- Valson Thampu
You are the light of the world -said, Jesus. The tragedy with us is that we have words, but, often, not their meanings. And meanings are what matter. So, we become the salt without its salt-ness; with predictable consequences. ‘What does it mean, let us ask, for the followers of Jesus to be ‘the light of the world’ in the Indian context today?
Remember how Nehru, now a despised name, imagined the ‘dawn’ of India’s freedom? ‘At the midnight hour, when the whole world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom’. Well, it is light that awakens us. And it is into light that we awaken.
Light, by the way, is the symbolic link between freedom and God. God is light. Wherever God-consciousness awakens in humans, it activates a passion for freedom. Gandhi understood this; so, he made the struggle for India’s freedom a spiritual mission.
Sustaining the holy passion for freedom is the basic spiritual task for those who are God-oriented. St Paul knew this. It is into freedom that Jesus has called you, he wrote to Galatians. The spiritual challenge is to abide in freedom. ‘Abide in me,’ Jesus urged his disciples. It is the same as saying, ‘Abide in true freedom’; for, ‘If the Son makes you free you shall be free indeed’.
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“What does it mean, let us ask, for the followers of Jesus to be ‘the light of the world’ in the Indian context today?”
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“The freedom that Christians as a spiritual community are mandated to witness is freedom, not as the world knows it, but freedom of the spiritual kind.”
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“Our calling is not to convert a few individuals as low-hanging fruits. It is to transform the soul of a nation.”
But it is no good preaching freedom. That’s where we got it wrong. Remember Moses? And Jesus? They were not mere words exhorting people to be free. They were the roadmap to freedom. ‘I am the way,’ said Jesus. Not many Christians are aware that ‘the Way’ is the way to true freedom. The truly free are imbued with, and driven by, a passion to lead others to freedom.
I remain astonished how realistic the biblical view of human nature is. Divine interventions in the human condition on earth are necessary because human nature is streaked with a deep pull towards un-freedom. Freedom and slavery are the positive and negative terminals of human nature.
The Athenian outlook is characterized by a tinge of pessimism about universal human liberation. It is neither possible, nor desirable, Aristotle insisted, to lead all individuals to freedom. Many are ineligible for freedom. The best that can happen to them is to be ruled by an enlightened authority. The colonial cant of the ‘White man’s burden’ was a variation of this Aristotelian dogma.
Christians seem to have forgotten that the Cross is a call to freedom. It is also a reminder of the pull towards slavery entrenched in human nature. It shows ‘what they’ll do to you, if you try to set them free’. It is this that ‘they know not’. They know not that they are driving the nails, with all their might, on the coffin of their own freedom.
But, what’s freedom? The departure of the oppressor? Oh, no! It is the germination of the seed of creativity in us. Or, it is a radical re-orientation of human nature from the consumerist to the creative, from the political to the spiritual. Politics, sans spirituality, is ‘the art of possible’. The extinction of creativity is the insignia of ‘the art of the possible’. Human liberation involves the art of the impossible, which is the heart of the Cross. God is the fountainhead of freedom because He is pure Creativity. Not surprisingly, even an unbeliever like Bertrand Russell said that one of the basic strengths that every sane, wholesome human being needs is ‘the re-orientation from the acquisitive to the creative’. The more acquisitive a society or person becomes, the more imperilled freedom becomes in that society or person.
That brings us to Dostoevsky’s insight in that profoundest of all short stories: The Grand Inquisitor: the story that Dimitri narrates to Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov. The most foundational of all issues for our species, according to Dostoevsky, is how to harmonise freedom and bread. Does it have to be, ‘Bread-or-freedom’? Can’t it be ‘Bread-and-freedom’? The dogma of today’s developmentalism is that bread has to be got in exchange for freedom.
The Last Supper Jesus celebrated with his disciples is the answer to this quintessential problematic in the historical human predicament. The Sacrament is: bread-as-freedom. Why else, should the bread be ‘broken’? Those who refuse to understand this, fight over rubrics and directions. The safest hiding place from world-transforming meanings is squabbles about superficialities. You fight for this angle or that of the shell. You can’t be fighting for the kernel: can you? You don’t see cooks fighting over coconut shells; they make do with the kernel, right?
The freedom that Christians as a spiritual community are mandated to witness is freedom, not as the world knows it, but freedom of the spiritual kind. In its worldly sense, my freedom has to be secured at the expense of your freedom. You have to be insecure, not because I have anything against you, but because I can be safe only at the expense of your safety. I know no other way. Call this, the Israel-Gaza syndrome, the Russia-Ukraine realpolitik, or what you will.
So, what does it mean for Christians to witness freedom in the Indian context, as freedom gets increasingly weaponised?
What can we, a minuscule minority, do in a country as vast as India? many ask. To them my answer is: what does it mean to have faith? All actions, I believe, are exercises in faith. That is because, we never can foresee the full consequences of even the smallest thing we do. That God, life is a rosary of novelties. So, if at all we walk, we walk in faith. In this outlook, what matters is not how big or small we are, but whether or not God wills the spiritual enlightenment, and antyodaya, of India.
In contrast to the orientation of faith, is the orientation of exigency. Faith can hitch itself to the distant stars. Exigency is stuck in the immediate. It holds out the right hand when something corresponding is sure to be slipped into the left. It is quid-pro-quo. It’s the polar opposite of the power of self-denial. Spiritually, self-denial is the precondition for freedom. Jesus, the Galilean, was Jewish. The Jesus on the Cross belongs to humanity. No label, no smudge of divisiveness, is admissible to a Person of that order. So, the Man on the Cross was at once naked and not naked. The last item of his attire snatched away, he remained clothed in pure freedom. Christian Hans Andersen’s The Emperor is Naked illustrates the exact opposite of that blessed state.
We got deflected from this ultimate spiritual mission by the specious lure of conversion. Our calling is not to convert a few individuals as low-hanging fruits. It is to transform the soul of a nation. Do you believe this is possible? Better, let me put it in the idiom of Ezekiel: Son of man, will these bones live?
