The Universal Christ

by Richard Rohr

  The Divine Mind transforms all human suffering by identifying completely with the human predicament and standing in full solidarity with it from beginning to end. This is the real meaning of the crucifixion. The cross is not just a singular event. It’s a statement from God that reality has a cruciform pattern. Jesus was killed in a collision of cross-purposes, conflicting interests, and half-truths, caught between the demands of an empire and the religious establishment of his day. The cross was the price Jesus paid for living in a “mixed” world, which is both human and divine, simultaneously broken and utterly whole. He hung between a good thief and a bad thief, between heaven and earth, inside of both humanity and divinity, a male body with a feminine soul, utterly whole and yet utterly disfigured—all the primary opposites.

  In so doing, Jesus demonstrated that Reality is not meaningless and absurd, even if it isn’t always perfectly logical or consistent. Reality, we know, is always filled with contradictions, what St. Bonaventure and others (such as Alan of Lille and Nicholas of Cusa) called the “coincidence of opposites.”

  Jesus the Christ, in his crucifixion and resurrection, “recapitulated all things in himself, everything in heaven and everything on earth” (Ephesians 1:10). This one verse is the summary of Franciscan Christology. Jesus agreed to carry the mystery of universal suffering. He allowed it to change him (“Resurrection”) and, it is to be hoped, us, so that we would be freed from the endless cycle of projecting our pain elsewhere or remaining trapped inside of it.

  This is the fully resurrected life, the only way to be, happy, free, loving, and therefore “saved.” In effect, Jesus was saying, “If I can trust it, you can too.” We are indeed saved by the cross—more than we realize. The people who hold the contradictions and resolve them in themselves are the saviors of the world. They are the only real agents of transformation, reconciliation, and newness.

  Christians are meant to be the visible compassion of God on earth more than “those who are going to heaven.” They are the leaven who agree to share the fate of God for the life of the world now, and thus keep the whole batch of dough from falling back on itself. A Christian is invited, not required to accept and live the cruciform shape of all reality. It is not a duty or even a requirement as much as a free vocation. Some people feel called and agree to not hide from the dark side of things or the rejected group, but in fact draw close to the pain of the world and allow it to radically change their perspective. They agree to embrace the imperfection and even the injustices of our world, allowing these situations to change themselves from the inside out, which is the only way things are changed anyway.

  As some of our saints have said in different ways, Jesus is not loyal to groups, to countries, to battles, to teams. Jesus is loyal only to suffering. He is as present to the suffering Iraqi soldier as he is to the wounded American soldier, as caring for the disillusioned Nazi warrior as for the discouraged British soldier bleeding to death in the field. As Isaiah shockingly puts it, “to him nations count as nothingness and emptiness” (40:17). The Jesus Nation crosses all boundaries and frontiers, and is occupied by only the wisdom and freedom of those who have suffered and come out the other side—not destroyed, but larger and stronger and wiser. The Gospel is simply the wisdom of those who agree to carry their part of the infinite suffering of God. Ironically, many non-Christians—I think of Anne Frank, Simone Weil, and Etty Hillesum, who were all Jewish—seemed to fully accept this vocation with greater freedom than many Christians.

  Scapegoating, and the “Sin of the World”

  For me, the Hebrew Scripture that most lays the foundation for understanding the death of Jesus is found in Leviticus 16, which French philosopher and historian René Girard calls the most effective religious ritual ever created. On the “Day of Atonement” the high priest Aaron was instructed to symbolically lay all the sins of the people on one unfortunate goat, and the people would then beat the animal until it fled into the desert. (The word “scapegoat” came from the phrase “escaping goat,” used in early English translations of the Bible.) It was a vividly symbolic act that helped to unite and free the people in the short term. It foreshadowed what we Catholics would later call “general absolution” or “public confession.” Instead of owning our sins, this ritual allowed us to export them elsewhere—in this case onto an innocent animal.

  For our purposes here, the image of the scapegoat powerfully mirrors and reveals the universal, but largely unconscious, human need to transfer our guilt onto something (or someone) else by singling that other out for unmerited negative treatment. This pattern is seen in many facets of our society and our private, inner lives—so much so that you could almost name it “the sin of the world” (note that “sin” is singular in John 1:29). The biblical account, however, seems to recognize that only a “lamb of a God” can both reveal and resolve that sin in one nonviolent action. (Any lion of a God would perpetuate the illusion that we can overcome power with the same kind of power, only doubling the problem.)

  Note too that the scapegoat in Leviticus is based on an arbitrary choice between two goats (Leviticus 16:7–10). There is really no difference between the “goat of YHWH, who is offered as a fitting sacrifice for sin” and the “goat of Azazel” (Azazel being a demon of the wastelands), who gets beaten into the desert—except in how the goat was seen and chosen by the people. Presumably God created both goats, but we humans are the ones who decide which should be driven out. Such dualistic thinking is not true, but our egos find it convenient and helpful—not to mention necessary for displacing blame.

