Radical Grace
October – December 2006

Awakened and Astonished—Part II

by Richard Rohr, OFM

Monotheism's great breakthrough was that its God was “Lord of all the earth.” This is its’ great truth: “One God who is Father of all, over all, through all, and within all” (Ephesians 4:6). Doesn’t monotheism necessarily prepare us for one pattern, one reality, one world—one love? Yet the religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have been—up to now—inclusive only at very small levels. (Catholic Eucharistic practice gives this away). The very people who defend the “Creator of all things” are the last ones who really defend that same creation! Sure, God created all things, but we only have to love and respect small parts of it, which just happens to be my part—“Our people” much more than “all people.” The ecologists, humanists, and some globalists end up being much more “monotheistic” in practice than most Christians I know.

As is usual, the Jewish prophets, and one that we do not usually present as a Jewish prophet, Jesus of Nazareth, were pointing us relentlessly toward an inclusive and allcompassionate God. They were the true monotheists, in all its implications. I personally believe that the common Christian insistence that Jesus is necessary for universal salvation is actually an unconscious recognition that Jesus is teaching a universal message and pointing history toward the good of all. The prophets were not tolerant of mere tribal religion or any small belonging systems, but intuited the universal glory and sovereignty of their Yahweh.

II Isaiah loves to speak of “the nations counting as nothingness and emptiness” (40:17), that “all of humanity” will see the glory of God” (40:5), and that “my house will be a house of prayer for all the peoples” (56:7), which is later quoted by Jesus. The light revealed to Israel is to be “the light to all the nations” (42:6) because their message offers illumination for everybody and not just for themselves. It has become apparent to me that particularity, personal election, is first for the sake of a heightened and condensed experience, but eventually it always moves toward a universal recognition that is deemed true for everybody. You have to experience specialness yourself before it can grow inside of you, and then you can communicate that same spaciousness and specialness to others. The constant problem is that we get trapped in the initial inflating experience and most stop right there—which only leads to idolatry, nationalism, group conformity, and religious righteousness. We stay in the containment task of “the first half of life” and never get on to generative religion.¹ Paul himself only slowly comes to this, as described in Romans 9-11, and summed up in his phrase “the whole batch of dough is holy if the first yeast is made holy; all the branches are holy if the root is holy” (11:16).

Jesus is the universalist par excellance, always making the outsider the heroes of his stories: the non-Jews appear as those with more faith and more compassion, the sinners become those who are saved, the women better than the men, and as he continually puts it, “the last will be first”— while the so-called elect and chosen are his constant opponents. Jesus’ clear criterion for one who speaks with authority is simply one who has gone through the belly of the whale experience, or what he calls the “sign of Jonah,” the “only” sign he will give. Neither membership in any group (“a throne”) nor correct verbiage (“Lord, Lord”) is what gives you authority in Jesus’ understanding, but those who “drink the cup that I must drink and are baptized with the baptism with which I must be baptized” (Mark 10:39). This is “the true authority of those who have suffered” and come through the cleansing bath transformed.²

Jesus reaches this shocking and scandalous conclusion because his starting place is quite different. He does not begin with any preoccupation with human sinfulness or the weighing of worthiness or unworthiness (that is the preoccupation of the ego). In fact, he just assumes that we are all “sick and in need of a physician.” As he puts it, “I did not come to call the virtuous” (Mark 2:17). Jesus’ starting place is human suffering instead of human sinfulness. How else can you explain his fulltime ministry of healing, exorcism, affirmation of the excluded ones, and the alleviation of human distress and humiliation? He is not naïve about sin, but just recognizes that human sinfulness, “hardness of heart,” is much more a symptom than a cause. Sin largely reveals the problem and he uses it for diagnostic purposes not for condemnation or exclusion. Sin, for Jesus, is not a set of purity codes or debt codes—which he goes out of his way to flaunt— but inner attitudes which blind and bind us inside of ourselves, and away from communion and mercy.³

It is not moral unworthiness that keeps people from God, but moral righteousness and self-sufficiency. It is that simple recognition, which is almost his constant message, that makes Jesus the ultimate, perennial, and radical reformer of religion. And why religious people oppose him. It makes one wonder if such a foundational critique can ever fashion itself into a proper religion at all. I agree with Simone Weil who said that the problem with Christianity is that it insists on seeing itself as a separate religion, instead of a healing message for all religions. I am afraid that is what will always emerge when you have religion without spirituality, or pious practices without inner experience. The very best thing will then become the very worst thing, and the only way through is to be awakened and astonished by a divine love that is of an utterly new dimension.

Read Part I of “Awakened and Astonished,” published in the July/August/September 2006 edition of Radical Grace. The article was first published in its entirety in the March/April 2006 edition of The Pastoral Review, © The Tablet Publishing Company Limited, ISSN1748-362X, London, England.

Fr. Richard Rohr is a Franciscan of the New Mexico province and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, NM.

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