Tuesday, March 3, 2026
Grace is the foundation of God’s restorative justice. Father Richard writes:
The Hebrew prophet Ezekiel affirms the unique and rarely understood notion of grace. Midway through the book, God speaks: “I am going to renew my covenant with you; and you will learn that I am Yahweh, and so remember and be covered with shame, and in your confusion be reduced to silence, when I have pardoned you for all that you have done” (Ezekiel 16:62–63).
Here, the Jewish people had not even asked for or recognized that they might need forgiveness. When I first read this verse as a young friar, I was overcome by shock. Why has no one even pointed out this break in our reward-punishment logic to me? Ezekiel and Jeremiah were coming to the same conclusion around the same time, in the middle of the Babylonian exile. Just when we think the prophets would have been looking for reasons for such punishment, they broke out of its logic altogether. That’s the refining power of suffering, I should think. “I will treat you as respect for my own name requires, and not as your own conduct deserves” (Ezekiel 20:44). God’s only measure is Godself. We can never forget that.
In Ezekiel, Yahweh always acts and never reacts, as we humans tend to do. This is divine revelation at its fullest and freest! Restorative justice—the divine freedom to do good at all costs—is quite simply God being consistently true to Godself. It’s a total end run around retributive justice, which Ezekiel portrays as being beneath God’s dignity.
This theme of themes—God filling in all the gaps created by our ignorance, low self-esteem, and fear—reaches an apotheosis, in my judgment, in chapter 36. Here Ezekiel, at great length, completely disqualifies Israel as a partner by listing all their many adulteries. But immediately after stating Israel’s total unworthiness, their constant and selfish prostitution of the ways of covenant, Ezekiel says that Yahweh completely requalifies the same relationship from Yahweh’s side:
I will take you from the nations, and gather you from all the countries, and bring you into your own land. I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clear from all your uncleanness, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you…. Then you shall live in the land that I gave to your ancestors; and you shall be my people, and I will be your God (see Ezekiel 36:22–38).
No reciprocity is any longer expected or demanded. God can’t waste God’s time anymore. It is all God’s work and gift from beginning to end, if we are honest with ourselves. This is the promise of how God will work within history, and exactly why many of us firmly believe in “the universal restoration that God announced long ago through his holy prophets” (Acts 3:21).
==========
A guest post by Brian McLaren
I grew up in an Evangelical background, I memorized many Bible verses as a child. Probably the first, and the most frequently recited, was from this passage, John 3:16. You may have memorized it to, or noticed it on T-shirts or signs at NFL games. “For God so loved the world,” the verse says, “that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”
The words “the world” and “everyone” have a universal reach. But when I learned the verse and heard it preached by Billy Graham and others, its universal reach was quickly and severely narrowed by the words “who believes in him.” God may love everyone, but only those who believe in him will escape punishment for their sins, which in our tradition, meant hell.
Believing in him (theological nerd alert) came to mean (for millions of us) believing in a doctrine called “penal substitutionary atonement theory.”*
That doctrine, I suspect, is what the organizers of the Revised Common Lectionary had in mind when they paired the steak of John 3 with the red wine of Romans 4 and the side salad of Genesis 12.
I still love John 3:16 and Romans 4, but penal substitutionary atonement theory stopped making sense to me decades ago. And part of my way out of the theory was the Genesis 12 passage in today’s readings, especially these words:
I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you,
and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the
earth shall be blessed.
The brilliant British missiologist Lesslie Newbegin said these words addressed the greatest heresy (or dangerous idea) in the history of monotheism. Many people understand being blessed by God as an exclusive matter, Newbegin said, as if God blesses some to the exclusion of others.
But no, Newbegin says. From the very beginning in the creation story in Genesis 1, when God blesses all creation – both day and night, both land and sea, both plant and animal, both animal and human – God’s blessings have been universal, because that is who God is and how God lives, an overflowing
fountain of blessing. When God calls Abraham (then known as Abram), God doesn’t bless Abram and his descendants to the exclusion of others, but for the
benefit of others.
God’s blessings are not exclusive, but rather instrumental.
I often recall an experience I had way way back in elementary school in the early 1960’s. Every day, we young students were assisted by older students in 5th or 6th grade. They were safety patrols, and they stood at intersections and held us back until they checked that there were no cars coming. Then they motioned for us to cross the road. I didn’t realize that what they did required hard work and sacrifice. They had to leave home earlier and come home later than the rest of us. They had to stand at their post in rain and snow and sleet and hail and hot sun and cold wind.
When at the end of fourth grade, our teacher asked for volunteers to be safety patrols next year, I wasn’t thinking of any of their hard work, sacrifice of comfort and time, or big responsibility. I wasn’t thinking of the special safety patrol training meetings I would have to attend.
