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

by Brennan Manning

It is for inconsistent, unsteady disciples whose cheese is falling off their cracker.

The institutional church has become a wounder of the healers rather than a healer of the wounded.

Put bluntly, the American church today accepts grace in theory but denies it in practice. We say we believe that the fundamental structure of reality is grace, not works—but our lives refute our faith. By and large, the gospel of grace is neither proclaimed, understood, nor

False gods—the gods of human manufacturing—despise sinners, but the Father of Jesus loves all, no matter what they do. But of course, this is almost too incredible for us to accept. Nevertheless, the central affirmation of the Reformation stands: Through no merit of ours, but by His mercy, we have been restored to a right relationship with God through the life, death, and resurrection of His beloved Son. This is the Good News, the gospel of grace.

proclaims that He has invited sinners and not the self-righteous to His table. The Greek verb used here, kalein, has the sense of inviting an honored guest to dinner.

saint is not someone who is good but who experiences the goodness of God.”

“If we but turn to God,” said St. Augustine, “that itself is a gift of God.” My

Children are our model because they have no claim on heaven. If they are close to God, it is because they are incompetent, not because they are innocent. If they receive anything, it can only be as a gift.

And though it is true that the church must always dissociate itself from sin, it can never have any excuse for keeping any sinners at a distance.

If the crust of the earth had been only ten feet thicker, there would be no oxygen, and without it all animal life would die. Had the oceans been a few feet deeper, carbon dioxide and

the words of Job 26:7 take on unparalleled significance: “He poised the earth on nothingness.”

Still, the sun is only one minor star among the 100 billion burning orbs that comprise our Milky Way galaxy. If you were to hold out a dime at arm’s length while gazing at the night sky, the coin would block out 15 million stars from your view, if your eyes could see with that power.

The God of the legalistic Christian, on the other hand, is often unpredictable, erratic, and capable of all manner of prejudices. When we view God this way, we feel compelled to engage in some sort of magic to appease Him. Sunday worship becomes a superstitious insurance policy against His whims. This God expects people to be perfect and to be in perpetual control of their feelings and thoughts. When broken people with this concept of God fail—as inevitably they must—they usually expect punishment. So they persevere in religious practices as they struggle to maintain a hollow image of a perfect self. The struggle itself is exhausting. The legalists can never live up to the expectations they project on

In similar fashion, a person who thinks of God as a loose cannon firing random broadsides to let us know who’s in charge will become fearful, slavish, and probably unbending in his or her expectations of others.

My personal experience of the relentless tenderness of God came not from exegetes, theologians, and spiritual writers, but from sitting still in the presence of the living Word and beseeching Him to help me understand with my head and heart His written Word.

Philosopher Jacques Maritain once said that the culmination of knowledge is not conceptual but experiential—I feel God. Such is the promise of the Scriptures: “Be still and acknowledge [experience] that I am God” (Psalm 46:10). My own journey bears witness to that. I mean simply that a living, loving God can and does make His presence felt, can and does speak to us in the silence of our hearts, can and does warm and caress us till we no longer doubt that He is near, that He is here.

essence, there is only one thing God asks of us—that we be men and women of prayer, people who live close to God, people for whom God is everything and for whom God is enough. That is the root of peace. We have that peace when the gracious God is all we seek. When we start seeking something besides Him, we lose it. As Merton said in the last public address before his death, “That is his call to us—simply to be people who are content to live close to him and to renew the kind of life in which the closeness is felt and experienced.”

There were two kinds of sin: mortal, which was the more serious kind, and venial. Committing a mortal sin means knowing that what you are about to do, think, want, or say is really bad…but doing, thinking, wanting, or saying it anyway. Most of the things we did wrong fell into the less offensive category of venial sin. Committing a venial sin meant doing something that is not really so bad, or doing something really bad that you don’t think is really bad or that your heart really isn’t into doing.

