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

by Richard Rohr

There’s a real difference between harmless repetitive ceremonies and life-changing rituals. Scholars say that ceremonies normally confirm and celebrate the status quo and deny the shadow side of things (think of a Fourth of July parade), whereas true ritual offers an alternative universe, where the shadow is named (think of a true Eucharist). In the church, I am afraid we mostly have ceremonies. Most masses I have ever attended are about affirming the status quo, which seldom reveals and often even denies the shadow side of church, state, or culture.

Wherever there was and is suffering, there is the sympathy and the empathy of God.

The Eucharist is an encounter of the heart, knowing Presence through our own offered presence. In the Eucharist, we move beyond mere words or rational thought and go to that place where we don’t talk about the Mystery anymore; we begin to chew on it. Jesus did not say, “Think about this” or “Stare at this” or even “Worship this.” Instead he said, “Eat this!”

At best, the theory of substitutionary atonement has inoculated us against the true effects of the Gospel, causing us to largely “thank” Jesus instead of honestly imitating him. At worst, it led us to see God as a cold, brutal figure, who demands acts of violence before God can love his own creation. Now, there is no doubt that both Testaments are filled with metaphors of atonement, sacrifice, expiation, ransom, paying the price, opening the gates, et cetera. But these are common temple metaphors that would’ve made sense to a Jewish audience. Anthropologically speaking, these words and assumptions reflect a magical or what I call “transactional” way of thinking. By that I mean that if you just believe the right thing, say the right prayer, or practice the right ritual, things will go right for you in the divine courtroom. In my experience, this way of thinking loses its power as people and cultures grow up and seek actual changes in their minds and hearts. Then, transformational thinking tends to supplant transactional thinking.

It’s time for Christianity to rediscover the deeper biblical theme of restorative justice, which focuses on rehabilitation and reconciliation and not punishment.

Restorative justice, of course, comes to its full demonstration in the constant healing ministry of Jesus. Jesus represents the real and deeper level of teaching of the Jewish Prophets. Jesus never punished anybody! Yes, he challenged people, but always for the sake of insight, healing, and restoration of people and situations to their divine origin and source. Once a person recognizes that Jesus’s mission (obvious in all four Gospels) was to heal people, not punish them, the dominant theories of retributive justice begin to lose their appeal and their authority.

The History of a Theory It only makes sense that early Christians would look for a logical and deeply meaningful explanation for the “why” of the tragic death of their religion’s founder. But for centuries, appeasing an angry, fanatical Father was not their answer. The consensus for the first eleven hundred years was that the sacrificial death of Jesus on the cross—the “price” or the ransom—was being paid not to God, but to the devil! Yes, I know this now seems silly, but it’s what many Christians believed for almost a millennium. This made the devil pretty powerful and God pretty weak, but it gave the people someone to blame for Jesus’s death. And at least it was not God at that point. Then, in the eleventh century, Anselm of Canterbury wrote a paper called Cur Deus Homo? or “Why Did God Become a Human?” which, unfortunately, might just be the most successful piece of theology ever written. Thinking he could solve the problem of sin inside of the medieval code of feudal honor and shame, Anselm said, in effect, “Yes, a price did need to be paid to restore God’s honor, and it needed to be paid to God the Father—by one who was equally divine.” Apparently, Anselm never thought out the disastrous implications of his theory, especially for people who were already afraid or resentful of God. In authoritarian and patriarchal cultures, most people were fully programmed to think this way—working to appease an authority figure who was angry, punitive, and even violent in his reactio...

Jurisprudence has its important place in human society, but it cannot be transferred to the divine mind. It cannot guide us inside the realm of infinite love or infinite anything. A worldview of weighing and counting is utterly insufficient once you fall into the ocean of mercy. If I can ever so slightly paraphrase my dear Thérèse of Lisieux, there is a science about which God knows nothing—addition and subtraction.

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.

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.