I was thinking of four things. First, I was thinking I would get to wear a special white belt with an actual silver badge. Wow! Second, I was thinking about how I could boss other kids around! Double wow! Third, I was thinking of the fact that they could arrive at school late and leave early. Triple Wow! And fourth, I was thinking of the fact that safety patrols all went to an amusement park on a school day at the end of the year as a reward for their service, and they didn’t have to make up the schoolwork they missed. That was a home run of wows!
So I raised my hand high and sat up straight to volunteer, adding an “Oooo, oooo, pick me!” for emphasis. And to my great joy, a few days later I found my name on the list of next year’s safety patrols. Hallelujah!
Simply put, immature Brian was interested in being a patrol so I could gain status, even superiority over my fellow students, and for the reward of a day at the park at the end of the year.
That is the way many people taught John 3:16. All you have to do is raise your hand, say yes to the privileges promised to those who are chosen, and you will be pronounced as a “born again Christian,” which meant you would have a free ticket to safety, security, and enjoyment in heaven for yourself and yourself alone, forever.
But that is not what Genesis 12 or John 3:16 are actually about, contrary to a very popular belief. God chooses Abram, not for elite and exclusive privilege for his descendants alone, but for deep responsibility and service for all the nations of world. God chooses Abram not to the exclusion of others, but to the benefit and blessing of others. As Lesslie Newbegin said, you can’t claim God’s blessings for yourself, your race, your culture, or your religion, and leave out and “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
Similarly, the profound image of being born again is not about getting a free “get out of hell” card and a free trip to the eternal amusement park above, to ride its roller coasters forever.
In John 3, Nicodemus, like many people today, is focused on the superiority of his in-group. “Teacher, we know,” he begins. Now as a lifelong teacher, I can tell you that whenever a student begins a conversation with “Teacher, we know,” things are not likely to go well. Students who want every answer to fit in with what they already know are operating within what psychologists and rhetoricians call confirmation bias: they only want to hear what conforms to and confirms their current thinking.
So Jesus goes to the heart of the issue: “I’m here to teach people about the kingdom of God, and the only way to see it is to be born from above.” To be born from above means to start life over again with a new identity, not as someone who is trying to be a carrier of elite privilege, but to be someone (like Abram, and like Jesus) who wanted to be blessed for the sake of others … who wanted to live, we might say, for the common good, or who wanted to join God in loving and healing the world.
Nicodemus is operating on what we might call a conventional and literalistic level, unaware of his biases and the limitations of his current perspective, so he asks questions that demonstrate his cluelessness. Jesus keeps challenging him to break out of his fourth-grade thinking, and join him as a safety patrol, so to speak, who isn’t working for himself alone, or even for his own little group or clique, but who is concerned for everyone’s welfare, everywhere, no exceptions. God’s desire, Jesus says, is not to condemn everyone or anyone, but to save everyone.
God’s desire, Jesus says, is not to condemn everyone or anyone,
but to save everyone.
One final thought: If Lesslie Newbegin was right when he said that the widespread religious idea of exclusive blessing was a heresy, then we might say that many if not most Christians today, like Nicodemus, need to rethink their understanding of the words save, perish, eternal life, and kingdom of God.
Most people think “save” means “get to heaven.”
Most people think “perish” means “go to hell.”
And most people think “eternal life” means “life in heaven.”
And they think “kingdom of God” means heaven, the perfect place where souls go after death.
If we take John’s gospel seriously enough to challenge our own conventional and literalistic thinking, I believe we will come to see differently, that:
“Save” means liberate or set free from the current, corrupt “kingdoms of this world.”
“Perish” means “die or be exterminated through war and oppression.”
“Eternal life” means “life of the ages,” in contrast to “life in this present age or regime.” In other words, it means life “from above,” life on a higher level than life in the current economic, political, and social systems of our current human civilization. We will see it as a synonym for what Jesus later calls “abundant life.”
And “kingdom of God” means “what the world would be like if God were sitting on the throne instead of Caesar and Herod” and [insert names of other powerful, corrupt, misguided leaders here].
For many Cottage readers, everything I’ve said here sounds pretty familiar and unsurprising. But many of us might feel like Nicodemus when he was walking home from his nighttime conversation with Jesus.
Based on what we learn about Nicodemus later in the Fourth Gospel (John 7:50- 51, and John 19:39-42), he probably left with his mind racing with thoughts like these: “Maybe I don’t actually already have everything figured out. Maybe I need to rethink a lot of what I think I know.”
That is not a bad place to be, not a bad place at all. In fact, it sounds like being born from above … discovering a new identity … seeing the world in radically new ways.
****
Individual reflection question:
Where have you received grace that you didn’t earn, ask for, or even recognize you needed — and what did that do to you?
Group discussion question:
Rohr says God requalifies the relationship entirely from God’s side; McLaren says blessing is instrumental, not exclusive. What would it look like, concretely, for you to live as someone “blessed for others” this week — and where does that feel costly?
