The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For and Believe

by Richard Rohr

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 we could almost name it “the sin of the world” (note that “sin” is singular in John 1:29).

It is the egoic illusion of our own perfect rightness that often allows us to crucify others.

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.

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.

God saves by loving and including, not by excluding or punishing.

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.

This view echoes the biblical concept of a covenant love that was granted to Israel as a whole, and never just to one individual like Abraham, Noah, or David. This is absolutely clear in the text, and to ignore it is to miss a major and crucial message. Christians as late as the 1500s still saw it that way, but I cannot imagine us adding such a statement to the creed in today’s religious landscape. We are now too preoccupied with the “salvation of individuals” to read history in a corporate way, and the results have been disastrous.

I suspect that Western individualism has done more than any other single factor to anesthetize and even euthanize the power of the Gospel. Salvation, heaven, hell, worthiness, grace, and eternal life all came to be read through the lens of the separate ego, crowding God’s transformative power out of history and society.

One side effect of our individualized reading of the Gospel is that it allows the clergy great control over individual behavior, via threats and rewards. Obedience to authorities became the highest virtue in this framework, instead of love, communion, or solidarity with God or others, including the marginalized.

Unless we find the communal meaning and significance of the suffering of all life and ecosystems on our planet, we will continue to retreat into our individual, small worlds in our quest for personal safety and sanity. Privatized salvation never accumulates into corporate change because it attracts and legitimates individualists to begin with. Think about that.

We have always made it hard for God to give away God—for free! The fragile ego always wants to set a boundary, a price, an entrance requirement of some sort.

The Christ of John’s Gospel says, “Be brave. I have overcome the world” (16:33) and its hopelessness. Courage and confidence is our message! Not threat and fear.

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.

God always outdoes the Israelites’ sin by loving them even more! This is God’s restorative justice.

In recent centuries, Christians have largely read him as if he was focused on what it takes for individuals to “go to heaven” and avoid hell. But Paul never once talks about our notion of hell! Most people fail to notice that. He would have agreed with Jesus, I think, that humans are punished by their sins more than for their sins. Goodness is its own reward, and evil is its own punishment—although the thought and language of that period led most people to ascribe final causality to God.

There is nothing to be against, but just keep concentrating on the Big Thing you are for! (Think Francis of Assisi and Mother Teresa.)

Did you ever notice that Jesus himself was not really that upset at the bad behavior that most of us call sin? Instead, he directed his critical attention toward people who did not think they were sinners, who could not see their own shadows or dark sides, or acknowledge their complicity in the world’s domination systems. Most of us would rather attack an easy, visible target—preferably sex and body-based issues—and thus feel “pure” or “moral.” Like any true spiritual master, Jesus exposed the root causes of evil (almost always some form of idolatry), and did not waste time punishing the mere symptoms, as moralistic people usually do.

Sin, salvation, and forgiveness are always corporate, social, and historical concepts for the Jewish prophets and for Paul. When you recognize this, it changes your entire reading of the Gospels.

This is the gradual “Second Coming of Christ.” Our present highly partisan politics, angry culture wars, and circling of the wagons around white privilege are just the final gasps of the old, dying paradigm.

Remember, it is not the brand name that matters. It is that God’s heart be made available and active on this earth.

And surely there was no room for “sinners” or outsiders of almost any sort—which was of course the exact opposite of Jesus’s message and mission. Our small empires and our small minds needed a self-serving God and a domesticated Jesus who could be used for ethnic purposes.

The contemplative mind can see things in their depth and in their wholeness instead of just in parts.

The binary mind, so good for rational thinking, finds itself totally out of its league in dealing with things like love, death, suffering, infinity, God, sexuality, or mystery in general. It just keeps limiting reality to two alternatives and thinks it is smart because it chooses one! This is no exaggeration.*1 The two alternatives are always exclusionary, usually in an angry way: things are either totally right or totally wrong, with me or against me, male or female, Democrat or Republican, Christian or pagan, on and on and on. The binary mind provides quick security and false comfort, but never wisdom.