Valson Thampu

Russia and Ukraine are countries presumably Christian in their culture. They are embedded in Orthodox Christianity. Zelensky is Jewish, but Putin is Orthodox enough to want a cease fire at Christmas. So, it is not outlandish to ask, ‘Where does Jesus figure in what is happening between these Christian countries?’
Ever since the outbreak of this climactic war, I have been haunted by the third Temptation of Jesus. Satan led Jesus to the top a mountain -never mind, which mountain- and showed him the glory of the nations. So, it is reasonable to assume that Jesus saw Russia and Ukraine as well. Why do I say so? Well, because of the Gospels. If Jesus is the ‘Word’- and the Word is the mind of God – it is reasonable to assume that all of history existed together in the consciousness of Jesus all the time.
Satan, going by his Eden track-record, is a superb salesman. He bought Eve and Adam offering them a fruit that was not his. Smart deal indeed! Imagine your buying a man’s mansion by selling him Rashtrapati Bhavan, which is not yours. That was pretty much what Satan did in Eden. But, let that be…
What is immediately relevant for us to note is that Satan showcased, as befitting his genius, an edited version of reality. The nations of the world are characterised not only by ‘glory’ but also by mountainous misery. As regards history, glory is only the specious facade. Misery is its very stuff. Or, misery is the raw material out of which glory is spun by the nations of the world. Jesus could not have been unaware of this. After all, the lamentations of mothers, whose male children were slaughtered by Herod – mothers who refused to be comforted – was echoing in him.
Jesus could sense what was hidden in the minds of people. He also had precognition -awareness of what was hidden in the womb of time – in relation to history. So, it is legitimate to assume the following. First, among the nations of the world that Satan showed him, Jesus saw Russia and Ukraine as well. Secondly, he saw, behind the facade of glory, the human misery being showcased to the world by these two fraternal nations.
Maybe, I am being overly specific in this regard. Well, in that case I admit that Jesus did not hear the roar of the Russo Ukrainian monster of mutual aggression. But, surely he was aware and with this, you’ll agree of the genius of the European culture. At every moment of historical significance, Europe made the wrong choice from the spiritual point of view. Europe heeded the Tempter, and sold its soul for the glory of the nations of the world. This is the essence of what we today know as European Colonial Imperialism. Europe rejected spiritual power in favour of military power; reposed its faith in matter and discounted the spirit. Napoleon Bonaparte was candid enough to say that God was always on the side of the larger battalion. Europe professed Christianity, but idolised violence, garnered worldly glory, inflicted untold miseries upon Afro-Asian peoples. European Christendom, accommodating itself to this bandwagon, became the ‘salt that lost its saltiness’. Organised Christianity still remains unable to recognize the ungodliness that lurks in this scenario. It remains deaf to the warning of Jesus, ‘Put down the sword. He who takes the sword shall perish by it.’
All of these has assumed a further, and more scary dimension, at the present time because of yet another significant modern phenomenon: the emergence of the mass-man. Jesus focused on individuals. He indicated the essence of his vision through the parable of the lost sheep. It is not the herd that matters, but the individual sheep. Going by the parable of the sheep and the goats, what is decisive is serving the least. From the satanic mountain-top none of this is visible. The massive crowd is; but the suffering individual is not. On a mega scale, military victory and defeat can be seen and felt; but the inordinate human misery on both sides will remain hidden. Victory will be celebrated; and the dead forgotten.
So, the European Jesus, as Dostoevsky’s wizened Cardinal, in his immortal story The Grand Inquisitor outlines, was wiser than the biblical Jesus. He was smart enough to buy the nations of the world, with subjection to satanic as the small price for it. The Cross was incompatible with this deal. So it got modified, as Jewish thinkers point out with evident sarcasm, into a dagger. Western Christianity got used to holding the cross by the other end, wielding it as a weapon rather than as a sign of peace, ‘peace, not as the world gives’.
India is today climbing to the very same mountain-top. The ghost of Europe ensconced itself in the collective psyche of India as the Hitler-inspired RSS ideology. The astounding irony in the Indian context is this mass conversion of the Vedic spirit by the pseudo-Christian, power-worshipping European genius. In a similar fashion, Hindutva uses Hinduism as its facade. Church leaders who straggle after this picnic to the power-mountaintop, must heed the words of Jesus, if not the warnings of history. Future historians will testify, after the dust and heat of the present settles down, that the author of the tragedy of Hinduism was not Islam or Christianity, but Hindutva.
From the mountain-top, some two thousand years ago, Jesus saw Modi’s India as well; but did so via the prism of UPA -II and the collapse of the pan-Indian moral order. I agree with Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism), that the malaria of political oppression is bred in the cesspool of moral degradation. A people will get, after all, only the sort of leaders they deserve; all the more so, in an epoch of free choice. Democracy then becomes the means by which a people fashion the instruments for their own nemesis.
On the mountain-top, Jesus would have wept, foreseeing all of these the giant agony of the world except that Satan then, as now, didn’t have the eyes to see it. It was not long ago, after all, that India-suffering put paid to the pretensions of India-shining. History will repeats itself, but as per its own reason and season.