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

by Brennan Manning

And what if we do die? Jesus died, too, and if Jesus died we believe that now He lives and that we shall live, too.

but not a single one is an adequate substitute for issuing invitations to the banquet.

To really be a disciple of Jesus, one must be as committed to the message of the kingdom as He was, and to preach it whether or not the audience finds it relevant.

The idea that God is love is certainly not new with Jesus. In fact, it probably wasn’t even exclusive to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Other men at other times in other parts of the world have thought or hoped or wished that the really REAL, the living God, might actually love them. But Jesus added a note of confidence. He didn’t say that maybe God was love, or that it would be nice if God were love. He said, GOD IS LOVE—period. But there is more to the message of Jesus. He insisted that His Father is crazy with love, that God is a kooky God who can scarcely bear to be without us. The parable that makes this truth so obvious is the story of the prodigal son, the parable of the loving Father.

The emphasis of Christ’s story is not on the sinfulness of the son but on the generosity of the Father.

God wants us back even more than we could possibly want to be back. We don’t have to go into great detail about our sorrow. All we have to do, the parable says, is appear on the scene, and before we get a chance to run away again, the Father grabs us and pulls us into the banquet so we can’t get away.

The nature of God’s love for us is outrageous. Why doesn’t this God of ours display some taste and discretion in dealing with us? Why doesn’t He show more restraint? To be blunt about it, couldn’t God arrange to have a little more dignity? Wow!

I don’t think anyone reading this would have approved of throwing rocks at the poor woman in adultery, but we would have made darn sure she presented a detailed act of contrition and was firm in her purpose of amendment. Because if we let her off without saying she was sorry, wouldn’t she be back into adultery before sunset?

Whatever you do to the least of my brethren, that you do unto me.” Then Jung asks a probing question: “What if you discovered that the least of the brethren of Jesus, the one who needs your love the most, the one you can help the most by loving, the one to whom your love will be most meaningful—what if you discovered that this least of the brethren of Jesus…is you?”

What is the story of my priesthood? It is the story of an unfaithful person through whom God continues to work!

especially for those of us caught up in the oppression of thinking that God can only work through saints.

Second, projecting the flawless image keeps us from reaching people who feel we just wouldn’t understand them.

The Christian with depth is the person who has failed and who has learned to live with it.

Do we state our belief in Him in no uncertain terms, even in finely articulated creeds, and then refuse to get into the wheelbarrow?

someone daring enough to be different, humble enough to make mistakes, wild enough to be burned in the fire of love, real enough to make others see how phony we are.

I am a bow on your hands, Lord. Draw me, lest I rot. Do not overdraw me, Lord. I shall break. Overdraw me, Lord, and who cares if I break?

The New Testament depicts another picture of the victorious life: Jesus on Calvary.

What makes authentic disciples is not visions, ecstasies, biblical mastery of chapter and verse, or spectacular success in the ministry, but a capacity for faithfulness.

Our whole understanding of him is based in a quid pro quo of bartered love. He will love us if we are good, moral, and diligent.

Jesus responded with the subtlest and most gracious compliment imaginable. He named Peter the leader of the faith community and entrusted him with authority to preach the Good News in the power of the Spirit.

“There is always an enormous temptation to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end.”

I loved my captivity and imprisoned myself in the desire for things I hated.

The prodigal’s father said, in effect, “Hush, child. I don’t need to know where you’ve been or what you’ve been up to.”

The gospel of grace announces, Forgiveness precedes repentance. The sinner is accepted before he pleads for mercy. It is already granted. He need only receive it. Total amnesty. Gratuitous pardon.

If we weren’t sinners and didn’t need pardon more than bread, we’d have no way of knowing how deep God’s love is.

the wastrel weaved his way home, not from a burning desire to see his father, but just to stay alive.

I am moved that the father didn’t cross-examine the boy, bully him, lecture him on ingratitude, or insist on any high motivation. He was so overjoyed at the sight of his son that he ignored all the canons of prudence and parental discretion and simply welcomed him home. The father took him back just as he was.

We don’t have to sift our hearts and analyze our intentions before returning home. Abba just wants us to show up. We don’t have to tarry at the tavern until purity of heart arrives. We don’t have to be shredded with sorrow or crushed with contrition. We don’t have to be perfect or even very good before God will accept us. We don’t

have to wallow in guilt, shame, remorse, and self-condemnation. Even if we still nurse a secret nostalgia for the far country, Abba falls on our neck and kisses us.

Make a radical choice in faith, despite all your sinfulness, and sustain it through ordinary daily life for Christ the Lord and His kingdom.

The mature Christians I have met along the way are those who have failed and have learned to live gracefully with their failure.

abortion and nuclear weapons are two sides of the same hot coin minted in hell; that we stand upright beside the Prince of Peace and refuse to bow before the shrine of national security; that we are a life-giving and not a death-dealing people of God; that we live under the sign of the cross and not the sign of the bomb.

