by Richard Rohr
Unfortunately, the notion of faith that emerged in the West was much more a rational assent to the truth of certain mental beliefs, rather than a calm and hopeful trust that God is inherent in all things, and that this whole thing is going somewhere good. Predictably, we soon separated intellectual belief (which tends to differentiate and limit) from love and hope (which unite and thus eternalize). As Paul says in his great hymn to love, “There are only three things that last, faith, hope and love” (1 Corinthians 13:13). All else passes.
Faith, hope, and love are the very nature of God, and thus the nature of all Being.
Such goodness cannot die. (Which is what we mean when we say “heaven.”)
Each of these Three Great Virtues must always include the other two in order to be authentic: love is always hopeful and faithful, hope is always loving and faithful, and faith is always loving and hopeful. They are the very nature of God and thus of all Being. Such wholeness is personified in the cosmos as Christ, and in human history as Jesus. So God is not just love (1 John 4:16) but also absolute faithfulness and hope itself. And the energy of this faithfulness and hope flows out from the Creator toward all created beings producing all growth, healing, and every springtime.
No one religion will ever encompass the depth of such faith.
No ethnicity has a monopoly on such hope.
No nationality can control or limit this Flow of such universal love.
These are the ubiquitous gifts of the Christ Mystery, hidden inside of all that has ever lived, died, and will live again.
I hope the vision is coming clearer. It is in a way so simple and commonsense that it is hard to teach. It is mostly a matter of unlearning, and learning to trust your Christian common sense, if you will allow me to say that. Christ is a good and simple metaphor for absolute wholeness, complete incarnation, and the integrity of creation. Jesus is the archetypal human just like us (Hebrews 4:15), who showed us what the Full Human might look like if we could fully live into it (Ephesians 4:12–16). Frankly, Jesus came to show us how to be human much more than how to be spiritual, and the process still seems to be in its early stages.
Without Jesus, the sheer scale and significance of our deep humanity is just too much, and too good, for our ordinary minds to imagine. But when we rejoin Jesus with Christ, we can begin a Big Imagining and a Great Work.
*1 Romans 1:20 says the same, in case you’re wondering how this self-critique shows up in the Bible itself.
*2 This is why the title for part one of this book says “Every Thing,” instead of “Everything,” because I believe the Christ Mystery specifically applies to thingness, materiality, physicality. I do not think of concepts and ideas as Christ. They might well communicate the Christ Mystery, as I will try to do here, but “Christ” for me refers to ideas that have specifically “become flesh” (John 1:14). You are surely free to disagree with me on that, but at least you know where I am coming from in my use of the word “Christ” in this book.
*3 See both Romans 8:19ff. and 1 Corinthians 11:17ff., where Paul makes his expansive notion of incarnation clear, and for me compelling. Most of us just never heard it that way.
*4 For a fuller treatment of this notion, see my earlier book The Divine Dance (New Kensington, PA: Whitaker House, 2016), which amounts to a prequel to this book.
*5 Scotism entry, Encyclopedia of Theology, ed. Karl Rahner (London: Burns and Oates, 1975), 1548.
2
Accepting That You Are Fully Accepted
I am making the whole of creation new….It will come true….It is already done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, both the Beginning and the End.
—Revelation 21:5–6
I tell you solemnly, before Abraham came to be, I AM.
—John 8:58
In these two scripture references, who do you think is speaking? Is it Jesus of Nazareth, or someone else? We’d have to conclude that whoever is talking here is offering a grand and optimistic arc to all of history, and is not speaking simply as the humble Galilean carpenter. “I am both the First and the Last,” the voice says in Revelation 22:14, describing a coherent trajectory between the beginning and the end of all things. The second quotation, from John’s Gospel, is even more startling. If Jesus was the only one speaking here—calling himself God while standing in Jerusalem’s flagship temple—the people present would’ve had every good reason to stone him!
While I don’t believe Jesus ever doubted his real union with God, Jesus of Nazareth in his lifetime did not normally talk in the divine “I AM” statements, which are found seven times throughout John’s Gospel. In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus almost always calls himself “the Son of the Human,” or just “Everyman,” using this expression a total of eighty-seven times.*1 But in John’s Gospel, dated somewhere between A.D. 90 and 110, the voice of Christ steps forward to do almost all of the speaking. This helps make sense of some statements that seem out of character coming from Jesus’s mouth, like “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6) or “Before Abraham ever was, I am” (John 8:58). Jesus of Nazareth would not likely have talked that way, but if these are the words of the Eternal Christ, then “I am the way, the truth, and the life” is a very fair statement that should neither offend nor threaten anyone. After all, Jesus is not talking about joining or excluding any group; rather, he is describing the “Way” by which all humans and all religions must allow matter and Spirit to operate as one.