Hence, the command to, “Take up your cross & follow me.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When we carry our small suffering in solidarity with the one universal longing of all humanity, it helps keep us from self-pity or self-preoccupation. We know that we are all in this together, and it is just as hard for everybody else. Almost all people are carrying a great and secret hurt, even when they don’t know it. When we can make the shift to realize this, it softens the space around our overly defended hearts. It makes it hard to be cruel to anyone. It somehow makes us one—in a way that easy comfort and entertainment never can.

A Crucified God is the dramatic symbol of the one suffering that God fully enters into with us—much more than just for us, as we were mostly trained to think.

The lone individual is far too small and insecure to carry either the “weight of glory” or the “burden of sin” on his or her own. Yet that is the impossible task we gave the individual. It will never work. It creates well-disguised religious egocentricity, because we are forced to take our single and isolated selves far too seriously—both our wonderfulness and our terribleness—which are both their own kinds of ego trips, I am afraid.

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.

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. All these lived arguments depend on some type of weighing, measuring, counting, listing, labeling, and comparing. The Gospel, by contrast, is about learning to live and die in and with God—all our warts included and forgiven by an Infinite Love. The true Gospel democratizes the world.

Our full “Christ Option”—and it is indeed a free choice to jump on board—offers us so much that is both good and new—a 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. It is no longer about being correct. It is about being connected. Being in right relationship is much, much better than just trying to be “right.”

If the universe is “Christened” from the very beginning, then of course it can never die forever. Resurrection is just incarnation taken to its logical conclusion. If God inhabits matter, then we can naturally believe in the “resurrection” of the body. Most simply said, nothing truly good can die!

Nothing is the same forever, says modern science. Ninety-eight percent of our bodies’ atoms are replaced every year. Geologists with good evidence over millennia can prove that no landscape is permanent. Water, fog, steam, and ice are all the same thing, but at different stages and temperatures. “Resurrection” is another word for change, but particularly positive change—which we tend to see only in the long run. In the short run, it often just looks like death. The Preface to the Catholic funeral liturgy says, “Life is not ended, it is merely changed.” Science is now giving us a very helpful language for what religion rightly intuited and imaged, albeit in mythological language. Remember, myth does not mean “not true,” which is the common misunderstanding; it actually refers to things that are always true!

A quote that may prod deep disturbances in our inner thoughts. Just a cautionary before you read further. But as one who wrestles heavily with the question of death throughout my life, I see a promise of hope within the mysteries of this description. When one struggles with heavy strife in this life, resurrection in the form of the here & now is hardly sought after. Change to both the physical being & soul’s well being becomes & purposeful delight in the here & after. As Soren Kierkegaard envisioned, “Now with God’s help, I shall become myself.”

God could not wait for modern science to give history hope. It was enough to believe that Jesus “was raised from the dead,” somehow planting the hope and possibility of resurrection in our deepest unconscious. Jesus’s first incarnate life, his passing over into death, and his resurrection into the ongoing Christ life is the archetypal model for the entire pattern of creation. He is the microcosm for the whole cosmos, or the map of the whole journey, in case you need or want one. Nowadays most folks do not seem to think they need that map, especially when they are young. But the vagaries and disappointments of life’s journey eventually make you long for some overall direction, purpose, or goal beyond getting through another day.

Just as the first creation of something out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo) seems impossible to the human mind, so any notion of life after death seems to demand the same huge leap of faith. Grace’s foundational definition could be “something coming from nothing,” and the human mind just does not know how to process that. Just as it does not like grace, it does not like resurrection. It is the same resistance. Resurrection, like most gifts of goodness, is also a creatio ex nihilo, which is precisely God’s core job description: God is the one “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Romans 4:17b), according to a wonderful line from Paul. Or as Walt Whitman so beautifully put it: All goes onward and outward…and nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and much luckier.*3

The central issue here is not whether Jesus did or did not physically rise from the dead, which supposedly “proves” the truth of the Christian religion if you agree, and disproves it if you disagree. No scientific proof is ever likely to be possible. Besides, our endless attempts to prove a supernatural event are misguided from the start, because neither Christ nor Jesus is outside of our natural reality in the first place. It will really help you, Christian or not, if you can begin to see Jesus—and Christ—as coming out of Reality, naming it, giving it a face, not appearing to Reality from another world. There is no group to join here, no need to sign on the dotted line, only a generous moment of recognition that the Inner and the Outer are one and the same. Our inner meaning and Christ’s outer meaning, if you will. They mirror one another: Human anthropology matches a divine theology. How is that for one Great Ecosystem? If one’s theology (view of God) does not significantly change one’s anthropology (view of humanity), it is largely what we call a “head trip.”

