The Universal Christ

by Richard Rohr

  In the resurrection, Jesus Christ was revealed as the Everyman and Everywoman in their fulfilled state. As the theologian St. Maximus the Confessor (580–662), put it, “God made all beings to this end, to [enjoy the same union] of humanity and divinity that was united in Christ”.*6 Later, St. Gregory Palamas (1296–1359) made it even more specific: “God revealed the Christ [in Jesus] so that humanity could never be separated from the pattern that he portrayed.”*7 These kinds of jewels are found much more in the writings of the Eastern church and its Fathers. The great Athanasius (298–373) put it this way: “God [in Christ] became the bearer of flesh [for a time] so that humanity could become the bearer of Spirit forever.”*8 This was the Great Exchange. Jesus was meant to be the guarantee that divinity can indeed reside within humanity, which is always our great doubt and denial. And once that is possible, then most of our problems are already solved. Resurrection of both persons and planets becomes a foregone conclusion! What that exactly means, of course, I cannot possibly know (1 Corinthians 2:9), but I can say:

  Creation is the first and probably the final Bible,

  Incarnation is already Redemption,

  Christmas is already Easter, and

  Jesus is already Christ.

  Simply put, if death is not possible for the Christ, then it is not possible for anything that “shares in the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). God is by definition eternal, and God is Love (1 John 4:16), which is also eternal (1 Corinthians 13:13), and this same Love has been planted in our hearts (Romans 5:5, 8:9) by the Spirit dwelling within us. Such fully Implanted Love cannot help but evolve and prove victorious, and our word for that final victory is “resurrection.” Peter states this rather directly: “By raising Jesus Christ from the dead, we have a sure hope and the promise of an inheritance that can never be spoiled or soiled or fade away. It is being kept for you in the heavens…and will be fully revealed at the end of time” (1 Peter 1:4–6).

  Then What About Hell?

  One of our biggest roadblocks to this healthier understanding of the cross and resurrection is the prevailing notion of God the Father as Punisher in Chief, an angry deity who consigns sinners to eternal torment and torture instead of as the one who is life itself. This idea originates in some misinterpreted Scriptures, largely in the Gospel by Matthew, who likes to end with threats, and also from a phrase in the Apostles’ Creed that says Jesus “descended into hell”—so surely there must be one. (He went there to liberate it and undo it, like he did the temple, but few people read it that way.) Many of us were taught a vision of God as Tormentor when we were small, impressionable children, and it got deposited in the lowest part of our brain stems, like all traumatic injuries do. So it is hard to talk about hell calmly or intelligently with most people who have been Christians from childhood.

  The language of “descent into hell” emerges from two very obscure passages in the New Testament. In 1 Peter 3, we read that Jesus “went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison,” and Ephesians 4 speaks of him descending “into the lower regions.” In both cases, the descriptions bear less resemblance to Dante’s punitive “Inferno” than they do the broadly used ancient terms for the “place of the dead,” like Hades, Sheol, Gehenna, “prison,” “among the shades,” or even some notion of Limbo.

  But Dante’s version became the dominant one, forming our Western mind more than any other—even those described in the Bible itself.*9 Depictions of hell became staples in church art, embellishing the entrances of most Gothic cathedrals, and even providing the full backdrop of the Sistine Chapel. When the message of a punishing God is so visible, dualistic, and frightening, how do you ever undo it, no matter how consoling your sermons and liturgies might be? Even worse, the many Evangelical songs about the wrath of God, along with “fire and brimstone” sermons, often did nothing but reinforce fear of God over trust in or love of God.

  If you are frightened into God, it is never the true God that you meet. If you are loved into God, you meet a God worthy of both Jesus and Christ. How you get there is where you arrive.

  In the Anglican as well as Eastern Orthodox traditions, the descent narrative takes a slightly different form. It’s often referred to as the “Harrowing of Hell,” an old English term that meant “to despoil” or “to undo” something, as farmers in those days did when they flattened out their land with a tool called a harrow. This vision of Christ’s descent was summed up powerfully in the Vespers antiphon of Holy Saturday in the Orthodox liturgy, where it says, “Hell reigns, but not forever.” Eastern iconography—in contrast with the Western images, which emphasize flames and torture—often pictures Jesus pulling souls out of hell, not thrusting them into it. (Google it if you doubt me.) What a completely different message! No wonder Easter is a so much bigger and more celebrated feast in the Eastern church, where the congregation voluntarily cheers and shouts with delight, “Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed!” (The underlying message is that we are too!)

