What is gospel?

In preaching class this week we are exploring law and gospel and what they mean, if they are optional for Lutherans and how they find there way into our sermons. I couldn't help as this class (GMM) asked us to also reflect on what is gospel. Maybe they are the same question, maybe they are different. For me, I wasn't able to reflect on gospel without also pulling in the law as a Lutheran. So here are my thoughts on "what is gospel" with a little preaching class embedded.



What is Gospel?

Gospel is what gives us identity. Gospel names us. Gospel gives us grace, but only by way of the law. If I am to reflect on this question taking into consideration by theological heritage, than I must also talk about law. In order to have gospel, we need the law. The gospel sets us free from the brokenness of our lives in which the law tells us the truth about.

The gospel is living and a part of our daily lives. God reveals the gospel to us through our brokenness and names us his beloved at the same time. The gospel isn’t just about Jesus, the gospel is the good news that we are loved, claimed and named by God. The gospel is for anyone that is willing to look into the mirror and believe that the broken, sinful person that is looking back is loved by God just the way they are.

I think that all too often we think of gospel as something that is said instead of something it does. Marin Luther tells us the “proper distinction between the function of the law and that of the gospel keeps all genuine theology in its correct use.” (Luther’s Works, American Edition) Gerhard Ebeling says, “The gospel is not simply a word, but a word-event, something that actually happens to people.” (Lose, Words that Do Things, dialogue: A Journal of Theology) One last quote. Dr. Lose in his article “Words that Do Things”, says “For the law is whatever lays us bare and exposes our plight apart from God, and the gospel is whatever clothes us in Christ’s righteousness and creates faith.”

The gospel isn’t found in the pages of the Bible (ok so of course we read from the Gospel texts), but God is alive and so is his word! If God continues to create, redeem, love, and be in this world, than we need to get out so that we can experience the gospel! The gospel doesn’t come to us in the pews at church, the gospel comes to us when God reveals himself to us through the people around us, through our experiences of pain and suffering, through our experiences of joy and celebration.

It is important for me that I don’t allow the gospel to be something that is stationary or become words that I visit when I pick up my Bible. Instead, for me the gospel names me, claims me and does something to me. The gospel seeps out of me like the water in a sponge that is oversaturated and leaks onto and into the lives of the people that are around me. Are we not called to be the gospel in and to the world? Isn’t the gospel how we respond to our neighbor? Maybe the gospel is why we respond, but isn’t it more how we respond?