SCARCITY OR ABUNDANCE (1)?

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I'm reading and truly enjoying Richard Rohr's "Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality."  The following paragraphs are from his discussion of grace:

Unless and until you understand the biblical concept of God's unmerited favor, God's unaccountable love,... most of the biblical text cannot be interpreted or tied together in any positive way. It is, without doubt, the key and the code to everything transformative in the Bible. 

In fact, people who have not experienced the radical character of grace will always misinterpret the meanings and the direction of the bible.The Bible will become a burden and obligation more than a gift. 

Grace cannot be understood by any ledger of merits and demerits. It cannot be held to any patterns of buying, losing, earning, achieving or manipulating, which is where, unfortunately, most of us live our lives. Grace is, quite literally, "for the taking." It is God eternally giving away God -- for nothing -- except the giving itself. I believe grace is the life energy that makes flowers bloom, animals lovingly raise their young, babies smile and the planets remain in their orbits -- for no good reason whatsoever -- except love alone.

Abundance, largesse, is the spiritual name of the game, "full measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over and pouring into your lap (Luke 6:38). Grace will always be experienced as more than enough instead of a mere survival mode. If there is not grace to a situation, it does not really satisfy or give any deep joy.

The ego does not know how to receive things freely or without logic. It prefers a worldview of scarcity, or at least quid pro quo, where only the clever win. It likes to be worthy and needs to understand in order to be able to accept things. That problem, and its overcoming, is at the very center of the gospel plot line.


I've been thinking a lot about the contrast he draws in the book between the worldview of scarcity and the worldview of abundance. According to the former, there is only so much grace to go around, so we have to scramble to earn our share; God has only so much forgiveness to dispense, so we have to work hard to earn it; God's patience has a limit, too, as does his love. This makes for a religion of fear, of measuring, of feverish effort to placate God and find ways to keep him pleased with us. I'm afraid that some of this sounds like the religion many of us were brought up in.

On the other hand, a worldview of abundance sees that God's love has no limits, his grace is a superabundant gift that is freely given rather than earned, his forgiveness, too, know no bounds. Many of us are very uneasy with this way of seeing God. We're more comfortable with a God who feels and acts like we do: that is, a God who keeps score, who records every misstep of ours so that he can punish us for it long after we've completely forgotten it and moved on. We want a God who is just: who doesn't love bad people, who only loves certain people (members or our particular church or religion, for example) and who detests drug addicts, and people of a different sexual orientation, and so on. For some reason, many people seem more comfortable with a God whose love has limits.

Tomorrow's gospel tells the story of Jesus' first miracle according to John, the changing of water into

wine. Notice that Jesus makes more wine than the entire village could use in weeks. John doesn't call this a miracle but a "sign." A sign, among other things, that the new era being initiated by Christ, will be one of abundance, not scarcity. Uh-oh! That will pose a problem for those who want a scarcity-based God who makes you earn his love, that is, for those whose religion is based on a ledger of merits and demerits, of buying, earning, achieving or manipulating. 

Be prepared for what happens in the rest of John's gospel: the woman taken in adultery isn't condemned, and Jesus, hanging on the cross, says "Father, forgive them!" Be prepared for Jesus to ask if he can wash your feet. Be prepared for him to challenge you to "love one another as I have loved you!" That last one is a switch from our idea that God loves people the way we love others: with restrictions of all sorts.

The story of Jesus changing water into all of that extra wine welcomes us into God's world, where it's all about infinite abundance rather than carefully measured scarcity.