A man doesn’t grow old because he has lived a certain number of years. A man grows old when he deserts his ideal.

I expect more failure from you than you expect from yourself.

“I was seized by the power of a great affection.”

What is the nature of Ultimate Reality? Jesus responds that the Really Real is generous, forgiving, saving love.

Jesus replied that the Romans were not the issue, the Law was not the issue, and cosmic miracles were not the issue. The relentless love of God was the issue, and in the face of that revelation, the Romans and the Torah were secondary. But His audience stubbornly refused to concede that the Torah could possibly be secondary or that the Roman domination of Palestine could be marginal. The Torah and Rome—these were the relevant issues, the gut problems. “What do You have to say about them, Rabbi?” Once again Jesus responded that He did not come to discuss the Law nor to challenge the Roman Empire. He had come to herald the Good News that the Really Real is love and to invite men and women to a joyous response to that love.

Do you live each day in the blessed assurance that you have been saved by the unique grace of our Lord Jesus Christ? After falling flat on your face, are you still firmly convinced that the fundamental structure of reality is not works but grace? Are you moody and melancholy because you are still striving for the perfection that comes from your own efforts and not from faith in Jesus Christ? Are you shocked and horrified when you fail? Are you really aware that you don’t have to change, grow, or be good to be loved?

The first step toward rejuvenation begins with accepting where you are and exposing your poverty, frailty, and emptiness to the love that is everything. Don’t try to feel anything, think anything, or do anything. With all the goodwill in the world you cannot make anything happen. Don’t force prayer. Simply relax in the presence of the God you half believe in and ask for a touch of folly.

Next, try this simple exercise in faith: Gently close your eyes and assume any position that is comfortable so long as you keep your spine straight—standing, sitting, kneeling or lying on your back with your knees bent. Imagine Jesus glancing at you either the way He glanced at the apostle John in the Upper Room when, in an incredible gesture of intimacy, he laid his head on Jesus’ chest; or the way He looked at the sinful woman washing His feet with her tears and drying them with her hair. For ten minutes pray over and over the first strophe of Psalm 23: “Yahweh is my shepherd, I lack nothing.” For the next ten minutes pray over this passage from Hosea and wherever you see the word Israel, replace it with your own name: When Israel was a child I loved him, out of Egypt I called my son. Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, who took them in my arms; I drew them with human cords, with bands of love; I fostered them like one who raises an infant to his cheeks; Yet, though I stooped to feed my child,

they did not know that I was their healer. How could I give you up, O Ephraim, or deliver you up, O Israel? How could I treat you as Admah, or make you like Zeboiim? My heart is overwhelmed, my pity is stirred. I will not give vent to my blazing anger, I will not destroy Ephraim again; For I am God and not man, the Holy One present among you; I will not let the flames consume you. (Hosea 11:1, 3–4, 8–9, NAB) Finally, for the last five minutes of this faith exercise read aloud slowly these three texts: But look, I am going to seduce her and lead her into the desert and speak to her heart. There I shall give her back her vineyards, and make the Vale of Achor a gateway of hope. There she will respond as when she was young, as on the day when

May Jesus Christ convert us to the folly of the gospel.

Our response to His love is itself His gift. Let us suppose you advanced me $1 million for my personal needs. A year later, you request that I begin making monthly interest-free payments of $10,000 on the debt. On the first day of each month I sit down to write the check just as the morning mail arrives. In the mail I find that you have sent me a $10,000 check to cover my payment. You continue this practice every month until the full amount of my debt is relieved. I am bewildered and protest, “But this is totally lopsided!”

She has no understanding of God, church, religion, prayer, or ministry except in terms of the Sacred Man who loved her and delivered Himself up for her. The unique place that Magdalene occupies in the history of discipleship owes not to her mysterious love for Jesus but to the miraculous transformation that His love wrought in her life. She simply let herself be loved. “The central truth for which Mary’s life has come to stand is that it is possible to be delivered through love from the lowest depths to the shining heights where God dwelleth.

Francis Schaeffer wrote, “True spirituality consists in living moment to moment by the grace of Jesus Christ.”

They compounded a sense of personal powerlessness with unfailing trust in the love of God. They were indeed the remnant, the true Israel to whom the messianic promises had been made.

Ragamuffins do not complain about the feeble preaching and the lifeless worship of their local church. They are happy to have a place to go where they can mingle with other beggars at the door of God’s mercy. “Beggars know how to open their hands,” writes Sue Monk Kidd, “trusting that the crumb of grace will fall.

they are grateful for the smallest crumb that tumbles from the preacher’s mouth.

the utter inability to self-generate trust. So he hurls himself on God’s mercy and approaches the throne of grace with confidence, because “he rescues the needy who calls to him, and the poor who has no one to help. He has pity on the weak and the needy, and saves the needy from death

Perhaps the supreme achievement of the Holy Spirit in the life of ragamuffins is the miraculous movement from self-rejection to self-acceptance.