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

by Richard Rohr

churches. Remember, contact with blood was usually ritual impurity for a Jew at that time. Is it just me, or is this beginning to have a Count Dracula feeling? Or is it supposed to? Is it supposed to be scandalous and shocking?

Jesus did not say, “Think about this” or “Stare at this” or even “Worship this.” Instead he said, “Eat this!”

We are not just humans having a God experience. The Eucharist tells us that, in some mysterious way, we are God having a human experience!

Who we are in God is who we all are. Everything else is changing and passing away.

the questions of why Jesus died and what is the meaning and message of his death have dominated the recent Christian narrative, often much more than his life and teaching.

We stay inside of what some call the “myth of redemptive violence,” which might just be the dominant story line of history.

The cross, instead of being a transaction, was seen as a dramatic demonstration of God’s outpouring love, meant to utterly shock the heart and turn it back toward trust and love of the Creator.

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.

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.

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

I thank you for not being loved or liked by so many, so I do not have to try so hard to be loved and liked by anybody. I thank you for being considered a failure, so I do not have to pretend or even try to be a “success.”

that moment, I was not sad about any one thing, but about everything.

the dead are at one with the living,

We are now too preoccupied with the “salvation of individuals” to read history in a corporate way,

Obedience to authorities became the highest virtue in this framework, instead of love, communion, or solidarity with God or others, including the marginalized.

Conformity is not the same as love; joining does not imply an actual change of heart and mind. Few taught us how to be the Sympathy of God or Compassion for the World, and this experience has seemed true in varying degrees in every denomination I have worked with.

Our arguments about private worthiness; reward and punishment; gender, race, and class distinctions; private possessions, all the things that make us argue and compete, largely become a waste of time and an illusion.

God who is in total solidarity with all of us at every stage of the journey, and who will get us all to our destination together in love.

Scared people remember threats and do not hear invitations!