  In his commentary on the Apostles’ Creed, Pope Benedict admits that the phrase “descended into hell” was problematic, confusing, and based on mythological language.*10 He concludes that if Christ indeed went there, he could have done nothing but undo the place; he would have stopped its functioning, just as he did when he “harrowed” the money changers in the temple.*11 Hell and Christ cannot coexist, he seems to say. We must see Jesus as triumphing over hell and emptying it out. Many of our Easter hymns and sermons actually say as much, but most of us never really accepted the enormity of this message. “He destroyed death,” we sing, often without really seeming to mean it.

  Such bad theology has its roots in organizing a worldview around the retributive notion of justice, as we discussed earlier, distinguishing it from restorative justice (a fancy term for healing). Jesus neither practiced nor taught retribution, but that is what imperial theology prefers—clear winners and clear losers. Top-down worldviews can’t resist the tidy dualisms of an in-and-out, us-and-them worldview. But Jesus roundly rejects such notions in both his parables and his teachings—for example, when he says, “Whoever is not against us is for us” (Mark 9:40), and that “God causes his sun to rise on bad as well as good, and causes it to rain on honest and dishonest men alike” (Matthew 5:45), and when he makes outsiders and outliers the heroes of most of his stories.

  Desert Fathers and Mothers of the first centuries of Christianity offered a common response when confronted with the notion of a God who eternally punishes his enemies, or the possibility that any of us could experience happiness in heaven while others we knew and loved were being tortured nonstop in hell. Some of them said, without indulging in any theological gymnastics, “Love could not bear that.”

  On the whole, we have been slow to notice how God grows more and more nonviolent through the Scriptures—or even how this evolution becomes completely obvious in Jesus. Infinite love, mercy, and forgiveness are hard for the human mind to even imagine, so most people seem to need a notion of hell to maintain their logic of retribution, just punishment, and a just world, as they understand it. God does not need hell, but we sure seem to. As both Jon Sweeney and Julie Ferwerda*12 demonstrate rather convincingly in their respective books, our common image of hell has much more to do with mythological thinking, athletic contests, and punitive practice than with anything representing God’s radicality and infinity.

  Years ago, when I was a young priest speaking at a Catholic men’s prayer breakfast in Cincinnati, I said, “What if the Gospel is actually offering us a win-win scenario?” A well-dressed businessman came up to me at the break, and said in a very patronizing tone while drumming his fingers on the podium, “Father, Father! Win-win? That would not even be interesting!” Perhaps he was just being consistent, as one whose entire worldview had been formed by sports, business deals, and American politics, instead of the Gospel. But over the years, I have come to see that he is the norm. The systems of this world
are inherently argumentative, competitive, dualistic, based on a scarcity model of God, mercy, and grace. They confuse retribution—what is often little more than crass vengeance—with the biblically evolved notions of healing, forgiveness, and divine mercy.

  The church was meant to be an alternative society in the grip of an altogether different story line. Restorative justice is used in New Zealand as the primary juvenile justice model, and the Catholic bishops of New Zealand have put out very good statements on it. We see this alternative model of justice acted out in scripture—famously in Jesus’s story of the Return of the Prodigal (Luke 15:11ff.), but almost always in the prophets (if we can first endure their tirades). God’s justice makes things right at their very core, and divine love does not achieve its ends by mere punishment or retribution.

  Consider Habbakuk, whose short book develops with vivid messages of judgment only to pivot at the very end to his “Great Nevertheless!” For three chapters, Habbakuk reams out the Jewish people, then at the close has God say in effect, “But I will love you even more until you come back to me!” We see the same in Ezekiel’s story of the dry bones (Chapter 16) and in Jeremiah’s key notion of the “new covenant” (Chapter 31:31ff.). God always outdoes the Israelites’ sin by loving them even more! This is God’s restorative justice.

