Conventional Wisdom

My slow and careful read of Richard Rohr's Jesus' Plan For a New Word: The Sermon on the Mount continues. If you're looking for a recommendation let me tell you this book is dynamite. Read it.

On one of my many trips across the water this week the good Father introduced me to the idea that the way of Jesus confronts and dismantles conventional wisdom. He says "I hope the whole of this book is an assault on conventional wisdom", and I hope my own writing will serve the same purpose.

"Conventional wisdom crucified Jesus. Then, as now, it was conventional wisdom that kept people from God. We think of wicked vices as keeping people from God, and indulging a vice certainly does. But people into the hot sins are often the ones who really hunger and thirst for justice. In the Gospels, these are the people who really seem to come around and get the truth. But the conventional wisdom people, who are trying to control it all and trying to be nice and proper, don't realize that they need to hunger and thirst for anything.

I believe that's the meaning of the "sin against the Holy Spirit" that Jesus says cannot be forgiven (see Matthew 12:32). The reason it cannot be forgiven is that it would never enter your mind that you have anything that needs to be forgiven! There's no asking for forgiveness, no recognition of being trapped. Conventional wisdom--status-quo culture that refuses to "turn around"--assures the group that they're elite, correct, the norm, that they do it well and swell." (p. 119-120, emphasis mine)

We must allow ourselves to think unconventionally--to step outside the box. It seems to me that this is almost an on/off switch that must willingly be tripped, or we will never understand Jesus. We will take an unconventional Jesus and try to squeeze him into the mold of our conventional world. And in order to do this, we will, out of necessity, cut out his heart and mind, and forcibly chop off his limbs. Otherwise he will take us to places and have us doing things that will be seen as ridiculous in our conventional world.