All of Jesus’ rules of ministry, his “tips for the road,” are very interpersonal. They are based on putting people in touch with people. Person-to-person is the way the gospel was originally communicated. Person-in- love-with-person, person-respecting-person, person-forgiving-person, person-touching-person, person-crying- with-person, person-hugging-person: that’s where the Spirit is so beautifully present.
The challenge is to preach a gospel that is livable, believable, and life-giving. Perhaps that is the most simple criterion by which we can discern Jesus’ teaching. It is always a call to death but is always life-giving in the long run. When you see life being created between people and within people, you see God. Where you see God, you will always see freedom. Restraint and passion—that is the paradoxical experience of the Holy. It takes time to learn. You grow into the ability to love another in a way that totally gives yourself and entrusts yourself and yet respects that person and stands back.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Good News According to Luke: Spiritual Reflections
Luke illustrates the “hearing and keeping” of the Word of God with Jesus’ central metaphor: “the sign of Jonah” (Luke 11:29-32). Without the sign of Jonah—the pattern of new life only through death (“in the belly of the whale”)—Christianity remains a largely impotent ideology, another way to “win” instead of the pain of faith. Or it becomes a language of ascent instead of the treacherous journey of descent that characterizes Jonah, Jeremiah, Job, John the Baptizer and Jesus. After Jesus, Christians used the metaphor “the way of the cross.” Unfortunately, it became “what Jesus did to save us”—or a negative theology of atonement—instead of the necessary pattern that is redemptive for all of us.
Faith is an end in itself. Faith is not what we do in order to get to heaven. Mutual perfect faith would be heaven! To have faith is already to have come alive. “Your faith has saved you” (Luke 18:42) is the way Jesus put it to the blind man. Faith is the opposite of resentment, cynicism and negativity. Faith is always, finally, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Faith actually begins to create what it desires. Faith always re-creates the good world. Without faith, we can sink into despair. Faith is a matter of having new eyes, seeing everything, even our most painful suffering, through and with the eyes of God.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Good News According to Luke: Spiritual Reflections
There is nothing you can do to lose the Holy Spirit; the most you can do….is be totally ignorant of your “birthright” and your adoption as sons and daughters of God. You can neglect the gift, and thus not enjoy its wonderful fruits.
But there is nothing you can do to “get” the Holy Spirit either. Why? Because it comes with the product! All you can do is fan the gift into flame that inherently lies within you, and within everything that God has created.
The word “sinner” really signifies not moral inferiors as much as people who do not know who they are and whose they are, people who have no connection to their inherent dignity and importance. They have to struggle for it by all kinds of futile performances. What a waste. Thus, do not hate “sinners” or look down on them. Feel sorry for what they are missing out on!
From Richard Rohr, The Naked Now: Learning to See How the Mystics See
