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

by Brennan Manning

This remarkable passage illuminates the extraordinary enchantment cast by the Carpenter-Messiah. The ragamuffins discovered that sharing a meal with Him was a liberating experience of sheer joy. He freed them from self-hatred, exhorted them not to confuse their perception of themselves with the mystery they really were, gave them what they needed more than anything else—encouragement for their lives—and delivered reassuring words such as “Do not live in fear, little flock; don’t be afraid; fear is useless, what is needed is trust; stop worrying; cheer up—your sins are all forgiven.” Small wonder that the evangelist Mark preserved this memory of Jesus with the utmost care.

The contagious joy of Jesus (only carriers can pass it on) infected and freed His followers. The author of Hebrews says, “Jesus Christ is the same today as he was yesterday and as he will be for ever” (13:8). 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. For “experiencing God’s love in Jesus Christ means experiencing that one has been unreservedly accepted, approved and infinitely loved, that one can and should accept oneself and one’s neighbor. Salvation is joy in God which expresses itself in joy in and with one’s neighbor.”

“Yesterday I learned something about myself,” said the woman who had made the harshest and most judgmental comments during the exercise. “I need a lot more compassion for people who are different from myself.”

The ragamuffin gospel reveals that Jesus forgives sins, including sins of the flesh; that He is comfortable with sinners who remember how to show compassion; but that He cannot and will not have a relationship with pretenders in the Spirit.

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. The Christian ragamuffin acknowledges with Macbeth, “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.”13 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 beauty of the ragamuffin gospel lies in the insight it offers into Jesus: the essential tenderness of His heart, His way of looking at the world, His mode of relating to you and me...

“Simple, my dear fellow! Your trouble is you have your halo on too tight. All we need to do is loosen it a bit.”

The sinner saved by grace is haunted by Calvary, by the cross, and especially by the question, Why did He die? A clue comes from the Gospel of John: “For this is how God loved the world: he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” Another clue from Paul’s cry in Galatians: “He loved me and delivered himself up for me.” The answer lies in love. But the answer seems too easy, too glib. Yes, God saved us because He loved us. But He is God. He has infinite imagination. Couldn’t He have dreamed up a different redemption? Couldn’t He have saved us with a smile, a pang of hunger, a word of forgiveness, a single drop of blood? And if He had to die, then for God’s sake—for Christ’s sake—couldn’t He have died in bed, died with dignity? Why was He condemned like a criminal? Why was His back flayed with whips? Why was His head crowned with thorns? Why was He nailed to wood and allowed to die in frightful, lonely agony? Why was the last breath drawn in bloody disgrace, while the world for which He lay dying egged on His executioners with savage fury like some kind of gang rape by uncivilized brutes in Central Park? Why did they have to take the very best? One thing we do know: We don’t comprehend the love of Jesus Christ. Oh, we see a movie and resonate to what a young man and woman will endure for romantic love. We know that when the chips are down, if we love wildly enough we’ll fling life and caution to the winds for the one ...

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.

But many of us don’t know our God and don’t understand His gospel of grace. For many, God sits up there like a Buddha, impassive, unmoving, hard as flint. Calvary cries out more clearly than any theology textbook: 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.” The cross reveals the depth of the Father’s love for us: “For greater love than this no one has than that he lay down his life for his friends.” The disciple living by grace rather than law has undergone a decisive conversion—a turning from mistrust to trust. The foremost characteristic of living by grace is trust in the redeeming work of Jesus Christ.

To believe deeply, as Jesus did, that God is present and at work in human life is to understand that I am a beloved child of this Father and, hence, free to trust. That makes a profound difference in the way I relate to myself and others; it makes an enormous difference in the way I live. To trust Abba, both in prayer and lif...

Or have you learned to fear this loving and gracious Father? “In love,” John says, “there is no room for fear, but perfect love drives out fear, because fear implies punishment and no one who is afraid has come to perfection in love” (1 John 4:18). Have you learned to think of the Father as the judge, the spy, the disciplinarian, the punisher? If you think that way, you are wrong. The Father’s love is revealed in the Son’s. The Son has been given to us that we might give up fear. There is no fear in love. The Father sent the Son “that they may have life and have it to the full” (John 10:10). Is not the Son the Father’s unsurpassable sign of love and graciousness? Did He not come to show us the Father’s compassionate care for us? “Whoever sees me, sees the one who sent me” (John 12:45). The Father is not justice and the Son love. The Father is justice and love; the Son is love and justice.

We need a new kind of relationship with the Father that drives out fear and mistrust and anxiety and guilt, that permits us to be hopeful and joyous, trusting and compassionate. We have to be converted from the bad news to the good news, from expecting nothing to expecting something.3 “The time is fulfilled,” Jesus said, “and the kingdom of God is close at hand. Repent, and believe the gospel” (Mark 1:15). Turn away from the sins of skepticism and despair, mistrust and cynicism, complaining and worry.

