RonRolheiser,OMI

And The Temple Veil was Ripped from Top to Bottom

March 30, 2026

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There are many haunting lines in the passion narratives. Who is not stirred in the soul when the passion story is read aloud in church and we come to the part where Jesus takes his last breath and there’s that poignant minute of silence, where we all drop to our knees? No homily is ever as effective as that single line (and he gave up his spirit) and the moving silence that ensues.

Another such line that has always haunted me is the one that follows immediately after. We are told that at the moment of Jesus’ death the veil of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.

My imagination, particularly when I was a child, always pictured that in a dark way: It grew dark in the middle of the day and then at the moment of Jesus’ death, as if by a frightening strike of lightning, the temple veil was ripped from top to bottom while everyone looked on stunned, convinced now, too late, that the person they’ve just mocked and crucified is the Christ.

What’s really meant by the phrase that the veil of the temple was torn apart at the moment of Jesus’ death?

Biblical scholars tell us that the veil of the temple was precisely a curtain in the temple that prevented the people from seeing what was going on behind it, namely, the sacred rituals being performed by the temple priests. The curtain shielded the ordinary worshipper from mystery.

Thus, when the Gospels tell us that at the moment of Jesus’ death the temple veil was torn apart from top to bottom, the point they are making is not, as my imagination would have it, that God shredded what was most precious to the those who crucified Jesus to show them how wrong they were. To the contrary.

The temple veil was understood to shield people from mystery, from seeing inside the mystery of God. In the crucifixion, that veil is torn apart so that now everyone can see inside the real Holy of Holies, the inside of God.

We now see what God really looks like, that is, as One who loves us so unconditionally that we can crucify Him and he doesn’t stop loving us for even a second. God spills his own blood to reach through to us rather than wanting us to spill ours to reach through to Him. What’s meant by this?

There’s a centuries old question that asks why Jesus had to die in so horrible a manner. Why all the blood? What kind of cosmic and divine game is being played out here? Is Christ’s blood, the blood of the lamb, somehow paying off God for the sin of Adam and Eve and for our own sins? Why does blood need to be spilled?

This is a complex question and every answer that can be given is only a partial one. We are dealing with a great mystery here. However, even great mysteries can be partially understood. One of the reasons why Jesus dies in this way, one of the reasons for the spilling of blood, is clear, with profound implications. What’s the reason?

It has precisely to do with blood. From the beginning of time until the crucifixion of Jesus, many cultures sacrificed blood to their gods. Why blood? Because blood is identified with the life-principle. Blood carries life, is life, and its loss is death. Thus, for all kinds of reasons, religious and anthropological, in many ancient cultures the idea was present that we owe blood to God, that God needs to be appeased, that offering blood is our way of asking for forgiveness and expressing gratitude, that blood is the language God really understands.

And so, sincere religious people felt that they should be offering blood to God. And they did – and for a long time this included human blood. Humans were killed on altars everywhere. Thankfully most cultures eventually eliminated human sacrifice and used animals instead.

By the time of Jesus, the temple in Jerusalem had become a virtual butchery with priests killing animals nearly non-stop. Some scholars suggest that when Jesus upset the tables of the money changers, about 90% of commerce in Jerusalem was in one way or the other connected with animal sacrifice. Small wonder Jesus’ action was perceived as a threat!

So why the blood at Jesus’ death?

As Richard Rohr aptly puts it, for centuries we had been spilling blood to try to get to God and, in the crucifixion, things reversed: God spilled his own blood to try to get to us. And this reversal strips away the old veil of fear, the false belief that God wants blood, the false belief that God is not unconditional love, and that we need to live in fear of God.

God doesn’t need blood as an appeasement. God never stops loving us for even a second. When the temple veil was ripped open, this incredible truth was revealed.

