Richard Rohr, OFM

How does transformation happen? Ladder-climbing Western culture, and the human ego, made the Gospel into a message of spiritual advancement—ascent rather than descent. We hopefully advance in wisdom, age, and grace, but not at all in the way we thought. Jesus got it right! He taught the way of the cross and not the way of climbing. We come to God much more by doing things wrong than by doing things right. God leveled the human playing field by using our sins and failures to bring us to divine union.

Jesus, in his proclamation of the kingdom, told us what we could prefer to life itself. The Bible ends by telling us we are called to be a people who could say, “Come, Lord Jesus” (Revelation 22:20), who could welcome something more than business as usual and live in God’s Big Picture. We all have to ask for the grace to prefer something to our small lives because we have been offered the shared Life, the One Life, the eternal Life, God’s Life, which became visible for us in this world as Jesus.