Trust defines the meaning of living by grace rather than works. Trust is like climbing a fifty-foot ladder, reaching the top, and hearing someone down below yell, “Jump!” The trusting disciple has this childlike confidence in a loving Father. Trust says, in effect, “Abba, just on the basis of what You have shown me in Your Son, Jesus, I believe You love me. You have forgiven me. You will hold me and never let me go. Therefore, I trust You with my life.”

The gospel declares that no matter how dutiful or prayerful we are, we can’t save ourselves. What Jesus did was sufficient. To the extent that we are self-made saints like the Pharisees or neutral like Pilate (never making the leap in trust), we let the prostitutes and publicans go first into the kingdom while we, in Flannery O’Connor’s unforgettable image, are in the background having our alleged virtue burnt out of us. The hookers and swindlers enter before us because they know they cannot save themselves, that they cannot make themselves presentable or lovable. They risked everything on Jesus and, knowing they didn’t have it all together, were not too proud to accept the handout of amazing grace.

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. This poverty of spirit is the second major characteristic of saved sinners with tilted halos living by grace. What is the person canonized by Jesus in the first beatitude (“Blessed are those who know that they are poor”) really like?

When he receives a gift he first experiences, then expresses, genuine gratitude. Having nothing, he appreciates the slightest gift. I have been given the utterly undeserved gift of salvation in Jesus Christ. Through no merit of mine, I have been given a bona fide invitation to drink new wine forever at the wedding feast in the kingdom of God. (Incidentally, for a recovering alcoholic, that’s heaven!)

The person who is poor in spirit realizes that he or she does not love others as much as his or her heart would wish. I once preached six weeklong Lenten renewals in succession. The last was in Downers Grove, Illinois, and on the closing night I was wiped out. Over one thousand people had attended. As the recessional song signaling my exit from the church began, I debated internally whether my body could handle another half-hour of farewells and blessings in the vestibule.

The prayer of the poor in spirit can simply be a single word: Abba.

The question the gospel of grace puts to us is simply this: Who shall separate you from the love of Christ? What are you afraid of? Are you afraid that your weakness could separate you from the love of Christ? It can’t. Are you afraid that your inadequacies could separate you from the love of Christ? They can’t. Are you afraid that your inner poverty could separate you from the love of Christ? It can’t. Difficult marriage, loneliness, anxiety over the children’s future? They can’t. Negative self-image? It can’t. Economic hardship, racial hatred, street crime? They can’t. Rejection by loved ones or the suffering of loved ones? They can’t. Persecution by authorities, going to jail? They can’t. Nuclear war? It can’t. Mistakes, fears, uncertainties? They can’t. The gospel of grace calls out, Nothing can ever separate you from the love of God made visible in Christ Jesus our Lord.

I asked for wonder, and He gave it to me. A Philistine will stand before a Claude Monet painting and pick his nose; a person filled with wonder will stand there fighting back the tears.

By and large, our world has lost its sense of wonder. We have grown up. We no longer catch our breath at the sight of a rainbow or the scent of a rose, as we once did. We have grown bigger and everything else smaller, less impressive. We get blasé and worldly-wise and sophisticated. We no longer run our fingers through water, no longer shout at the stars or make faces at the moon. Water is H20, the stars have been classified, and the moon is not made of green cheese. Thanks to satellite TV and jet planes, we can visit places once accessible only to a Columbus, a Balboa, and other daring explorers. There was a time in the not too distant past when a thunderstorm caused grown men to shudder and feel small. But God is being edged out of His world by science. The more we know about meteorology, the less inclined we are to pray during a thunderstorm. Airplanes now fly above, below, and around them. Satellites reduce them to photographs. What ignominy—if a thunderstorm could experience ignominy! Reduced from theophany to nuisance!

So often we religious people walk amid the beauty and bounty of nature and we talk nonstop. We miss the panorama of color and sound and smell. We might as well have remained indoors in our closed, artificially lit living rooms. Nature’s lessons are lost and the opportunity to be wrapped in silent wonder before the God of creation passes. We fail to be stretched by the magnificence of the world saturated with grace. Creation doesn’t calm our troubled spirits, restore our perspective, or delight us in every part of our being.3 It reminds us instead of mundane chores: changing the page on the calendar or ordering our snow tires. We must rediscover the gospel of grace and the world of grace. For “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit” opens us to the divine spread everywhere about us, especially in the life of a loving person.

A story is told about Fiorello LaGuardia, who, when he was mayor of New York City during the worst days of the Great Depression and all of World War II, was called “the Little Flower” by adoring New Yorkers because he was only five foot four and always wore a carnation in his lapel. He was a colorful character who used to ride the New York City fire trucks, raid speakeasies with the police department, take entire orphanages to baseball games, and whenever the New York newspapers were on strike, he would go on the radio and read the Sunday funnies to the kids.

