The Grace Is From God’s Side
Monday, June 29, 2026
Father Richard points to God’s covenant with the Jewish people to illustrate how the choosing rests entirely on God’s side, not on our own merit:
We first see the idea of grace in the Hebrew Scriptures through the concept of election or chosenness. This is eventually called “covenant love” because it finally becomes a mutual giving and receiving. This love is always initiated from God’s side toward the people of ancient Israel, and they gradually learn to trust it and respond in kind. The Bible shows a relentless movement toward intimacy and divine union between Creator and creatures. For this to happen, there needs to be some degree of compatibility, likeness, or even “sameness” between the two parties. In other words, there has to be a little bit of God in us that wants to find itself.
We see the message of implanted grace clearly in Jesus. He recognizes that he is one with God. Jesus knows that it is God in him doing the knowing, loving, healing, and serving. Jesus fully trusts his deepest identity and never doubts it, which is the unique character of his divine sonship. We often doubt, deny, and reject our true identity, our own belovedness, finding it hard to believe what we did not choose, create, or earn for ourselves. Such unaccountable gratuity is precisely the meaning of grace and also why we are afraid to trust it. Yes, it is God in us that always seeks and knows God; like always knows like. We are made for one another from the beginning (Ephesians 1:4–6). Maybe the ultimate grace is to know that it is all grace to begin with! It is already a grace to recognize that it is grace. [1]
God doesn’t love the ancient Hebrew people or anybody else because we are good. God loves us from a free and deliberate choice. Receiving God’s love has never been a worthiness contest. This is very hard for almost everyone to accept. It is finally a surrendering and never a full understanding. The proud will seldom submit until they are “brought down from their thrones,” as Mary put it (Luke 1:52). It just does not compute inside our binary, judging, competing, and comparing brains.
God does not love you because you are good; God loves you because God is good, and then you can be good because you draw upon such an Infinite Source of Goodness. The older I get, the more I am sure that God does all the giving and we do all the receiving. God is always and forever the initiator in my life, and I am, on occasion, the half-hearted respondent. My mustard seed of a response seems to be more than enough for a humble God, even though the mustard seed is “the tiniest of all the seeds” (Matthew 13:32).
God makes use of everything that we offer and thus expands our freedom. Otherwise, it would not be a covenant love, but a mere coercion. God implants the desire within us to desire even more intimacy with God.
_____________________________________________________
Everyone is Chosen
Called and Sent
Sunday, June 28, 2026
Father Richard Rohr invites us to accept with humility that we are chosen by God:
In Romans 11, Paul is trying to define chosenness. Speaking of the chosenness of the Jewish people, he says chosenness is definitive and irrevocable (Romans 11:29). But he also says chosenness has nothing to do with worthiness, which is so hard for our tit-for-tat minds to understand. God’s choice has to do with God alone, not with us being worthy or ready. No one is ever ready! In fact, the readiness comes from experiencing and surrendering to the chosenness. That’s a subtle point, but it’s absolutely foundational. The biblical tradition goes to great lengths to show that God always chooses the unworthy, the weak, the sinful, and the broken, so that no flesh can glorify itself in God’s sight. We are merely God’s instruments. When we love God and love others, it is God doing that through us and in us.
Paul also says that chosenness is for the sake of experiencing mercy (see Romans 11:30–31). Ancient Israel’s chosenness is not so they can feel superior and saved, which is where immature religion always stops. Rather, Paul says very clearly that we experience chosenness so that we can know what it feels like to be God’s beloved and experience God’s mercy. Only then can we communicate that chosenness to everybody else. Now we are a fit instrument to describe what it feels like to be beloved, to be elect, to be significant, to be validated, to be gazed at with the gaze of God, and to be mirrored by the ultimate mirror.
Being loved by God in this way, we know we cannot love back the way we are loved. However, our inability to love God fully keeps us in the realm of desire—always yearning, longing, and wanting more. Knowing we are not there yet is good! It keeps us humble and honest. It keeps us aware of our need for mercy. We know we will never get it right on our own.
I think religion is the best thing and the worst thing. It can create the most narrow-minded, petty, self-protective, racist people who stop at that first stage of: “We’ve got it right. We’re elect. We’re chosen.” But their faith really hasn’t transformed them, so they don’t know how to communicate chosenness to anyone else. Without a love relationship with God, religion doesn’t keep us moving or growing. It doesn’t keep transforming. It becomes a sideshow for elitism, that’s all.
The biblical tradition begins with chosenness for a few, but it always moves toward egalitarian chosenness for everyone. And the only people who are equipped to communicate the inclusivity and the boundless abundance of God are people who first experience that boundless abundance in themselves.
