“Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, “I am the light of the world; the one who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” (John 8:12)
I’ve been reading more this summer than I have in years for obvious reasons. It’s one of the unexpected blessings of a terrible time. For me, the best books are the ones I mark all up, filling the few blank pages at a book’s beginning and end with words I want to ponder and never forget. One of those reads lately has been Richard Rohr’s “The Universal Christ”. Rohr is a Franciscan Catholic priest, and he pounds away at this premise, that when we see Jesus, when we look at Jesus, we are meant to grow into people who see the world and others with His eyes, not merely our own:
“We need to look at Jesus until we can look out at the world with his kind of eyes. hen Christ calls himself the light of the world, he is not just telling us to look at him, but to look out at life with his all merciful eyes. We see him so we can see like him.“
Rohr’s conclusion is that “The world no longer trusts christians who love Jesus but do not seems to love anything else. In Jesus Christ, God’s own broad, deep, and all inclusive worldview is made available to us. In God you do not include less and less; you always see and love more and more.”
What I’m left with is his haunting question: “Does the Almighty One operate from a scarcity model of love and forgiveness?”
The challenge to us who would shout out a hearty NO! is to seek to nurture a ministry practice that speaks more than words…to take up the pattern of God, who in the bible time after time loves by becoming, by including, not by excluding, symbolized by a cross, which is God’s great act of solidarity with humanity — the judgement once and for all is grace.
Who have seen Jesus need to work continually at seeing the world with the eyes of Jesus. Ephesians 1:9-10: “God has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.”
Seeing Jesus, may we now become more and more those who see like him.
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