For a moment allow me to sketch with broad strokes a biblical theology of divine agape. Israel’s earliest concept of God was based on the covenant, the contract made on Mount Sinai. Through their spokesman, Moses, God said to the Israelites, “You will be my people, and I shall be your God.” Yahweh is first perceived by the Jewish community as a personal, relating Being. Their concept of God was vastly superior to that of the pagans whose gods were quite human, fickle, capricious, erotic, as unpredictable as the forces with which they were identified—wind, storm, fertility, the nation, and so forth. But Israel knew a holy God, transcending everything visible and tangible, yet personal. He was somehow reflected in things but was not to be identified with things. Exodus depicts God as stable, interested,

Human love will always be a faint shadow of God’s love. Not because it is too sugary or sentimental, but simply because it can never compare from whence it comes. Human love, with all its passion and emotion, is a thin echo of the passion/emotion love of Yahweh.

But we cannot apply human logic and justice to the living God. Human logic is based on human experience and human nature. Yahweh does not conform to this model. If Israel is unfaithful, God remains faithful against all logic and all limits of justice because He is. Love clarifies the happy irrationality of God’s conduct. Love tends to be irrational at times. It pursues despite infidelity. It blossoms into jealousy and anger—which betrays keen interest. The more complex and emotional the image of God becomes in the Bible, the bigger He grows, and the more we approach the mystery of His indefinability.

But in the man, Jesus, we see the human face of God, one in keeping with Old Testament revelation. He is interested in the woman. His love moves beyond justice and proves more salvific than spelling out the ground rules all over again.10 Unjust? To our way of thinking, yes. Thank God! I am wonderfully content with a God who doesn’t deal with me as my sins deserve. On the last day when Jesus calls me by name, “Come, Brennan, blessed of my Father,” it will not be because Abba is just, but because His name is mercy.

Will we ever understand the gospel of grace, the furious love of God, the world of grace in which we live? Jesus Christ is the scandal of God. When the Baptizer is imprisoned by Herod, he sends a couple of his followers to ask Jesus, “Are you the One who is to come into the world or should we wait for another?” Jesus says, “Go back and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk, the poor have the gospel preached to them, the messianic era has erupted into history, and the love of my Father is revealed. Blessed is he who is not scandalized in me.” We should be astonished at the goodness of God, stunned that He should bother to call us by name, our mouths wide open at His love, bewildered that at this very moment we are standing on holy ground.

These sinners, these people you despise are nearer to God than you. It is not the hookers and thieves who find it most difficult to repent. It is you who are so secure in your piety and pretense that you have no need of conversion. They may have disobeyed God’s call, their professions have debased them, but they have shown sorrow and repentance. But more than any of that, these are the people who appreciate His goodness: They are parading into the kingdom before you for they have what you lack—a deep gratitude for God’s love and deep wonder at His mercy.

Since reading this passage, the image of the husband contorting his mouth and twisting his lips for an intimate kiss with his palsied wife haunted me. Yet something eluded me until, one day in prayer, it exploded anew in my memory of the violence on a hill outside the city wall of old Jerusalem. The mangled body of the Son hangs exposed to the world’s derision. He is a blasphemer of God and a seducer of the people. Let Him die in disgrace. His friends are scattered, His honor broken, His name a laughingstock. He has been forsaken by His God. Left absolutely alone. Drive Him out of the holy city and across the tracks where His kind belong. The ragamuffin Christ is roughly handled, pushed around, scourged and spat upon, murdered and buried among His own ilk.

In order to dramatize His death, some Christian artists have given the crucified Christ a rolling eye and a contorted mouth; they use red lead to make realistic drops of blood flow from His hands, feet, and side. In 1963 a friend gave me an expensive crucifix. A French artist had carved in wood, carved very delicately, the hands of Jesus on the cross. On Good Friday the Roman artists carved—O God, how they carved!—our brother Jesus with no trouble at all. No art was needed to bang in the nails with hammers, no red lead to make real blood gush from His hands, feet, and side. His mouth was contorted and His lips twisted simply by hoisting Him up on the crossbeam. We have so theologized the passion and death of this sacred man that we no longer see the slow unraveling of His tissue, the spread of gangrene, His raging thirst. In his monumental work The Crucified God, Jürgen Moltmann writes, “We have made the bitterness of the cross, the revelation of God in the cross of Jesus Christ, tolerable to ourselves by learning to understand it as a necessity for the process of salvation.”2

There is an extraordinary power in storytelling that stirs the imagination and makes an indelible impression on the mind. Jesus employs a set of stories, known as the “crisis” parables to issue a warning, a summons to repentance, because of the lateness of the hour. Jesus says, “A tidal wave is approaching and you are lollygagging on the patio having a party.” Or as Joachim Jeremias puts it, “You are feasting and dancing—on the volcano which may erupt at any moment.”3 The impending crisis precludes procrastination: “Stay awake, because you do not know when the master of the house is coming, evening, midnight, cockcrow, dawn; if he comes unexpectedly, he must not find you asleep. And what I say to you, I say to all: ‘Stay awake!’” In the parable of the wedding feast, the guest without a wedding garment is forcibly seized by the bouncers and heaved out the door. “The festal garment is repentance. Put it on today before your death, the day before the Deluge breaks, put it on today! The demand of the crisis is conversion.”4