  Yet we remember collectively the admittedly harsh judgments that usually come earlier in all these texts, which I have to believe was the prophets’ own way of teaching the principle of karma. (Goodness is its own reward, and evil will always be its own punishment.) This was their way of communicating divine fairness built into our good and bad actions. But the nature of our neurons seems to be that we remember the negative and forget the positive. Threats of hell are unfortunately more memorable to people than promises of heaven.*13

  As long as you operate inside any scarcity model, there will never be enough God or grace to go around. Jesus came to undo our notions of scarcity and tip us over into a worldview of absolute abundance—or what he would call the “Kingdom of God.” The Gospel reveals a divine world of infinity, a worldview of enough and more than enough. Our word for this undeserved abundance is “grace”: “Give and there will be gifts for you: full measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over, and poured into your lap” (Luke 6:38). It is a major mental and heart conversion to move from a scarcity model to an abundance model.

  No Gospel will ever be worthy of being called “Good News” unless it is indeed a win-win worldview, and “good news for all the people” (Luke 2:10)—without exception. The right to decide who is in, and who is out, is not one that our little minds and hearts can even imagine. Jesus’s major theme of the Reign of God is saying, “Only God can do such infinite imagining, so trust the Divine Mind.”

  We Shall All Be Changed

  When you study or pray before the Eastern Orthodox icons of the resurrection, you see something quite different from Western depictions. Eastern icons picture the Risen Christ standing astride the darkness and the tombs, pulling souls out of hell. Chains and locks fly in all directions across the frame. This is good news worthy of the name. I first felt this leap in my heart when a young Austrian priest came up to me after I had led a male initiation rite near Salzburg. He handed me such an icon as a gift, and said with great enthusiasm, “This is what you are teaching, whether you fully realize it or not.” The joy and peace I saw on both the priest’s face and the images on the icon showed me what is surely the true message of the Resurrection. As I have said before, but it bears repeating, John Dominic Crossan demonstrates convincingly through art that “the West lost and the East kept the original Easter vision.”*14 If that is true, it is a real game changer. In my opinion, we tried to breathe the full air of the Gospel with only the Western church lung, and it left us with a very incomplete and not really victorious message.

  “I am telling you something that has been a secret,” Paul writes in 1 Corinthians (15:51). “We are not all going to die, but we shall all be changed.” And he even says “all” twice, but our perversity just does not allow us to see that. Most Western Christian paintings of the resurrection show a man stepping out of a tomb with a white banner in his hand, but in my many trips to churches and art museums around the world, I have yet to see any written words on that banner. I always wonder, Why the empty space? Perhaps it is because we ourselves were still unsure about the message of resurrection. We had imagined that resurrection was just about Jesus, and then found ourselves unable to prove it, nor could we always find this abundant life within ourselves.

  But now you have been told about the Eternal Christ, who never dies—and who never dies in you! Resurrection is about the whole of creation, it is about history, it is about every human who has ever been conceived, sinned, suffered, and died, every animal that has lived and died a tortured death, every element that has changed from solid, to liquid, to ether, over great expanses of time. It is about you and it is about me. It is about everything. The “Christ journey” is indeed another name for every thing.

  As if to confirm this message for me, while writing this chapter on a lovely fall day in New Mexico, I heard the trumpeting and “shouting” of sandhill cranes immediately above my little house. I went outside to witness a gyre of maybe fifty elegant birds circling in the thermals of the clear blue sky above me. It was almost like they had stopped on their journey south along the Rio Grande just to rejoice for a while—circling again and again, shouting encouragement to one another and to me. What jubilant noise! After a full twenty minutes of pure celebration, they reassembled into the V formations of their journey, determined to move on and yet clearly in no rush at all, each “announcing your place in the family of things,” as Mary Oliver so beautifully puts it in her poem, “Wild Geese.”*15

  I hope many others saw what I saw, enjoyed what I have enjoyed so often, and received what I received. Resurrection is contagious, and free for the taking. It is everywhere visible and available for those who have learned how to see, how to rejoice, and how to neither hoard nor limit God’s ubiquitous gift.

