Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that a theology of God that reflects God’s compassion and mercy should always be reflected in every pastoral decision we make. Otherwise, we make God look stupid – arbitrary, tribal, cruel, and antithetical to church practice. He shares a quote from Marilynne Robinson, the American novelist and essayist: “Christianity is too great a narrative to be underwritten by any lesser tale, and that should forbid in particular its being subordinated to narrowness, legalism, and lack of compassion.”
So what did Jesus reveal to us about God?
First, that God has no favorites and that there must be full equality among races, among rich and poor, among slave and free, and among male and female. No one person, race, gender, or nation is more favored than others by God. Nobody is first. All are privileged.
Next, Jesus taught that God is especially compassionate and understanding towards the weak and towards sinners. Jesus scandalized his religious contemporaries by sitting down with public sinners without first asking them to repent. He welcomed everyone in ways that often offended the religious propriety of the time and he sometimes went against the religious sensitivity of his contemporaries, as we see from his conversation with the Samaritan woman or when he grants a healing to the daughter of a Syro-Phoenician woman. Moreover he asks us to be compassionate in the same way and immediately spells out what that means by telling us the God loves sinners and saints in exactly the same way. God does not have preferential love for the virtuous.
Shocking to us too is the fact that Jesus never defends himself when attacked. Moreover he is critical of those who, whatever their sincerity, try to block access to him. He surrenders himself to die rather than defend himself. He never meets hatred with hatred and dies loving and forgiving those who are killing him.
Jesus is also clear that it’s not necessarily those who explicitly profess God and religion who are his true followers, but rather those, irrespective of their explicit faith or church practice, who do the will of God on earth. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Mercy, Truth, and Pastoral Practice,” May 2018]
