• Valson Thampu

I have heard it said ever and anon, ‘Christianity has been in India for two thousand years. Yet we are only a little over two per cent of the population!’ Why so?
Well, it is certainly not because resources, opportunities and mission-and-conversion enterprises have been lacking. Surprisingly, it is not even because the way of Jesus lacks attractiveness to the soul of India. Rather, the contrary. As a Brahmin colleague of mine in St Stephen’s College told me years ago: ‘Among the founders of religion, it is Jesus Christ who fascinates me most. But I do not know why.’ Remember Swami Vivekananda’s words? If he were in the place of the woman in the Gospel of Luke (chapter7) he’d have, he said, washed the feet of Jesus not with tears ‘but with his heart’s blood’. The highest compliment that Gandhi could confer on C. F. Andrews (CFA) was to call him ‘Christ’s Favourite Apostle’ (CFA). To him, Jesus was present in India’s struggle for freedom through Andrews.
Mother Teresa’s mission raised two contrary responses. The communal elements in the Hindu fold sought to discredit her by attributing ulterior motives to her outreach of compassion to the destitute and dying. In doing so they acknowledged, albeit unwittingly, the power of her appeal to the people at large. And that power stemmed from her incarnating the compassion of Jesus in the soil of India. The unprejudiced among the Hindus, on the contrary, hailed her with affection and appreciation bordering on veneration.
As a rule, it is the ‘charismatic’ power of a faith -not its institutional mechanism laden with rules and prescriptions, attitudes and affluence- that attracts those external to it. Going by the evidence in Acts of the Apostles, the exponential growth of the early churches was due to this charismatic impact. There is a world of difference between Peter speaking in the fullness of the Spirit, and a Gospel tract being handed over to a non-believer. The crucial question here is, ‘What does it mean to communicate the Good News ‘in the power of the Spirit’?
The Spirit, as per Jesus’s teaching, is wholly free of human agendas and motives. The Spirit is like the wind. It blows where it pleases. It is immune to man’s control and dispositions. What corrupts religious enterprises is the covert agendas lurking in them; traces of sanctimonious fraudulence by which it is, in truth, not what it passes for. This may go undetected for a while, but is bound to be discerned and decried sooner or later. That is not all. Ulterior motives make individuals and initiatives blind and insensitive to the aches and pains of the human condition. The hallmark of Jesus was his intuitive and proactive oneness with them. He was the living bread of life for all. One cannot be so, without ‘denying the self’, or renouncing expectations of gains. Only by denying the self can we succeed in dismantling the walls that divide us from others. The power of the holy is the power of selflessness. Nothing speaks more powerfully to human beings than someone being interested in them entirely for their own sake. That was the power and affirmation of the Cross. The Cross of Calvary raises self-transcendence to its ultimate level.
Religion-as-Establishment tends to be bureaucratic and legalistic. It gets petrified by the will of man. As against the metaphysical sweep and spontaneity of the Spirit, the bureaucratic tends to be legalistically exoskeletal. Words stifle spirit. Law takes precedence over love. Law divides. Love embraces even the enemy. It is hospitable to the alien and the outcast(e). Hospitality of the spiritual kind is love in action shorn of the shackles of otherness as well as covert motives. The bureaucratic is averse to risk. It is like the grain of what that refuses to be sown. It is the symbolic counterpart of the incarnational.
The time has come to re-think how the church can be made spiritually responsive to the lived realities amidst which it stands. Church is meant to be an incarnation of God’s love for the world at large. Nothing else can make it authentic. Truth is the operating principle of love. And truth in the religious context means the absolute identity of appearance and reality. The opposite of truth is not untruth, but hypocrisy. People respond to love. They cannot but so respond. But love must begin at home. It is in this respect that churches in general have been lacking. Jesus has called us to be a community of love. There is only one Commandment: love one another. But that, alas, is the one Commandment beyond us.
If Christianity stays stunted in India, it is largely due to the inability of Christians to love one another. That spiritual disability exposes itself to the world as chronic Christian disunity. To the world we look anything but redeemed. Not surprisingly, the invitations we air to others to come to the redeeming love of Christ evokes scepticism and, at times, sarcasm. Surely, there are better ways to witness Jesus’s love for the world than by being a community of inherent and incurable lovelessness.