Reflection of the Week - 25th January 2022

By Richard Rohr

Posted Jan 25, 2022 in Faith

The absolute religious genius of Jesus is that he utterly refuses all debt codes, purity codes, religious quarantines, and the searching for sinners. He refuses the very starting point of historic religions. He refuses to divide the world into the pure and the impure, much to the chagrin of almost everybody—then and now.

Jesus is shockingly not upset with sinners. This is a shock so total that most Christians, to this day, refuse to see it. He is only upset with people who do not think they are sinners: these denying, fearful, and illusory individuals are the actual blockage. They are much more likely to hate and feel no compunction.

Formerly, religion thought its mission was to expel sin and evil. Through Jesus, we learn that sin lies in the very act of expelling. There is no place to expel it to. We have met the enemy, and the enemy is us. We either carry and transform the evil of human history as our own problem, or we increase its efficiency and power by hating and punishing it ‘over there.’ The Jesus pattern was put precisely and concisely by Paul: ‘for our sake he made the sinless one a victim for sin, so that in him we might become the uprightness of God’ (2 Corinthians 5:21). I admit, that is counterintuitive for most people. Only mystics and sinners seem to get it.

In the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30–37), Jesus tells of a man by the side of the road waking up in enemy territory, realising that he has been loved by the very one who is supposed to hate him and whom he is supposed to fear. Could this be everybody’s awakening? Could this be an accurate image of discovering God and truth?

Jesus is clearly presenting the foreign Samaritan as an image of God. He ends the shocking parable by saying, ‘Go and do the same’ (Luke 10:37). The human task has become the very imitation of God, which seems almost unthinkable. God, the one that history has been taught to fear, is in fact the utter Goodness that enfolds us and creates a safe and non-threatening universe for us—a renewed universe that we can now pass on to others.

For Jesus, there are no postures, group memberships, behaviours, prayer rituals, dietary rules, asceticism, or social awareness that, of themselves, transform us or make us enlightened, saved, or superior. There are no contaminating elements or people to expel or exclude. These answers are exposed as inadequate only when goodness is exposed as the divine field of action. Everyone and everything belongs.

Reference:

Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Disorder, Reorder (Cincinnati, OH: Franciscan Media, 2001, 2020), 168–170.

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