On Not Being Stingy with God’s Mercy

March 23, 2026

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Shortly after my ordination, doing replacement work in a parish, I found myself in a rectory with a saintly old priest. He was over eighty, nearly blind, but widely sought out and respected. One night, alone with him, I asked him this question: “If you had your priesthood to live over again, would you do anything differently?”

From a man so full of integrity, I had fully expected that there would be no regrets. So, his answer surprised me. Yes, he did have a regret, a major one, he said: “If I had my priesthood to do over again, I would be easier on people the next time. I wouldn’t be so stingy with God’s mercy, with the sacraments, with forgiveness. You see what was drilled into me in the seminary was the phrase: The truth will set you free. So, I believed it was my responsibility always to give a hard challenge, and that can be good. But I fear that I was too hard on people. They have pain enough without me and the Church laying further burdens on them. I should have risked God’s mercy more!”

This struck me because, less than a year before, as I took my final exams in the seminary, one of the priests who examined me, gave me this warning: “Be careful,” he said, “never let your feelings get in the way. Don’t be soft, that’s wrong. Remember, hard as it is, the truth sets people free!” Sound advice, it would seem, for a young priest.

However, after fifty years in ministry, I’m more inclined to the old priest’s advice: We need to risk more God’s mercy. The place of justice and truth should never be ignored, but we must risk letting the infinite, unbounded, unconditional, undeserved mercy of God flow more freely. The mercy of God is as accessible as the nearest water tap, and so we, like Isaiah, must proclaim a mercy that has no price tag: Come, come without money, without virtue, come, drink freely of God’s mercy!

What holds us back? Why are we so hesitant in proclaiming God’s inexhaustible, prodigal, indiscriminate mercy?

Partly our motives are good, noble even. The concern for truth, justice, sound orthodoxy, proper morality, public form, proper sacramental preparation, and fear of scandal, are not unimportant. Love needs to be tempered by truth, even as truth must be moderated by love.

But sometimes our motives are less noble and our hesitancy arises more out of timidity, fear, legalism, the self-righteousness of the Pharisees, and an impoverished understanding of God. Thus, no cheap grace is dispensed on our watch!

In doing this we are, I fear, misguided, less than good shepherds, out of tune with the God that Jesus incarnated. God’s mercy, as Jesus revealed it, embraces indiscriminately, like the sun that shines equally on the good as well as the bad, the deserving and the undeserving, the initiated and the uninitiated.

One of the truly startling insights that Jesus gave us is that the mercy of God cannot not go out to everyone. It’s always free, undeserved, unconditional, universal in embrace, reaching beyond all religion, custom, rubric, political affiliation, mandatory program, ideology, and even sin itself.

For our part then, especially those of us who are parents, ministers, teachers, catechists, and elders, we must risk proclaiming the prodigal character of God’s mercy. We must not dispense God’s mercy as if it were ours to dispense; dole out God’s forgiveness as if it were a limited commodity; put conditions on God’s love as if God needs to be protected; or cut off access to God as if we were the keeper of the heavenly gates. We aren’t. If we tie God’s mercy to our own timidity and fear, we limit it to the size of our own minds. A bad game.

It is interesting to note in the Gospels how the apostles, well-meaning of course, often tried to keep certain people away from Jesus as if they weren’t worthy, as if they were an affront to his holiness or would somehow taint his purity. So, they tried to send away children, prostitutes, tax collectors, known sinners, and the uninitiated of all kinds. Always Jesus overruled their attempts with words to this effect: “Let them come to me. I want them to come.”

Things haven’t changed. Perennially, we, well-intentioned persons, for the same reasons as the apostles, continue trying to keep certain individuals and groups away from God’s mercy as it is accessible in Christian Word, Sacrament, and Community. Jesus managed things then; I suspect that he can manage them now. God doesn’t need our gatekeeping.

What God wants is for everyone, regardless of age, religion, culture, personal weakness, or lack of Christian practice, to come to the unlimited waters of divine mercy.

