Valson Thampu

A philosopher colleague of mine -Prof. R. K. Gupta, Hindu by birth but agnostic by choice- once said to me, ‘I can make sense of what the founders of religions have said. Everything, except Jesus’ teaching, ‘Love your enemy’. I consider this the ultimate reach of morality; except that it is unattainable by human beings.’
He made me think. I had heard, by then, scores of sermons on love. Maundy Thursday sermons, for example. But no preacher ever told me what ‘loving one’s enemy’ meant in practice. I never tried it; and so had no experience of it. As a result, I knew, and didn’t know, this teaching. Frankly, that was true, in my case, of almost all of Jesus’ teachings. I knew what it meant to be a Christian. But I didn’t know what it meant to be a follower of Jesus. It was for me too that Jesus prayed from the Cross, ‘Father, forgive; for they know not what they do.’ How can one crucify Jesus, if one knows not what it is to crucify? Also, how can one do it, if one knows who it is one crucifies?
Ironically, it was R.K Gupta, an agnostic, who set me on course to seeking not only what Jesus said, but also what he meant. Here’s a sliver of what I understand by loving one’s enemy.
The primary challenge in this teaching is to critique ‘enmity’. It is impossible to love enemies, as enemies, as per the worldly idea of enmity; for an enemy is one who deserves to be hated. None of us creates the ingredients of the ‘enmity’ we practise; we absorb them from the society or the community to which we belong. For example, to the extent that you subscribe to the Sangh Parivar genre of enmity, it suffices that your neighbour is a Muslim or Christian for you to belch enmity against him. You are obliged to hate and to take pride in doing so. But, this enmity has no personal substance. It is only as personal as an epidemic is personal. This is true of enmity of all kinds. But for our specific conditioning, by which we are programmed to react in a set ways, we would not be vectors of enmities.
The anti-dote to enmity, as Kierkegaard said, is objectivity. In practice this means being an advocate for the other as well: to plead his cause together with mine. We must consciously endeavour, he said, to be more subjective about others, and more objective about ourselves. Afford the benefit of doubt to the other, but none to oneself; for, as St Paul wrote to the Romans, ‘you have no excuse’.
In this respect, the enemy is a help! No one can be as objective about me as my ‘enemy’ is. The enemy is one-half of the truth that I am that I would rather not confront. Enmity, therefore, has a reference to the sort of person I am. Enmity is born as much because of who one is, as on account of what one does. Jesus knew this. Why are some people offended at me? Jesus asked his disciples. I make the dumb speak, restore sight to the blind, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead. But they are offended at me. Why? The point is that the offence was not because of what Jesus did, but because of who he was.
The teaching, ‘love your enemies’ must be understood within the ambit of the Commandment: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’. To love is to know. To love the self is to know the self in truth. It took me a long time to realize that there is something in me that calls forth enmity from others, gratis. The fact that I didn’t do anything to merit the enmity I had to face didn’t make me blameless. I am responsible for my neighbour, for love is a state of responsibility. The question is: ‘Did I, by being the sort of person I am, nudge a fellow human being towards enmity?’
This perspective may well be resented as masochistic. But the truth remains that, if a change is to be brought about, I am the only feasible starting point for it. That is why Jesus taught, through the parable of the ‘speck and the beam’ that we must purify ourselves first. I cannot remove the speck from the eyes of another person so long as I harbour a beam in my own. The spiritual truth is that there is a necessary link between the ‘speck’ and the ‘beam’. ‘Enmity’ prevents me from seeing that they belong together.
You are, say, on your way to the church on a Sunday. But the worm of enmity is wiggling in your soul. ‘Turn right about,’ Jesus would say. ‘Go and be reconciled. Worship only thereafter. Don’t tell me that the enmity was provoked by the other person. No enmity can be unrelated to who you are. Go. Be reconciled.’
Far-fetched? Well, that’s the teaching, whether we like it or not. As if that’s not bad enough, there is this further teaching, ‘He who hears these words of mine and does them is like the wise man who built his house on the rock.’ The question is simple and stark: do you want to be wise? Or, are you content to stay stuck in the quagmire of existential stupidity. As Paul write to the Romans, ‘Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.’
Consider this as well. On 28 September 2021, Swami Jagadguru Paramhans Acharya Maharaj, served an ultimatum on the Central Government that unless India is declared a Hindu Rashtra by 2 October 2021, he would undertake ‘Jal samadhi in Sarayu’. He wants Muslims and Christians to be de-nationalized, as per the Sangh ideology. ANI, which broke the story, described him ‘a noted seer’. (And this is how gets ‘noted’ even more.) Not for nothing. On an earlier occasion he had undertaken a fast to push and precipitate the very same demand. It was broken in the presence of Amit Shah, the Home Minister of India.
The ‘seer’ in question is not a stray freak. He represents the mainstream Hindutva agenda. The supreme question confronting the Indian Christian community is: how are we to relate to this emerging scenario in which enmity is manufactured on a mega scale and retailed nation-wide? What is the Christian thing to do in this context? Is it to curry favours with the beast of enmity, so to speak, in the naïve hope of domesticating it? Or, is it to enunciate, for dear life, a counter-culture, as Jesus said we should? Do we succeed or fail in our Christian duty by deflecting the malevolence of enmity towards a people-group more hated than we are? In doing do, we legitimize enmity. In that case, what right would we have when our turn comes, as indeed it will, to face the very same poison? Do we become smart as Christians by preaching Jesus’ words and acting in total contradiction of their meanings? It won’t be long before we are forced to realize that we have been our own worst enemies.