The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out

by Brennan Manning

For the disciple of Jesus, “becoming like a little child” means the willingness to accept oneself as being of little account and to be regarded as unimportant.

God’s grace falls on them because they are negligible creatures, not because of their good qualities. They may be aware of their worthlessness, but this is not the reason revelations are given to them. Jesus expressly attributes their good fortune to the Father’s good pleasure,

In every denomination and nondenominational persuasion Christians are seeking to win God’s favor by plunging into more spiritual activities, multiplying altars and sacrifices, making charitable contributions, lengthening the time of formal prayer, and getting involved in more church-related organizations.

need for careful discernment

What’s missing? He or she has not surrendered to the Christ of grace.

It did not escape the Pharisees’ attention that Jesus meant to befriend the rabble. He was not only breaking the law, He was destroying the very structure of Jewish society.

Jesus had taken away their shame, humiliation, and guilt.

he gave them a sense of dignity and released them from their old captivity.

“It is difficult to understand how Jesus could have been accused of entertaining sinners (see Luke 15:2) if he did not have some kind of home in which to do so.”7

even

the call of Jesus is fundamentally connected to being a table companion, eating and drinking with Jesus in whom God’s merciful manner with sinners is manifested.

If Jesus appeared at your dining room table tonight with knowledge of everything you are and are not, total comprehension of your life story and every skeleton hidden in your closet; if He laid out the real state of your present discipleship with the hidden agenda, the mixed motives, and the dark desires buried in your psyche, you would feel His acceptance and forgiveness.

a wondrous open-mindedness about children and an insatiable desire to learn from life.

A closed mind kills marriages and human relations; it deadens feelings and sensitivities; it makes for a church that lives in a thousand and one tunnels, with no communication and no exit.”

If we maintain the open-mindedness of children, we challenge fixed ideas and established structures, including our own. We listen to people in other denominations and religions. We don’t find demons in those with whom we disagree. We don’t cozy up to people who mouth our jargon. If we are open, we rarely resort to either/or—either creation or evolution, liberty or law, sacred or secular, Beethoven or Madonna. We focus on both/and, fully aware that God’s truth cannot be imprisoned in a small definition. Of course, the open mind does not accept everything indiscriminately—Marxism and capitalism, Christianity and atheism, love and lust, Moët Chandon and vinegar. It does not absorb all propositions equally like a sponge, nor is it as soft. But the open mind realizes that reality, truth, and Jesus Christ are incredibly open-ended.

“Relapse spells relief,

We miss Jesus’ point entirely when we use His words as weapons against others. They are to be taken personally by each of us.

Perhaps the real dichotomy in the Christian community today is not between conservatives and liberals or creationists and evolutionists but between the awake and the asleep.

Just as a smart man knows he is stupid, so the awake Christian knows that he/she is a ragamuffin.

Although truth is not always humility, humility is always truth—the blunt acknowledgment that I owe my life, being, and salvation to Another. This fundamental act lies at the core of our response to grace.

The trouble with our ideals is that if we live up to all of them, we become impossible to live with.

But when it comes to God’s love in the broken, blood-drenched body of Jesus Christ, we get antsy and start to talk about theology, divine justice, God’s wrath, and the heresy of universalism.

The saved sinner is prostrate in adoration, lost in wonder and praise. He knows repentance is not what we do in order to earn forgiveness; it is what we do because we have been forgiven. It serves as an expression of gratitude rather than an effort to earn forgiveness. Thus the sequence of forgiveness and then repentance, rather than repentance and then forgiveness, is crucial for understanding the gospel of grace.

We do not know our God. We have not grasped the truth in the First Letter of John: “In this is love, not that we loved God but that He loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”

a profound difference

an enormous difference

There is no fear in love.

The Father is not justice and the Son love. The Father is justice and love; the Son is love and justice.

not our enemy.

not intent on trying and tempting and testing us.

does not prefer and promote suffering and pain.

and of such homely mysteries is genuine religion made.

Grace means that God is on our side and thus we are victors regardless of how well we have played the game. We might as well head for the showers and the champagne celebration.

The roller coaster ride of elation and depression continues. Why? Because we never lay hold of our nothingness before God, and consequently, we never enter into the deepest reality of our relationship with Him.

But when we accept ownership of our powerlessness and helplessness, when we acknowledge that we are paupers at the door of God’s mercy, then God can make something beautiful out of us.

Yet the experience of absence does not mean the absence of experience.

Once we accept the gospel of grace and seek to shed defense mechanisms and subterfuges, honesty becomes both more difficult and more important.

Honesty involves the willingness to face the truth of who we are, regardless of how threatening or unpleasant our perceptions may be. It means hanging in there with ourselves and with God, learning our mind tricks by experiencing how they defeat us, recognizing our avoidances, acknowledging our lapses, learning completely that we cannot handle it ourselves. This steady self-confrontation requires strength and courage. We cannot use failure as an excuse to quit trying.

Honesty keeps us in touch with our neediness and the truth that we are saved sinners.

never

When a man or woman is truly honest (not just working at it) it is virtually impossible to insult them personally. There is nothing there to insult.

Getting honest with ourselves does not make us unacceptable to God. It does not distance us from God, but draws us to Him—as nothing else can—and opens us anew to the flow of grace.

The gospel of grace calls out, Nothing can ever separate you from the love of God made visible in Christ Jesus our Lord.

but the love of Jesus Christ that is stronger than death endures forever.

But the monks lived in a world in which everything was a word of God to them, in which the love of God was manifest to anyone with the least creative imagination.

They cherished the Scriptures, but they also cherished God’s ongoing revelation in His world of grace.

We must rediscover the gospel of grace and the world of grace.

The grace of God operates at a profound level in the life of a loving person. Oh, that we would recognize God’s grace when it comes to us!

For what we need to know, of course, is not just that God exists, not just that beyond the steely brightness of the stars there is a cosmic intelligence of some kind that keeps the whole show going, but that there is a God right here in the thick of our day-by-day lives who may not be writing messages about himself in the stars but in one way or another is trying to get messages through our blindness as we move around down here knee-deep in the fragrant muck and misery and marvel of the world. It is not objective proof of God’s existence that we want but the experience of God’s presence. That is the miracle we are really after, and that is also, I think, the miracle that we really get.

Bill Cosby