Once we see that the Eternal Christ is the one talking in these passages, Jesus’s words about the nature of God—and those created in God’s image—seem full of deep hope and a broad vision for all of creation. History is not aimless, not a mere product of random movement, or a race toward an apocalyptic end. This is good and universal truth, and does not depend on any group owning an exclusive “divine revelation.” How different from the clannish form religion often takes—or the anemic notion of individual salvation for a very few on one minor planet in a still-expanding universe, with the plotline revolving around a single sin committed between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers!
The leap of faith that orthodox Christians made from the earliest period was the belief that this eternal Christ presence truly was speaking through the person of Jesus. Divinity and humanity must somehow be able to speak as one, for if the union of God and humankind is “true” in Jesus, there is hope that it might be true in all of us too. That is the big takeaway from having Jesus also speak as the Eternal Christ. He is indeed “the pioneer and perfector of our faith,” as Hebrews puts it (12:2), modeling the human journey rather perfectly.
To summarize, because I know this is such a huge shift in perspective for most of us:
The full Christian story is saying that Jesus died, and Christ “arose”—yes, still as Jesus, but now also as the Corporate Personality who includes and reveals all of creation in its full purpose and goal. Or, as the “Father of Orthodoxy,” St. Athanasius (296–373), wrote when the church had a more social, historical, and revolutionary sense of itself: “God was consistent in working through one man to reveal himself everywhere, as well as through the other parts of His creation, so that nothing was left devoid of his Divinity and his self-knowledge…so that ‘the whole universe was filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters fill the sea.’ ” *2 This whole book could be considered nothing more than a footnote to these words of Athanasius!
The Eastern church has a sacred word for this process, which we in the West call “incarnation” or “salvation.” They call it “divinization” (theosis). If that sounds provocative, know that they are only building on 2 Peter 1:4, where the author says, “He has given us something very great and wonderful…you are able to share the divine nature!” This is Christianity’s core good news and only transformative message.
Most Catholics and Protestants still think of the incarnation as a one-time and one-p
erson event having to do only with the person of Jesus of Nazareth, instead of a cosmic event that has soaked all of history in the Divine Presence from the very beginning. This implies, therefore
That God is not an old man on a throne. God is Relationship itself, a dynamism of Infinite Love between Divine Diversity, as the doctrine of the Trinity demonstrates. (Notice that Genesis 1:26–27 uses two plural pronouns to describe the Creator, “let us create in our image.”)
That God’s infinite love has always included all that God created from the very beginning (Ephesians 1:3–14). The connection is inherent and absolute. The Torah calls it “covenant love,” an unconditional agreement, both offered and consummated from God’s side (even if and when we do not reciprocate).
That the Divine “DNA” of the Creator is therefore held in all the creatures. What we call the “soul” of every creature could easily be seen as the self knowledge of God in that creature! It knows who it is and grows into that identity, just like every seed and egg. Thus salvation might best be called “restoration,” rather than the retributive agenda most of us were offered. This alone deserves to be called “divine justice.”
That as long as we keep God imprisoned in a retributive frame instead of a restorative frame, we really have no substantial good news; it is neither good nor new, but the same old tired story line of history. We pull God down to our level.
Faith at its essential core is accepting that you are accepted! We cannot deeply know ourselves without also knowing the One who made us, and we cannot fully accept ourselves without accepting God’s radical acceptance of every part of us. And God’s impossible acceptance of ourselves is easier to grasp if we first recognize it in the perfect unity of the human Jesus with the divine Christ. Start with Jesus, continue with yourself, and finally expand to everything else. As John says, “From this fullness (pleroma) we have all received, grace upon grace” (1:16), or “grace responding to grace gracefully” might be an even more accurate translation. To end in grace you must somehow start with grace, and then it is grace all the way through. Or as others have simply put it, “How you get there is where you arrive.”
Seeing and Recognizing Are Not the Same
The core message of the incarnation of God in Jesus is that the Divine Presence is here, in us and in all of creation, and not only “over there” in some far-off realm. The early Christians came to call this seemingly new and available Presence “both Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:36), and Jesus became the big billboard that announced God’s message in a personal way along the speedy highways of history. God needed something, or someone, to focus our attention. Jesus serves that role quite well.
Read 1 Corinthians 15:4–8, where Paul describes how Christ appeared a number of times to his apostles and followers after Jesus’s death. The four Gospels do the same thing, describing how the Risen Christ transcended doors, walls, spaces, ethnicities, religions, water, air, and times, eating food, and sometimes even bilocating, but always interacting with matter. While all of these accounts ascribe a kind of physical presence to Christ, it always seems to be a different kind of embodiment. Or, as Mark says right at the end of his Gospel, “he showed himself but under another form” (16:12). This is a new kind of presence, a new kind of embodiment, and a new kind of godliness.
