Valson Thampu

It is significant that the Mass controversy has morphed into a power struggle, distinguished by the will to make the ‘rebellious faction’ fall in line. Human beings rebel even against God. God is tolerant of rebellion because God is love. Love brooks rebellion. Power can’t.
Obedience is of two kinds. Obedience impelled by love is liberating and life-enriching. Love transforms obedience into a joyous condition. It is conduces to ‘life in its fullness’ (St. John 10:10). Coercion is alien to obedience of this kind. The obedience that power exacts has to be coerced. So, it is obedience only in appearance. Obedience of this kind is imposed on people to further the interests of those who do so. Coerced obedience is powered by vested interests. True obedience liberates. Specious obedience enslaves.
Spiritual authority is authenticated by love, not power. True authority is corrupted the moment coercion is introduced into it. Parental authority weakens when a parent resorts to violence to extract obedience from his or her offspring. Political authority inflates itself in proportion to its ability to coerce citizens to obey the will of the State. The more irrational and unsound that will is the greater is the euphoria of power generated by its abject obedience by the people. The demonetisation fiasco, together with the the people’s duty to endure ‘short term pain’ imposed arbitrarily on them, amply illustrates this.
Worldly systems and transactions are animated by power. ‘It shall not be so with you,’ said Jesus. He instituted the New Commandment ‘to love one another’ (Jn. 13: 34). Those familiar with the spirit of the Fellowship Meal Jesus celebrated with his disciples (St John 13) would realize that it was meant to substitute power with love. Nothing, from which love is excluded, amounts to a sacrament. The Last Supper was envisaged to be a ceremonial annulment of power, signified by the master washing the feet of his disciples, besides being the institution of love as the hallmark of spiritual life. The Fellowship Meal was a sacrament of love. Jesus knew, and was concerned about, the power-affinity of human nature. Its pull needed to be neutralized before the Commandment to love could be written on the hearts of men.
It is ironic, therefore, if the celebration of the Mass, presumably a memorial of the Fellowship Meal, is degraded into a power struggle: precisely what it was to forestall! This is a sign of ecclesial ill-health. The fact that it is not recognized as such only confirms the pathology.
Illness implies the infringement of wholeness, the foundation on which life is established. Illness results from the incursion of alienation into the wholeness of the body. Heart attack happens when cardiac muscles are alienated from the blood that the heart itself pumps. Limbs are amputated when their oneness with the rest of the body is ruined beyond repair. Alienation is the generic pattern of ill-health. Hence, ‘relationship’ is a core concern in spirituality, with the relationship of Jesus and the Church as its paradigm. The Church is the Bride of Jesus. She is also the Body of Jesus. Christ and Church are ‘one flesh’, so to speak. Love alone can safeguard this oneness. When the foundation shifts from love to power the very health and wholeness of the church is imperilled.
To the insane, though, this unhinging from purpose is apt to seem a privilege. Ironically, this only underlines the need to be counterbalanced with principled resistance. Religious zeal, as Jonathan Swift wrote in A Tale of a Tub, is tantalisingly close to madness.
Jesus is our model for Christian obedience. He ‘perfected obedience’ (Phil.2:5-8). That obedience operated in the matrix of ‘My Father and I are one’ (St. John 10: 30) For that, he was labelled and condemned as a religious rebel. This conundrum is native to Christianity. So, the question as to what obedience should amount to, and what it should not, is of critical importance in the present-day context. More so, when it is posited in the sacramental context.
Jesus’s obedience was focused on knowing and doing the Will of God. So he taught his disciple to pray, ‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’. That obedience ran into a head-on collision with the authority of the then religious Establishment. The conflict that paved the way to the Cross of Calvary was the conflict between two contrary models of obedience: one mistaking the other for disobedience. The sure sign of spiritual disarray is that obedience to God comes to be perceived as rebellion against religion. This has the potential to caricature the Son of God as an infidel!
This brings us to the ‘spirituality’, if you like, of Gandhian civil disobedience, which he derived mostly from Henry David Thoreau. (So, civil disobedience is Christian in its genesis.) Gandhi counterpointed the duty to disobey the will of the coloniser to the duty to be free human beings. Disobedience was not, to him, an end in itself. Nor did he mean it to be unleashed indiscriminately. The imperative to disobey is an awful one. It can bring persons and societies to the precipice of peril. So, it has to be exercised with fear and trembling, compelled by the duty to not bend one’s knees, as Tagore said, before insolent might. Gandhi ensured this by heeding the Inner Voice. Disobedience without obedience to the Inner Voice is mere rebellion. Spiritually valid disobedience is higher obedience to the Spirit: the still, small Voice that speaks within us.
That was akin to the metaphysic of obedience at work in Jesus. Habitual and unthinking compliance with whatever is dictated from seats of power amounts to slavery, not obedience. It was this sort of obedience that made a misguided mob shout two thousand years ago: ‘Crucify him!’ They shouted with full-throated ease, precisely because they ‘knew not’ what they were made to do. Spiritual obedience is illumined by the light of true understanding; whereas worldly obedience discounts it as an impious extravagance.