  To this day, scapegoating characterizes much personal, political, and public discourse. People on the Left accuse the Right of being merely “pro-birth” while being pro-war and pro-gun, and thus hypocritical when they call themselves “pro-life.” People on the Right accuse the Left of being “pro-abortion” and “pro-choice,” and thus not “pro-life” at all. By concentrating on the other group’s goat, both sides can avoid being completely consistent. Amazing how this logic works quite effectively to keep both of us from being honest. In reality, a full and completely consistent pro-life position would probably please very few because of what it would demand—including the sacrifice of some of our unquestioned assumptions. Very few wear the “seamless garment” of being truly pro-life all the time. There is no completely pure place to stand, it seems, and before we can resolve an issue at any depth, we must honestly name and accept this imperfection. It is the egoic illusion of our own perfect rightness that often allows us to crucify others.

  Girard demonstrated that the scapegoat mechanism is probably the foundational principle for the formation of most social groups and cultures. We seldom consciously know that we are scapegoating or projecting. As Jesus said, people literally “do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). In fact, the effectiveness of this mechanism depends on not seeing it! It’s almost entirely automatic, ingrained, and unconscious. “She made me do it.” “He is guilty.” “He deserves it.” “They are the problem.” “They are evil.” Humans should recognize their own negativity and sinfulness, but instead we largely hate or blame almost anything else.

  Unless scapegoating can be consciously seen and named through concrete rituals, owned mistakes, or what many call “repentance,” the pattern will usually remain unconscious and unchallenged. It took until the twentieth century for modern psychology to recognize how humans almost always project their unconscious shadow material onto other people and groups, but Jesus revealed the pattern two thousand years ago. “When anyone kills you, they will think they are doing a holy duty for God,” he said (John 16:2). We hate our own faults in other people, and sadly we often find the best cover for that projection in religion. God and religion, I am afraid, have been used to justify most of our violence and to hide from the shadow parts of ourselves that we would rather not admit.

  Yet the scriptures rightly call such ignorant hatred and killing “sin
,” and Jesus came precisely to “take away” (John 1:29) our capacity to commit it—by exposing the lie for all to see. Like talking with any good spiritual director or confessor, gazing at the Crucified One helps you see the lie in all its tragedy. Remember, Jesus stood as the fully innocent one who was condemned by the highest authorities of both “church and state” (Rome and Jerusalem), an act that should create healthy suspicion about how wrong even the highest powers can be. Maybe power still does not want us to see this, and that’s why we concentrate so much on the private sins of the flesh. The denied sins that are really destroying the world are much more the sins that we often admire and fully accept in our public figures: pride, ambition, greed, gluttony, false witness, legitimated killing, vanity, et cetera. That is hard to deny.

  As John puts it, “He will show the world how wrong it was about sin, about who was really in the right, and about true judgment” (16:8). This is what Jesus is exposing and defeating on the cross. He did not come to change God’s mind about us. It did not need changing. Jesus came to change our minds about God—and about ourselves—and about where goodness and evil really lie.

  We Carry and Love What God Carries and Loves

  What, then, does it mean to follow Jesus? I believe that we are invited to gaze upon the image of the crucified Jesus to soften our hearts toward all suffering, to help us see how we ourselves have been “bitten” by hatred and violence, and to know that God’s heart has always been softened toward us. In turning our gaze to this divine truth—in dropping our many modes of scapegoating and self-justification—we gain compassion toward ourselves and all others who suffer. It largely happens on the psychic and unconscious level, but that is exactly where all of our hurts and our will to violence lie, lodged in the primitive “lizard brain,” where we have almost no rational control.

  A transformative religion must touch us at this primitive, brain-stem level, or it is not transformative at all. History is continually graced with people who somehow learned to act beyond and outside their self-interest and for the good of the world, people who clearly operated by a power larger than their own. The Gandhis of the world, the Oskar Schindlers, the Martin Luther King Jrs. Add to them Rosa Parks, Mother Teresa, Dorothy Day, Oscar Romero, Cesar Chavez, and many other “unknown soldiers.” These inspiring figures gave us strong evidence that the mind of Christ still inhabits the world. Most of us are fortunate to have crossed paths with many lesser-known persons who exhibit the same presence. I can’t say how one becomes such a person. All I can presume is that they all had their Christ moments, in which they stopped denying their own shadows, stopped projecting those shadows elsewhere, and agreed to own their deepest identity in solidarity with the world.

  But it is not an enviable position, this Christian thing.

  Following Jesus is a vocation to share the fate of God for the life of the world.

  To allow what God for some reason allows—and uses.

  And to suffer ever so slightly what God suffers eternally.

  Often, this has little to do with believing the right things about God—beyond the fact that God is love itself.

