What is the Gospel?

What is the Gospel? Some say ragamuffin – good news for the down and out. Some say Creed, words ringing true to all that is. Many don’t know what the gospel is, a strange word seldom used in normal ways of life.

Gospel means simply “Good News” and for nearly 2,000 years references the story of Christ as we receive it in the New Testament books named after his followers.

What is the Gospel? My needy soul reaches up to God and hopes the Gospel is for the down and out, for those who have received the grace to know how lost they are and how much this world and every single one of us needs a Savior. But of course I also hope it is true, that it can be understood and accessed by normal processes of reason and curiosity and understanding. If the Gospel is true then it can weather the withering storms of centuries of doubt and attack. And so it has.

I hear myself say the Gospel is the Incarnation writ large, or perhaps most accurately the gospel IS the Incarnation. This feels closer to Creed than ragamuffin, but I want to linger here. The Incarnation tells us God is with us. There is no greater Good News. When we hear God is with us we know he did not just select the best and the brightest, the wisest and most erudite. No, he came to be with this world just as it is, full of sadness, darkness, death and loss, disappointment, addiction, broken hearts.

The Gospel is for everyone because the Incarnation is for the whole world: past, present, future. When God touches the world nothing remains as it was. When Joy Davidman Lewis surrendered her life to Christ, she used the expression “God came in” to describe the Wonder of what happened. This can happen in our individual lives because it happened in Bethlehem. If there’s a God, the one whom Christ reveals, this God doesn’t wait for us to seek him out. He seeks us out.

This is the Gospel, the Good News: God has come into the world and we need never be alone again.