Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Fr. Richard Rohr's Take on Jesus--Incarnation, Passion, and Death

Fr. Richard Rohr writes a very good column on the subversive Jesus, one that we sometimes shun--a Jesus who sometimes embarrasses us. Here is the first paragraph of Richard Rohr's piece, which he calls "God's Bias from the Bottom--God's Most Distressing Disguise":

"In Jesus we have an almost extreme example of God taking sides. It starts with one who empties himself of all divinity (see Philippians 2:6-7), comes as a homeless baby in a poor family, then a refugee in a foreign country, then an invisible carpenter in his own country which is colonized and occupied by an imperial power, ending as a "criminal," accused and tortured by heads of both systems of power, temple and empire, abandoned by most of his inner circle, subjected to the death penalty by a most humiliating and bizarre public ritual, and finally buried quickly in an unmarked grave. If God in any way planned this story line, God surely intended the message to be subversive, clear, and unavoidable. Yet we largely made Jesus into a churchy icon that any priestly or policing establishment could gather around without even blushing."

You can locate Fr. Richard's Daily Meditation at the website for The Center for Action and Contemplation: https://cac.org/category/daily-meditations/

No comments: