wednesday of holy week

Date: Wednesday, March 27
Contributor: From Richard Rohr’s Eager to Love
 
Lectionary Link https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearABC_RCL/HolyWk/HolyWed_RCL.html
 
For a number of years Franciscan priest, Richard Rohr, wrote many meditations and books on spirituality. In 1987 he established the Center for Action and Contemplation in the south valley of Albuquerque. Following his death the Center continues to share snippets of his writings through email. This is a copy of one of those emails derived from Richard Rohr’s Eager to Love. It offers a different perspective on Jesus’ Passion from within a framework of Franciscan spirituality.

 “The common Christian reading of the Bible is that Jesus "died for our sins"--either to pay a debt to the devil (common in the first millennium) or to pay a debt to God the Father (proposed by Anselm of Canterbury, 1033-1109). This is an old notion of retributive justice: theologians call this "substitutionary atonement theory"--the strange idea that before God could love us God needed and demanded Jesus to be a blood sacrifice to atone for sin-drenched humanity.

With that view, salvation depends upon a problem instead of a divine proclamation about the core nature of reality. It is as if God could need payment, and even a very violent transaction, to be able to love and accept "his" own children--a message that those with an angry, distant, absent, or abusive father were already far too programmed to believe in.

A Franciscan philosopher and theologian, John Duns Scotus (1266-1308) disagreed with this understanding. He was not guided by the Temple language of debt, atonement, or blood sacrifice (understandably used in the Gospels and by Paul). He was inspired by the cosmic hymns in the first chapters of Colossians and Ephesians and the first chapter of John's Gospel.

For Scotus, the incarnation of God and the redemption of the world is not a mop-up exercise in response to human sinfulness, but the proactive work of God from the very beginning. We were "chosen in Christ before the world was made," as the hymn in Ephesians puts it.

To summarize Dun Scotus’ approach, Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity (it did not need changing)! Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God.

God in Jesus moved people beyond the counting, weighing, and punishing model, that the ego prefers, to a new world that Jesus offered, where God's abundance makes merit, sacrifice, reparation, or atonement both unhelpful and unnecessary. Jesus undid "once and for all” (Hebrews 7:27; 9:12; 10:10) the notions of human and animal sacrifice. Jesus replaced them with a new economy of grace, at the very heart of the gospel revolution.

Jesus was meant to be a game changer for the human psyche and religion itself. When we begin negatively, or focused on the problem, we never get out of the hamster wheel. To this day we begin with and continue to focus on sin, when the crucified one was pointing us toward a primal solidarity with the very suffering of God and all of creation. This changes everything.

Change the starting point, change the trajectory!

God does not love us because we are good; God loves us because God is good.

Nothing humans can do will ever decrease or increase God's eternal eagerness to love!”