The renowned naturalist John Muir once challenged Christians with these words: Why are Christians so reluctant to let animals into their stingy heaven?

We are also, I fear, stingy with God’s prodigal mercy.

All Lives Matter

March 16, 2026

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Theodore Roethke begins his poem In a Dark Time, with these words: “In a dark time, the eye begins to see.”

 We live in a dark time, one beset with hatred, bitter divisions, and wars that, daily, are bringing death and incalculable trauma to millions of people. But are our eyes beginning to see?

Sometimes in a dark time, irreverent humor can help us see. Here’s an example: Recently I was leading a retreat at a renewal center near a beach. Taking a walk on the beach during one of our breaks, I saw three young men sitting on the back of a pickup truck. The truck’s stereo was blasting music that could be heard for hundreds of yards, and the three young men, their baseball caps turned backwards, were joyously hoisting beer cans and happily waving to everyone around them. And above the truck flew a large flag which read: Drunk lives matter! Their joyous irreverence lifted my spirits, as it did too for the retreatants when I shared the story with them.

Yes, sometimes we see that even drunk lives matter. All lives matter.

That all lives matter needs to be highlighted right now because today we are being given the strong impression from some of our top government officials and others that some lives don’t matter, at least not as much as our own and those of our loved ones. Here’s the point:

During the past weeks, the USA and Israel have been at war with Iran, a war that has destabilized millions of lives. During these weeks there have been 15,000 bombing strikes in Iran and Lebanon, and Iran has retaliated with countless strikes directed against USA and Israeli interests.

A number of American and Israeli lives have been lost and several hundred Americans and Israelis have been injured. And we have properly mourned those deaths and injuries, mourned that these precious lives were lost or injured. Our empathy let us see that these lives were precious and that some irreplaceable oxygen left the planet when each of them died. We recognized that their lives mattered. And that’s to our credit.

However, during this time, more than 2000 lives have been lost in Iran and Lebanon and hundreds of thousands have had their lives ripped apart irrevocably, and (at least publicly) we have not awarded them the same empathy that we gave to our own. For us, it seems, their lives were not as precious as our own.

Perhaps this can be excused (or at least understood) by the fact that we don’t see these other lives firsthand. They’re far from us, abstract, faceless, nameless, Iranians and Lebanese.

However, what’s not excusable is the very cavalier and callous way this war and those deaths are being talked about by some government leaders and others around them. Their language in the face of all these deaths and the dislocation of millions is the language of celebration; what one might hear at a football game when your home team is humiliating a hated foe. We’re beating them! We’re humiliating them! We’re bombing them into oblivion! Yay!

Where is our empathy for their suffering, for their dead, for the millions of lives that are now being torn apart by death, dislocation, and heartbreak? It’s as if Iranian and Lebanese deaths aren’t real, like the virtual killings in a video game. Even the title of this war smacks of a video game: Epic Fury! But this isn’t a video game. Real people are dying. Hundreds are dead and millions are living with hearts that are breaking or in despair.

We are called by what’s best in us is to touch that part of our heart where we care for more than only our own. We need to touch that deeper empathic part inside us that can say (and say out loud): Iranian lives matter! Lebanese lives matter! All lives matter! Every life is as precious as my own.

Of course, we also need to keep saying that American lives and Israeli lives matter.

All human lives are equally precious in God’s eyes. As St. Paul says in his Letter to the Galatians (3,28): “There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Jesus Christ.” In effect, that’s saying that in Christ there is no American or Iranian, no Israeli or Lebanese, no lives that don’t matter or matter less than other lives.

War is war and there can even be just wars, and understandably people die in wars. That can be accepted.

But, we have better hearts than falling into selective empathy. We have better hearts than to celebrate the death and the destruction of lives as we would celebrate the triumph of our favorite sports team demolishing a hated rival. We have better hearts than seeing the deaths and the destruction of countless lives as not fully real, like the dead in video games.

We’re better than that!

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