at a time. One healed wound. One repaired relationship. One courageous step towards justice. One moment of compassion. One choice to move from fear toward love.
Jesus actually intends to save the world! And by world, I mean God’s good creation and God’s original intent for human society.
-Brian Zahnd
So, as we close this chapter, we are reminded that the gospel is even better than most of us imagine. It is not just good news, it is the best news! It is not merely a message about avoiding punishment or securing a destination after death. It is the announcement that God is at work restoring all things. It is the good news that God’s dream of peace, goodness, and wholeness – between each of us and God, each of us and ourselves, each of us and all others, and each of us and the earth – is being made reality through divine love.
When viewed through the lens of the cruciform God revealed in Jesus, the gospel becomes a story not of exclusion, but of reconciliation; not of retribution, but of restoration; not of fear, but of love. The God revealed on the cross is not standing against humanity, but standing with humanity, bearing our wounds and inviting us into a new way of being human together.
This vision also helps us recognize the forces that continually pull us away from God’s dream. Fear narrows our imagination. Anxiety tempts us to search for someone to blame. Scapegoating divides us into insiders and outsiders. Yet the gospel moves in the opposite direction. It calls us toward compassion, belonging, forgiveness, and reconciliation, teaching us to see neighbors where fear sees enemies, and possibility where despair sees only obstacles.
The best news then is not simply that God loves us. It is that God’s love is restoring the whole world. And every time we participate in acts of mercy, justice, peacemaking, generosity, and compassion, we become partners in that restoration. We join the ongoing work of making God’s dream visible here and now, trusting that one day peace, goodness, and wholeness will fill all things.
We have only today, let us begin.
–Mother Theresa
BLESSING
And so, as we continue our pursuit of beauty and the fulfillment of God’s dream of wholeness for all things, may we become people who deeply embody this good news. And may the love revealed in Jesus continually expand our hearts, deepen our compassion, and awaken within us a greater hope.
Amen.
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