  Those who agree to carry and love what God loves—which is both the good and the bad—and to pay the price for its reconciliation within themselves, these are the followers of Jesus Christ. They are the leaven, the salt, the remnant, the mustard seed that God uses to transform the world. The cross, then, is a very dramatic image of what it takes to be usable for God. It does not mean you are going to heaven and others are not; rather, it means you have entered into heaven much earlier and thus can see things in a transcendent, whole, and healing way now.

  To maintain this mind and heart over the long haul is true spirituality. I have no doubt that it takes many daily decisions and many surrenders. It is aided by seeking out like-minded people. Such grace and freedom is never a lone achievement. A heaven you created by yourself will never be heaven for long. Saints are those who wake up while in this world, instead of waiting for the next one. Francis of Assisi, William Wilberforce, Thérèse of Lisieux, and Harriet Tubman did not feel superior to anyone else; they just knew they had been let in on a big divine secret, and they wanted to do their part in revealing it.

  They all refused to trust even their own power unless that power had first been taught and refined by powerlessness.

  This is no easy truth. Once their entire frame of mind had been taken apart and reshaped in this way, they had to figure out how they fit back into the dominant worldview—and most of them never did, at least not completely. This became their crucifixion. The “way of the cross” can never go out of style because it will surely never be in style. It never becomes the dominant consciousness anywhere. But this is the powerlessness of God, the powerlessness that saves the world.

  The scapegoat mechanism, our ability to hate ourselves in others and attack, is too seductive and too difficult for most people to recognize. It must be opposed anew by every generation and every culture. The Kingdom of God is always a leaven, a remnant, a critical mass, a few chosen ones, a Jewish minyan—“ten just men”—who save us from ourselves for the sake of truth.

  God is the ultimate nonviolent one, so we dare not accept any theory of salvation that is based on violence, exclusion, social pressure, or moral coercion. When we do, these are legitimated as a proper way of life. God saves by loving and including, not by excluding or punishing.

  This God is calling every one and every thing, not just a few chosen ones, to God’s self (Genesis 8:16–17, Ephesians 1:9–10, Colossians 1:15–20, Acts 3:21, 1 Timothy 2:4, John 3:17). To get every one and every thing there, God first needs models and images who are willing to be “conformed to the body of his death” and transformed into the body of his resurrection (Philippians 3:10). These are the “new creation” (Galatians 6:15), and their transformed state is still seeping into history and ever so slowly transforming it into “life and life more abundantly” (John 10:10).

  If we do not recognize that we ourselves are the problem, we will continue to make God the scapegoat—which is exactly what we did by the killing of the God-Man on the cross. The crucifixion of Jesus—whom we see as the Son of God—was a devastating prophecy that humans would sooner kill God than change themselves. Yet the God-Man suffers our rejection willingly so something bigger can happen.

  A Dialogue with the Crucified God

  Many years ago, I wrote a meditation that I called “A Dialogue with the Crucified God,” to help people experience what I am so feebly trying to describe here. I suggest you wait until you have an open, quiet, and solitary slot of time, then pray it out loud so your ears can hear your own words from your own mouth. In addition, I suggest that you place yourself before a tender image of the crucified Jesus that will allow you to both give and receive.

  And know two things before you begin:

  We need images to reveal inner states. You are going to look at an image of what humans deny and are most afraid of: exposure, shame, vulnerability, and failure. Like a homeopathic medicine, Jesus became the problem on full display—to free us from that very problem. The cross withdraws the curtain of both denial and fear from our eyes and from our psyches. Jesus became the victim so we could stop victimizing others or playing the victim ourselves.

  Any authentic image of the crucified one is already an image of resurrection. The open arms and the knowing gaze are already the victory over any suffering.

  JESUS SPEAKS TO YOU FROM THE CROSS

  I am what you are most afraid of: your deepest, most wounded, and naked self. I am what you do to what you could love.

  I am your deepest goodness and your deepest beauty, which you deny and disfigure. Your only badness consists in what you do to goodness—your own and anybody else’s.

  You run away from, and you even attack, the only thing that will really transform you. But there is nothing to hate or to attack. If you
try, you will become a mirror image of the same.

  Embrace it all in me. I am yourself. I am all of creation. I am everybody and every thing.

  YOU SPEAK BACK TO THE CRUCIFIED ONE

  Brother Jesus, you are my life, which I deny. You are my death, which I fear. I embrace them both in you. Now I recognize—through you and because of you—that death and life are not opposites. You are my full self—exposed. You are infinite in action, which makes me infinite in becoming. This is my divine possibility. (Stay with this thought until it moves beyond words.)

  You, Brother Jesus, are my outrageously ignored and neglected soul. You are what we do to goodness. You are what we do to God. You are the outrageously ignored and neglected soul of every thing. You are what we do to what we should and could love. You are what we do to one another. You are what we do to the Reality right in front of us. You are what we do to ourselves. (Stay with this until it sinks in.)

  I hate and fear the very things that will save me. May this thought help me to love these things, be patient with them, and even forgive them.