Job and the Mystery of Suffering: Spiritual Reflections

by Richard Rohr

The church in the West has looked at the Gospel and history from that superior position for more than sixteen hundred years. We became, not the church of the poor; at our best we were for the poor from our privileged position of the rich. We became a middle-class and even upper middle-class church that largely avoids much that Jesus preached about riches and wealth. The church saw no problem, as most Christians see no problem today, with being fabulously wealthy, amassing huge securities and insurance and properties, and still believing that we trust in God. That would have been inconceivable to early believers. But the early Christian spirit is equally inconceivable to most Catholics in the West today. We have adhered to our present view from above for so long, we don’t even read the Gospels correctly any more. If some passages don’t fit our culture and lifestyle, we dismiss them. Hard sayings of Jesus — for example, the reference to a camel going through the eye of a needle to indicate how hard it is for the rich to enter heaven — are written off as metaphors and literary exaggeration, and ignored.