  *1 See Matthew 8:11, 22:2ff.; Luke 13:29, 14:15ff.; and Revelation 19:9. All those passages draw on the source texts of Isaiah 25:6–12 and 55:1–5.

  *2 John Dominic Crossan, How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (New York: HarperCollins, 2018). Here this same point is made in a much more detailed and scholarly fashion than I can.

  *3 Walt Whitman, “A child said, What is the grass,” in Song of Myself, 6.

  *4 Michael Dowd, Thank God for Evolution (New York: Viking, 2007), 118ff. A really brilliant, life-changing book.

  *5 John Dominic Crossan and Sara Sexton Crossan, Resurrecting Easter: How the West Lost and the East Kept the Original Easter Vision (New York: Harper One) 45–59.

  *6 Maximus the Confessor, Greek Fathers 90.621.A.

  *7 Gregory Palamas, The Triads. Translation by Nicholas Gendle. Edited and with an introduction by John Meyendorff (New York: Paulist Press, 1983).

  *8 Athanasius, On the Incarnation 8, trans. Oliver Clement, The Roots of Christian Mysticism (New York: New City Press, 1995), 263.

  *9 Jon Sweeney, Inventing Hell (New York: Jericho Books, 2014).

  *10 Benedict XVI, The Faith (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor, 2013), chapter 10.

  *11 Hilarion Alfeyev, Christ the Conqueror of Hell (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2009).

  *12 Sweeney, Inventing Hell, and Julie Ferwerda, Raising Hell: Christianity’s Most Controversial Doctrine Put Under Fire (Lander, WY: Vagabond Group, 2011).

  *13 New Zealand Bishops Conference, “Creating New Hearts” (August 30, 1995).

  *14 John Dominic Crossan and Sara Sexton Crossan, Resurrecting Easter: How the West Lost and the East Kept the Original Easter Vision (New York: Harper One) 45–59.

  *15 Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese,” in Owls and Other Fantasies (Boston, Massachussetts: Beacon Press, 20
03), 1.

  15

  Two Witnesses to Jesus and Christ

  Among the examples we find in the Bible of who can take us into deeper knowing of both Jesus and Christ, two witnesses stand out: Mary Magdalene, who fully knew Jesus in his humanity and was also the first to see him as the Risen Christ; and Paul, who never knew Jesus in his humanity and almost entirely speaks of Christ. He then becomes the most eloquent witness of this version of Jesus through his many letters. This is the same experience available to all of us, the always-present Christ more than the time-bound Jesus, so Paul is a perfect writer for the New Testament and for all later history.

  Magdalene loved a very concrete Jesus who led her to a ubiquitous and Risen Christ. Paul started with a Universal Christ and grounded it all in a quite homely and lovable Jesus, who was rejected, crucified, and resurrected. Working together, Magdalene and Paul guide and direct the Christian experience in truly helpful ways toward both Jesus and Christ, but from opposite sides.

  Mary Magdalene

  In the Gospel of Luke (8:2), Mary Magdalene is described as a woman who became a follower and friend of Jesus after he had cast seven demons out of her. Not a terribly auspicious start for a person who’s then mentioned as many as twelve times throughout the Gospels (more than most apostles). By the way, prostitution is never mentioned as one of her demons in any account. I suspect sex is our demon and we projected it onto her.

  In all four of the Gospel accounts, Mary Magdalene is said to have been present with Jesus’s mother and various other women at the crucifixion (Matthew 27:56, Mark 15:40, Luke 24:10, John 19:25ff.). After Jesus was taken down from the cross, his mother, Mary, and other women accompanied the body to the tomb. (The accounts of which exact women were there are not consistent, but the interesting thing is that it was always women who accompanied the body, with the exception of John’s Gospel.) When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene went back to the tomb at dawn and found it open and empty. She hastened to tell two of the apostles this startling news, and they ran to the tomb to confirm it. Suspecting that a thief had stolen the body, the apostles returned to their homes. But Mary Magdalene stayed, weeping and grieving the loss of her beloved friend and teacher (Matthew 27:61). She is the consistent and faithful witness.