Being a Catholic in those days meant a lifelong struggle to avoid sin, mortal or venial. While you didn’t want to go to hell, you didn’t want to rot in purgatory either. So you played it safe: Think about every thought, word, action, desire, and omission, and figure that everything you want to do is a sin.

Genuine self-acceptance is not derived from the power of positive thinking, mind games, or pop psychology. It is an act of faith in the God of grace.

Several times in my ministry people have expressed the fear that self-acceptance will abort the ongoing conversion process and lead to a life of spiritual laziness and moral laxity.

Love is a far better stimulus than threat or pressure. One saint used to say that she was the type of woman

Whatever past achievements might bring us honor, whatever past disgraces might make us blush, all have been crucified with Christ and exist no more except in the deep recesses of eternity, where “good is enhanced into glory and evil miraculously established as part of the greater good.”

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.

opened themselves to the gift that was offered them. On the other hand, the self-righteous placed their trust in the works of the Law and closed their hearts to the message of grace.

The danger with our good works, spiritual investments, and all the rest of it is that we can construct a picture of ourselves in which we situate our self-worth. Complacency then replaces sheer delight in God’s unconditional love. Our doing becomes the very undoing of the ragamuffin gospel.

It would be impossible to overestimate the impact these meals must have had upon the poor and the sinners. By accepting them as friends and equals Jesus had taken away their shame, humiliation, and guilt. By showing them that they mattered to him as people he gave them a sense of dignity and released them from their old captivity. The physical contact which he must have had with them at table (see John 13:25) and which he obviously never dreamed of disallowing (see Luke 7:38–39) must have made them feel clean and acceptable. Moreover, because Jesus was looked upon as a man of God and a prophet, they would have interpreted his gesture of friendship as God’s approval on them. They were now acceptable to God. Their sinfulness, ignorance, and uncleanness had been overlooked and were no longer being held against them.

The contagious joy of Jesus (only carriers can pass it on) infected and freed His followers.

Mark notes carefully that Jesus picked them up one by one, cradled them, and gave each of them His blessing.

my inner child protests, “I want new friends, not old mirrors.”

When our inner child is not nurtured and nourished, our minds gradually close to new ideas, unprofitable commitments, and the surprises of the Spirit. Evangelical faith is bartered for cozy, comfortable piety. A failure of nerve and an unwillingness to risk distorts God into a Bookkeeper, and the gospel of grace is swapped for the security of religious bondage.

The reformed smokers were much more understanding because they had been there—the place of addiction.

We miss Jesus’ point entirely when we use His words as weapons against others.

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.

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

The disciple living by grace rather than law has undergone a decisive conversion—a turning from mistrust to trust.

Jesus brings good news about the Father, not bad news.

The gospel of grace calls us to sing of the everyday mystery of intimacy with God instead of always seeking for miracles or visions.

The conversion from mistrust to trust is a confident quest

Trust defines the meaning of living by grace rather than works.

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

Maybe this is the heart of our hang-up, the root of our dilemma. We fluctuate between castigating ourselves and congratulating ourselves because we are deluded into thinking we save ourselves.

She does not impose herself on others. He listens well because he knows he has so much to learn from others. Her spiritual poverty enables her to enter the world of the other, even when she cannot identify with that world—e.g., the drug culture, the gay world. The poor in spirit are the most nonjudgmental of peoples; they get along well with sinners.

Creation doesn’t calm our troubled spirits, restore our perspective, or delight us in every part of our being.

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.

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.

If she does receive consolation, she is reassured, but only for a time. She presses for further proofs—each one less convincing than the one that went before. In the end the need to trust dies of pure frustration. What the disciple has not learned is that tangible reassurances, however valuable they may be, cannot create trust, sustain it, or guarantee any certainty of its presence. Jesus calls us to hand over our autonomous self in unshaken confidence. When the craving for reassurances is stifled, trust happens.

“What have I done?” but “What can he do?”

opportunity of showing gratitude to Jesus by passing on His gospel of grace to others.

“Truth consists in the mind giving to things the importance they have in reality.”