This, I think, is why the people who witnessed these apparitions of Christ seemed to finally recognize him, but not usually immediately. Seeing and recognizing are not the same thing. And isn’t this how it happens in our own lives? First we see a candle flame, then a moment later it “blazes” for us when we allow it to hold a personal meaning or message. We see a homeless man, and the moment we allow our heart space to open toward him, he becomes human, dear, or even Christ. Every resurrection story seems to strongly affirm an ambiguous—yet certain—presence in very ordinary settings, like walking on the road to Emmaus with a stranger, roasting fish on the beach, or what appeared like a gardener to the Magdalene.*3 These moments from Scripture set a stage of expectation and desire that God’s presence can be seen in the ordinary and the material, and we do not have to wait for supernatural apparitions. We Catholics call this a “sacramental” theology, where the visible and tactile are the primary doorway to the invisible. This is why each of the formal Sacraments of the church insists on a material element like water, oil, bread, wine, the laying on of hands, or the absolute physicality of marriage itself.
By the time Paul wrote the letters to Colossae (1:15–20) and Ephesus (1:3–14), some twenty years after Jesus’s era, he had already connected Jesus’s single body with the rest of the human species (1 Corinthians 12:12ff.), with the individual elements symbolized by bread and wine (1 Corinthians 11:17ff.), and with the entire Christ of cosmic history and nature itself (Romans 8:18ff.). This connection is later articulated in the Prologue to John’s Gospel when the author says, “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of humanity” (John 1: 1–4), all grounded in the Logos becoming flesh (1:14). The early Eastern Fathers made much of this universal and corporate notion of salvation, both in art and in theology, but not so much in the West.
The sacramental principle is this: Begin with a concrete moment of encounter, based in this physical world, and the soul universalizes from there, so that what is true here becomes true everywhere else too. And so the spiritual journey proceeds with ever-greater circles of inclusion into the One Holy Mystery! But it always starts with what many wisely call the “scandal of the particular.” It is there that we must surrender, even if the object itself seems more than a bit unworthy of our awe, trust, or surrender.*4
Light and Enlightenment
Have you ever noticed that the expression “the light of the world” is used to describe the Christ (John 8:12), but that Jesus also applies the same phrase to us? (Matthew 5:14, “You are the light of the world.”) Few preachers ever pointed that out to me.
Apparently, light is less something you see directly, and more something by which you see all other things. In other words, we have faith in Christ so we can have the faith of Christ. That is the goal. Christ and Jesus seem quite happy to serve as conduits, rather than provable conclusions. (If the latter was the case, the Incarnation would have happened after the invention of the camera and the video recorder!) We need to look at Jesus until we can look out at the world with his kind of eyes. The world no longer trusts Christians who “love Jesus” but do not seem to love anything else.
In Jesus Christ, God’s own broad, deep, and all-inclusive worldview is made available to us.
That might just be the whole point of the Gospels. You have to trust the messenger before you can trust the message, and that seems to be the Jesus Christ strategy. Too often, we have substituted the messenger for the message. As a result, we spent a great deal of time worshiping the messenger and trying to get other people to do the same. Too often this obsession became a pious substitute for actually following what he taught—and he did ask us several times to follow him, and never once to worship him.
If you pay attention to the text, you’ll see that John offers a very evolutionary notion of the Christ message. Note the active verb that is used here: “The true light that enlightens every person was coming (erxomenon) into the world” (1:9). In other words, we’re talking not about a one-time Big Bang in nature or a one-time incarnation in Jesus, but an ongoing, progressive movement continuing in the ever-unfolding creation. Incarnation did not just happen two thousand years ago. It has been working throughout the entire arc of time, and will continue. This is expressed in the common phrase the “Second Coming of Christ,” which was unfortunately read as a threat (“Wait till your Dad gets home!”), whereas it should more accurately be spoken of as the “Forever Coming of Ch
rist,” which is anything but a threat. In fact, it is the ongoing promise of eternal resurrection.
Christ is the light that allows people to see things in their fullness. The precise and intended effect of such a light is to see Christ everywhere else. In fact, that is my only definition of a true Christian. A mature Christian sees Christ in everything and everyone else. That is a definition that will never fail you, always demand more of you, and give you no reasons to fight, exclude, or reject anyone.
Isn’t that ironic? The point of the Christian life is not to distinguish oneself from the ungodly, but to stand in radical solidarity with everyone and everything else. This is the full, final, and intended effect of the Incarnation—symbolized by its finality in the cross, which is God’s great act of solidarity instead of judgment. Without a doubt, Jesus perfectly exemplified this seeing, and thus passed it on to the rest of history. This is how we are to imitate Christ, the good Jewish man who saw and called forth the divine in Gentiles like the Syro-Phoenician woman and the Roman centurions who followed him; in Jewish tax collectors who collaborated with the Empire; in zealots who opposed it; in sinners of all stripes; in eunuchs, pagan astrologers, and all those “outside the law.” Jesus had no trouble whatsoever with otherness. In fact, these “lost sheep” found out they were not lost to him at all, and tended to become his best followers.