Even when our lives feel meaningless, we can still trust and be confident that Someone is talking, and that Someone is also listening when we talk. To be outside of that constant interface is probably what it means to not believe. Every time you choose love or positively connect with someone or something, you are in touch with the Divine Personality. You do not even need to call it “God”—God does not seem to care at all. It is equally important to say that to negatively connect, to hate, fear, or oppose, is not to meet the Divine Personality. Thus we are strongly warned against such negativity in every way, and such things are called “sin” or even the state of “hell,” which is not really a geographical place but a very real state of consciousness. All rewards and punishments must primarily be seen as first of all now—and inherent in good and bad behavior.

Negative or cynical people, conspiracy theorists, and all predictors of Armageddon are the polar opposites of witnesses to resurrection. And many such people appear to be running the world and even the churches. 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.

People who are properly aligned with Love and Light will always see in good ways that are not obvious to the rest of us, and we still call that “enlightenment.”

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.

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.

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.

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”:

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.

Spiritual knowing is an inner encounter and a calm inner knowing that we usually identify with “soul” knowledge. We need this intimate inner knowing because we can’t be left at the visual level or we will always think we can localize, limit, or capture God as a private possession (see John 20:29), or as something that can or must be “proven” to others.

This is no small point. If God is God, then the Divine Presence must necessarily be everywhere and universally accessible. If you can physically “touch” God, it’s easy to think God is just here and not there, mine but not yours.

For Jesus to become Christ, he must surpass the bounds of space and time, ethnicity, nationality, class, and gender. Frankly, he must rise above any religion formed in his name that remains tribal, clannish, xenophobic, or exclusionary. Otherwise, he is not the “Savior of the World” (John 4:42) at all.

What Paul calls “sin” and personifies as “Adam” or the “old man” (Romans 5:12ff., 1 Corinthians 15:21ff.), many of us today might call the “human tragedy.” Whatever term you use, Paul believed Christ named the normal human situation as an entrapment, even a slavery, and, like Jesus, Paul tried to give us a way out of what he saw as ephemeral, passing, oppressive, and finally illusory. His vision was not cosmetic but revolutionary, and we miss that if we make him into a mere moralizer or “church man.”

I would insist that the foundation of Jesus’s social program is what I will call non-idolatry, or the withdrawing of your enthrallment from all kingdoms except the Kingdom of God. This is a much better agenda than feeling you have to attack things directly, or defeat other nation-states, the banking system, the military-industrial complex, or even the religious system. Nonattachment (freedom from full or final loyalties to man-made domination systems) is the best way I know of protecting people from religious zealotry or any kind of antagonistic thinking or behavior. There is nothing to be against, but just keep concentrating on the Big Thing you are for!

Very important, and an utterly new idea from Paul was that the Gospel was not about following some criteria outside of the human person—which he calls “the law,” but that the locus of authority had changed to inside the human person. This is why he rails against law so strongly and surprisingly in both Romans and Galatians. The real and “new” law is an actual participation with Someone inside of us: the “love of God that has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit” (Romans 5:5 and throughout). This Inner Authority, this personal moral compass, will guide us more than any outer pressure or law, he believes, and it is available to everyone.

Many people, however, are now finding this kind of solidarity in think tanks, support groups, prayer groups, study groups, projects building houses for the poor, healing circles, or mission organizations. So perhaps without fully recognizing it, we are often heading in the right direction these days. We are creating many para-church organizations, and some new studies claim that if we look at the statistics, we will see that Christians are not leaving Christianity as much as they are realigning with groups that live Christian values in the world, instead of just gathering to again hear the readings, recite the creed, and sing songs on Sunday. In that sense, actual Christian behavior might just be growing more than we think. Remember, it is not the brand name that matters. It is that God’s heart be made available and active on this earth.