(A meditation inspired by a tape I’ve just heard of some
retreat-teaching by the American Franciscan Richard Rohr)…

Jesus’ main teaching-emphasis, ‘The Kingdom’ is about
priorities/idolatries, absolutes/relatives. The first commandment
forbade idols, but the institution of religion itself can be idolatrous
if we make an absolute out of it. Bede Griffiths, the English
Benedictine who founded an ashram in India has said ‘I don’t think
people in the West can know God. I just don’t think it’s possible… All
they keep doing is meeting themselves and calling it God. I don’t think
Western Christianity has the power to lead people to God any more.’

Scary: he’s saying that when our religion is infected by faith in
technology, ‘progress’ and achievement, it becomes different to that of
Jesus. For us Westerners ‘freedom’ means two things: (spatially )
freedom of mobility – freedom to move around, geographically or
ideologically; and (temporally) freedom from the tyrannies of the
commonplace (our gadgets are supposed to save us time, but in Third
world countries when they have few or no gadgets they’ve got more time
to sit down with you for an afternoon to talk: paradox there
somewhere!). We Westerners want freedom in terms of choices/options; but
Jesus relativizes all those so-called freedoms. For him there is only
one absolute: the reality of the ‘Kingdom’.

Matthew 10 describes Jesus sending out the disciples to be
audio-visual aids of what they’re talking about. They’ll travel light.
They are free of the world’s encumbrances…

But our ‘church’ can itself be an encumbrance, an idol, and we may
have to let it go for the sake of the absolute. As Thomas Merton loved
to say (using a Zen idiom) our religious gifts are no more than fingers
pointing to the moon. What religion does is get preoccupied with the
fingers – defining them, protecting them; fighting about which finger is
better/bigger/more important – instead of paying attention to the
moon… The institutional church with its dogmas and constitutions, the
Bible , the sacraments, the priesthood, whatever… are _means_ and not
ends, but we become preoccupied with these things. We debate questions
about who’s right, who has authority, but these are ego/headgame/
power-game questions, issues of group narcissism.

Jesus says to his followers: don’t carry your garbage with you. Live
the paradoxical life which is free of all systems. Beware, he says,
you’ll have problems with the Sanhedrin, synagogues, governors, kings.
All four dimensions of ecclesiastical authority and of political
authority will hate you. They’ll want to be loyal to their systems
rather than to God. So to fit into these system/s you’ll have to play
their games, be ‘nice’.

This year I’m 61, and supposed to be closer to ‘oldness’ than
youthfulness. One of the advantages about being ‘old’ is that you can
finally say what you believe is the truth. You don’t have to be rewarded
by the ‘systems’ anymore. And the truth is that Western ‘civilization’
and the Gospel of Jesus have made terrible bedfellows.

For example, Richard Rohr says he grew up in the Catholic school
system learning three key Scriptures:

# ‘Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church’ (‘a
quote beloved by hierarchs, but probably not too relevant to the
mother-of-eight who has difficulty feeding her kids’)

# ‘This is my body, this is my blood’ (‘thank God for the Eucharist,
but it’s been domesticated; it’s nice and soft and aesthetic, losing the
powerful symbolism of the pouring of one’s blood, the surrendering of
life… The ritual becomes a substitute for the reality… The
sacrament kept defining the church and the need of the laity for the
clergy: it became a managerial tool to control the laity…’)

# ‘Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven; and whose sins
you retain, they are retained’ (‘again, a handy quote for the
priesthood, but Jesus said this to the whole community of
disciples…’).

Historically, the problem with our Western Christianity is that it
comes out of European communities where ‘Christians’ are the majority.
In parts of the world where Christians are a persecuted minority it’s
all very different. Jesus preached in a Semitic culture, where
everything is family. In those kinds of cultures today, if you go
against the rules of the household you’re cut off, you’re not part of
the family anymore, you’re dead. So when Jesus talks about ‘the Cross’
it’s something real; it’s the suffering we experience because we’ve made
tough choices. Jesus sets his face towards Jerusalem – and _against_
Jerusalem in one sense. Everything else – even family or culture – is
not lord.

When we _benefit_ from our political, economic or ecclesiastical
systems we’ll choose the status quo. We’ll become conservative,
protective. The Gospel becomes a gospel of ‘minimals’; tamed by our
culture – and our ‘rights’. Jesus is saying that until we’re free from
the tyrannies of possessions, prestige and power – the three seductions
of this world – we’ll never be truly free. The Kingdom is about finding
security, not in ‘bigger barns’ here, but in knowing/loving God and
others.

Our culture defines your worth in terms of how you look, what you do
– and how well you do it. Our young people are seduced in these ways,
and so if a girl doesn’t have the right kind of body she gets depressed
or even bulimic. If you’re not going to ‘make it’ then (some in the rock
culture tell them) there’s always suicide.

I John puts it this way: there are three sources of evil – ‘the lust
of the eye, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life’ (Rohr:
‘Superficiality, sensuality and showiness’). The soap operas reinforce
these values (‘so ‘garbage in, garbage out’). It is time for us to go
back and read the Gospels, not through the eyes of privilege, protection
or power – ‘reading from the top’… Rohr: ‘Once we have [really]
experienced the unconditional love of God the relative loves of this
world don’t have much power over us any more.’

Rowland Croucher September 1998.