Humble Uncertainty: A Narrower Path to a Greater Hope

The first time that I encountered the phrase “Jesus saves” was in 1969 when I was 11 years old. It appeared in the form of graffiti spray painted on a railroad trestle over the Arcadia Soda Shop on South Columbus Avenue where my friends and I would hang out after playing basketball. It didn’t take long for another, less religious “artist” to complete the thought with “and Esposito scores on the rebound.” Of course we were all amused by the irreverent hockey reference, though I confess that we didn’t completely understand it. I knew who Esposito was, Phil Esposito, the all-star center for the Boston Bruins. I also knew who Jesus was, Jeffrey Hunter in King of Kings, a movie that had commanded my attention every time it was on television, and taught me everything I knew of Jesus at that time. And of course I knew that the new graffiti was a play on the word “saves,” but I didn’t fully get the joke. Why was Jesus saving in the first place, and from what? What did “Jesus saves” possibly mean?

I was already aware at this tender young age that the world was in need of saving. This was a time of turmoil and I was just becoming old enough to be aware of that. It was the height of the Vietnam War and every morning CBS News brought a new body count to our television, while every evening it documented the political unrest over the war. Living in an apartment building in a neighborhood of apartment buildings assured a high level of intimacy with our neighbors and a low level of privacy. The entire neighborhood was aware when one of its sons went off to war and even more painfully aware when one didn’t come home. It was less than a year since the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and the Chicago Seven trials were still under way. Monthly air raid drills at William H. Holmes Elementary School served as a reminder that even school was not a completely safe place.