• Valson Thampu

There is a practical reason why the Bible presents God as living God. To be alive is to be able to respond. In contrast, idols, Jesus said, have eyes that see not. They are there; but not so in relation to anything beyond themselves. Idolatry is man adoring himself as God, of which Nebuchadnezzar’s idol in the book of Daniel is a mammoth prototype. Wherever jealousy and zeal – intolerance of difference- are attributed to God, idolatry is at work. Idolatry lurks in religious zeal of every kind.
There are in relation to all religions two contrary types of pieties. In their popular versions driven by wish-fulfilment, they involve idol-worship. In true worship, God is the Supreme Good; a good beyond which there is no other good. In idol-worship, self becomes the supreme good. The pious load of covetousness projected on to gods neither honours them nor reflects their nature. In using gods as the means for attaining them, ‘believers’ impose their wills on their gods, rather than seek to know their will, to be guided and ennobled. In this scheme of things, gods become ethically indifferent beings, subserving the whims and angularities thrust on them by devotees. Believers re-make gods after their own image and likeness.
A temple of unrivaled splendour for Lord Ram has arisen in Ayodhya. On the face of it, it is a stunning religious achievement; but it is also a political feat. As Christians, we feel with the protagonists of the temple movement as we would have, if we were in their shoes. But we feel also for the vanquished and displaced masjid protagonists. Both are our neighbours, whom we are to love like ourselves. That pathos is peculiar to us; and real, if we are spiritually inclined.
Consequently, a question bothers us: Is there a match between the Ayodhya temple and maryada purushottam Ram? It is, surely, a temple for Ram. But is it also a temple of Ram? ‘Maryada’ mandates adherence to righteousness, the scope of which must exceed, Jesus said, the scope of the merely lawful. So, the disciples were exhorted to ‘exceed’ the righteousness of Scribes and Pharisees. Does the righteousness of Lord Ram coincide with the scope of the temple’s legal legitimacy decreed by the Supreme Court? If the two are the same, does not law supersede the sovereignty of God: a question equally relevant to the Orthodox-Jacobite impasse in Kerala?
Religious groups of every kind and every age have modified the nature of their gods to suit their agendas, including war-making abroad and political conquests at home. Monotheism conduces better to national unity than polytheism. The early champions of India’s freedom struggle -including Shri. Aurobindo Ghosh-felt that the idea of God native to India wasn’t martial enough to fortify the land against external aggression. Now, as the Sangh Parivar spearheads ‘the second freedom struggle of India’ to establish Hindu Rashtra, it is natural that the nature of the god suitable for a project of that kind is being conceived and consolidated. It is this that the Ram mandir in Ayodhya symbolizes. It presages a piety in which religion impregnates politics, and God becomes an exalted quasi-political Totem.
This issue is not exclusive to Hindu self-assertion. It has always been present, in varying degrees and forms, in religious communities across the ages. Surely, the idea of God and humankind’s spiritual destiny unveiled by Jesus has undergone radical changes over the centuries. As early as the 4th century AD, the cross was turned into a symbol of martial prowess by Constantine to buttress his political project. He breathed his spirit into the cross: a breath different in genius to the breath of Jesus!
What about the cross of the prosperity gospel today? What kinship does it have to the Cross of Jesus: the Cross of self-denial and renunciation? See how easily and facilely the Cross is transformed into a symbol of covetous superstitions! The original Cross will not sell, it is assumed, in the market of popular religiosity today. Who wants to ‘bear’ the Cross of self-denial? And who doesn’t want to ‘wear’ the Cross as a totem of covetous wish fulfilment?
This proclivity has played it many games from the dawn of humankind’s religious consciousness; the reason Jesus insisted that God must be worshipped ‘in spirit and truth’. To do so, one has to ‘deny oneself’; for the self craves to shape God after its own nature. Not infrequently, it is the collective ego that is worshipped as the god in a national religion. The potential for violence is real and present in every cult of collective self-assertion. That insight is prefigured in a seminal form in the murder of Abel by Cain -a murder framed in worship. Herod too wanted to ‘worship’ the Babe; the scope of which was revealed soon enough through the massacre of children.
What is on display, via covetous popular religiosity, is not the nature of God, but the nature of those who use God as a tool to serve their interests. This ominous cloud of misconceived religiosity over-hangs all parochial ideas of gods. So, Jesus emphasized that God is universal. He is ‘our’ Father in Heaven; ‘heaven,’ not earthly considerations, determining the scope of ‘our’.
Hence the transition from Jesus to Holy Spirit. The age of Spirit, according to Jesus, could not commence until he left. In his flesh, he was local and limited. Clinging to him would limit believers via religious exclusivism. Spirit is universal, immune to human manipulation. No one can mould Spirit after his tastes or inclinations. To worship God in spirit is to honour God as per his true nature. What caricatures the nature of God cannot be worship, no matter in what liturgical solemnity or elaboration it is offered.
Lord Ram, as Maryada Purushotham, embraced van-vas, or banishment from the land, in voluntary compliance with ethical imperatives. It is doubtful if the same is acceptable to his politically nuanced reincarnation today. When the divine becomes a subset of power, it is the ‘different other’ that is sacrificed to national interests: a pattern common, ironically, alike to Hitler and to his foremost victims: the Jews.