Jesus Christ is the Savior of all people, not only of some races or nationalities.
God spent many centuries preparing for the coming of Jesus Christ. God’s primary revelation was to the Jewish people. God sent them prophets who proclaimed the coming Messiah, the Savior. But God also prepared for the coming of his Son among the pagans. The Fathers say that God sowed seeds of the word, seeds of the truth in pagan religions. However, the primary revelation was to the Jewish people. For this reason when Christians read the Old Testament we see many foreshadowings of Jesus Christ.
In the pagan religions we see two extremes. One was a kind of crude sacramentalism; one slaughtered sheep, cows, birds to the gods and the gods gave something in return. However, the pagan religions often developed a sublime philosophy. One finds this, for example, in ancient Chinese, Greek and Indian philosophers. Sometimes the conception of God was quite abstract, seeing God as a kind of impersonal force. Other philosophies were close to Christian monotheism. But the problem was that no one knew for sure. But this changes with the coming of Jesus Christ.
In today’s Gospel (Matthew 11: 27-30) Jesus Christ says “….no one knows the Son except the Father. Nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and one to whom the Son wills to reveal him.” In other words, Jesus tells us who God is, and he tells us that God is love. In other religions there was often the concept that God was merciful or that there is a divine providence overseeing the world. But this teaching that God is love is revolutionary. But Jesus knows that this is true because as second Web Article January 10, 2015 person of the Holy Trinity Jesus existed from all eternity in loving communion with God the Father and God the Holy Spirit. And in His earthly life Jesus experienced God as Abba, his dear father. And so this revelation of God as love, that he cares for each and every one of us, is the good news of the Gospel.
Fr John