Valson Thampu

Discernment is one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, though it is rarely mentioned and hardly valued by us as Christians. We covet dramatic and profitable gifts like healing, speaking in tongues, and prophecy. We discount the need for understanding and discernment. It is necessary to wonder why.
The secular counterpart to discernment is intuition, which presupposes intellectual refinement. The more culturally developed you are, the more intuitive, as well as counter-intuitive, you need to be. The capacity to make subtle distinctions is basic to this attainment. If our intellectual discipline is feeble, words like ‘labour’, ‘work’ and ‘action’ may all be synonymous to us. But, if intellectually refined like Hannah Arendt, they get semantically distinguished from each other radically.
Consider a religious analogue. For most people ‘belief’ and ‘faith’ are the same. But they aren’t. So long as we do not mind what ‘faith’ means, we can harbour the illusion that we are a people of faith, just because we happen to endorse certain articles of belief. Strictly speaking, the term ‘faith community’ is a misnomer. A community can be characterised only by belief. Faith pertains to individuals. Jesus said to those who were healed by him, ‘your faith has healed you’. If the Jews had faith, rather than belief, they wouldn’t have killed Jesus. Faith is utterly incompatible with crimes and malfeasance of every kind.
Clarity, C. S. Lewis said, is basic to godliness. How can you be vague and yet be faithful? How can you obey God, when you are unclear as to who God is, or what the will of God for you is? As Soren Kierkegaard wondered, how could Abraham be sure that it was the voice of God, and not of Satan, that commanded him to sacrifice Isaac, the son of promise?
In the secular context, being woolly-headed or outdated attracts ridicule. In the religious context, it is deemed a mark of piety. Though St Paul opposed conformity with transformation (Rom.12:2), we remain vassals to the notion that conformity, not transformation, is the spiritual norm.
I have been asked at times by my Christian students in the past, ‘how can the blood if Jesus come upon the children and grandchildren of those who were party to the Crucifixion?’ Is it just? Shouldn’t the scope of culpability be limited to the immediate perpetrators? Sadly, we have no forum -at least they don’t exist to the required extent- to address such questions.
The unease felt in this context pertains to a crucial issue: the distinction between individual and collective offences. If I act in my individual capacity alone, then, surely, it is unjust that the consequences of my offences involve others, including my near ones. As regards the latter, there is the problem of kinship. So, I involve them, willy-nilly, in my offences. This is unfair; but the unfairness of it is more on my part than on the part of the society. I betrayed my duty to be mindful of them in committing the offences involved. It is appropriate to state here that growing in the scope and reach of responsibility is an important aspect of biblical spirituality. Strictly speaking a Christian is one whose sense of responsibility covers the face of the earth. That is why we are the salt of the earth and the light of the world.
The problem of physical kinship gets aggravated a thousand fold when it comes to offences committed by those in representative communities. Unlike in the case of my offences tainting my kith and kin, this situation involves collective consent and endorsement, even if such offences are not committed under explicit consents. They involve the community their perpetrators represent. That is why the faults and foibles overlooked in individuals acting in their private capacities, assume special seriousness in the corporate or community context. What a Christian leader does, therefore, affects the entire Christian community, beyond the denomination he represents. So, when a Church leader acts or advocates a stance in public, he is not acting as a mere individual. A person in representative authority cannot succumb to common frailties, or hide behind clichés like ‘To err is human’. Nor can he flaunt the shield of, ‘Let he who is sinless cast the first stone’. It is the bounden duty of those in religious authority to be blemish-less, to an extent that no lay person is.
If Jesus were a private individual, or his mission only one of local and parochial scope, the consequences of his religiously orchestrated murder could have been limited to the perpetrators of the sacrilege. But Jesus was quintessentially universal. He was not a mere Jewish phenomenon. Neither the Jewish religious establishment, nor the secular agency of Rome, had any authority over him. His scope far exceeded the jurisdiction of both. The Crucifixion was like a local club condemning the UNO is unlawful, and initiating terrorist actions against it.
If the logic adumbrated above is valid, it also means that the scope of the life and mission of Jesus goes far beyond the confines Christendom. Jesus is quintessentially universal. We err when we relate to him, or treat him, as a parochial -or even religious- phenomenon. Clarity in regard to the universality of Jesus’s person and mission may seem subversive to status-quoist Christianity.
Jesus was acutely aware of the problem of incomprehension in the sphere of religion. On several occasions he alluded to it. In the Sermon on the Mount he does so pointedly. One may do mighty things in his name, but end up rejected as an ‘evil doer’ (Mtt.7:21-23). The problem here is one of incomprehension. These evil doers were impressive in their performances, but erred fatally in their understanding. It is necessary, hence, to be mindful of the core question that Jesus raised with his disciplines-
‘Do you understand what I have done for you?” -A simple question; but one on which our eternity hinges indeed.