Sunday, July 26, 2026
Father Richard Rohr recalls how he first fell in love with Scripture and devoted himself to its study:
I was in my first year of seminary when I fell in love with Scripture. I really did. To me, it was God’s self-disclosure of love for us. To be honest, I think my little mind was looking for validation for what I already believed to be true. Early experiences of God’s love and goodness shaped my intuitions before I encountered any formal theology. I devoured Scripture and systematic theology because they gave me the tools for understanding and validating my own experiences and intuitions. Now I knew they were not just my ideas.
During the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, the Bible opened up for me even further. The Council said that divine revelation was not God disclosing ideas about God but actually God disclosing Godself. Scripture, and even religion itself, became not mere doctrines or moralisms for me, but love-making, an actual mutual exchange of being and intimacy. It seemed like Scripture was one revelation after another of a loving God and a benevolent universe.
I remember finding certain passages that would send me into ecstasy for days. For example in 2 Samuel 7, David tells God that he’s going to build God a house, and God turns it around and says, “David, you don’t need to build me a house; I am going to build you a house!” I lived on that particular story, because for me, it was the theme of grace solidified. Now all these years later, I feel like here it is embodied in my own life. It was all true! All I had to do was be open and give my little “yes” to being used by God.
Reading the Bible, we can recognize how true it is that only those who know their need for the Beloved know how to receive the gift of the Beloved without misusing such love. A mutually admitted emptiness is the ultimate safety net for all love, and in the Scriptures, even God is presented as somehow “needing” us, and even “jealous” for our love (Exodus 20:5; 34:14). Basically, love works only inside humility. My father, Saint Francis, fell in love with the “humility” of God, as exemplified through Jesus, a word that most of us would not even think could apply to God.
Fullness or complete self-satisfaction in a person cannot permit love because there are no openings, no give-and-take, and no deep hunger. It is like trying to attach two inflated balloons to one another. Human vulnerability gives the soul an immense head start on its travels—maybe the only start for any true spiritual journey. Thus, the Risen Christ starts us off by revealing the human wounds of God, God’s solidarity with human suffering. God begins with self-disclosure from the divine side, which ideally leads to self-disclosure from our side.
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How Jesus Uses the Scripture
Monday, July 27, 2026
Just because you use Scripture, even in a God-affirming way, does not mean you are using Scripture for life and love, growth and wisdom—and for the sake of God or others.
—Richard Rohr, What Do We Do with the Bible?
Father Richard describes how Jesus read his own Hebrew Scriptures through the lens of love:
Jesus never once quotes from nineteen of the books in his own Hebrew scriptures. In fact, he appears to use a very few favorites: Exodus, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Hosea, and Psalms. Jesus appears to ignore most of his own Bible, yet it clearly formed his whole consciousness. That is the paradox. If we look at what he ignores, it includes any passages that appear to legitimate violence, imperialism, exclusion, purity, and dietary laws—of which there are many. Jesus is a biblically formed non-Bible quoter, who gets the deeper stream of God’s unconditional love, the spirit, the trajectory of his Jewish history and never settles for mere surface readings.
When he does once quote Leviticus, he quotes the one positive mandate among long lists of negative ones: “You must love your neighbor as yourself” (see Leviticus 19:18). He openly disagrees with Scriptures that emphasize non-essentials and “mere human commandments” that made their way into what are presented as divine commandments (see Mark 7:1–23 and almost all of Matthew 23). Jesus reduces the 613 clear biblical commandments down to two: love of God and love of neighbor (see Matthew 22:34–40).
He omits troublesome verses with which he does not agree, as when he drops the final half-verse from the Isaiah scroll when he first reads in the Nazareth synagogue (see Luke 4:18–19). As if to make the point, he “rolls up the scroll, hands it back to the attendant and sits down.” We can imagine them glaring at him for adjusting the Scriptures. They know the final line of Isaiah 61:2b is “to proclaim a day of vengeance from our God.” Jesus ends with verse 2a, which “proclaims the Lord’s day of favor,” and better portrays the God he knows.
Generally speaking, Jesus makes use of his own Scriptures to teach a message of radical inclusivity, mercy, and justice, and to negate the predominant religious messages of exclusion, religious righteousness, and oppression of the underdog, the impure, and the sinner.
Jesus clearly considers “justice, mercy, and good faith” to be “the weightier matters of the Law” (see Matthew 23:23), and many statements such as this seem to indicate he did have a definite hierarchy of values. As Pope Francis indicated, mercy is always right there at the top of Christian values! Not all Scriptures were created equal in Jesus’s mind, which is a great blind spot for most fundamentalists. Jesus seems to teach that you can only tell goodness “by its fruits” (see Luke 6:43–45) and not just by the action itself. Paul then lists these fruits as “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (see Galatians 5:22–23).
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Individual Reflection
Where in your own reading of Scripture have you, like Rohr, been looking for validation rather than transformation?
Group Discussion — choose one:
What passage or verse have you quietly “rolled up the scroll” on — skipped, softened, or stopped reading past — because it didn’t match the God you’ve come to know?
Mary Gauthier sings that “every living thing could use a little mercy now” — including the institutions and people who’ve hurt you. Where does that line comfort you, and where does it provoke you?
Rohr says human vulnerability, not fullness, is what opens us to love. Where has admitted need or emptiness done more for your faith than certainty ever did?
