New Year’s Day
Richard Rohr expresses the liberation the gospel offers when freed from our cultural and religious expectations:
Without God’s definition of freedom, we will continue to use the gospel as if it were a product that can be bought, sold, imposed, or attained. The gospel is not a competing ideology that’s threatened by anything outside itself. It is the light of the world that illuminates the whole household; it is the yeast and not the whole loaf; it is the salt that gives flavor and nutrition to the much larger meal (see Matthew 5:13–15, 13:33).
Once we can accept that Jesus has given us an illuminating lens by which to see and measure all things, we can no longer treat Christianity as a threat—or allow it to be a threat—to human or cultural freedom. In fact, it is true freedom’s greatest ally. The gospel is a process much more than a product, a style more than a structure, a person more than a production. It is a way of being in the world that will always feel like compassion, mercy, and spaciousness—at least to honest and healthy people.
The gospel stands against death; it equally critiques every culture, and is identical with no culture or institution, even the church. As John’s Gospel states so poetically, the Spirit blows where it will (see John 3:8). How different and healing Western history could have been if we had received such gospel freedom and modeled it for others!
Jesus has not come to impose Christendom like an imperial system. The gospel flourishes in the realm of true freedom. I don’t think Jesus ever expected the whole world would become formally Christian, but I do believe that his truth about right relationship, his proclamation of the power of powerlessness, is the message that will save the world from self-destruction and for an eternal truth. This is how Jesus is the “Savior of the World.” He does it by choosing a minority position, entering Jerusalem on a donkey.
Jesus has a different understanding of personal freedom. Freedom is not the capacity to be what we are not, but the capacity to be fully who we already are, to develop our inherent selves as much as divine time and circumstances allow. The perfect and full freedom of a fig tree is to become a perfect and full fig tree. Thus, Jesus curses one that does not (see Matthew 21:19). Many of us are like sick or dead fig trees, but with happy faces painted on our anemic fruit shouting, “But I’m free!” Our addictive society will do what it wants to do, but the freedom offered by all great spiritual traditions is quite different: spiritual and true freedom is wanting to do what we have to do to become who we are.
References:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Jesus’ Alternative Plan: The Sermon on the Mount, 2nd ed. (Cincinnati, OH: Franciscan Media, 1996, 2022), 14–16.
Image credit and inspiration: Austin Ban, Untitled (detail), 2015, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Just like these hands move the dust of the world around them, we too, can influence the world—hopefully for good by being salt and light.
Story from Our Community:
My perception of God has changed over time. Growing up, God was cool, distant and kept a tally of my actions. Then, my view started to shift to a more compassionate figure, based on my experiences with Higher Power in Al-Anon. Most recently, the CAC and Centering Prayer have helped me expand even more. Now, I feel more called to embrace the deep mystery of God.
—Kara K.
