Valson Thampu

A.N Radhakrishnan, the BJP candidate in the Thrikkakkara by-election, has made an interesting revelation. A Christian priest in the constituency wept on his shoulder and asked, ‘Who will defend us?’ A sudden wave of compassion rose in the votes-wooing aspirant. He said, ‘I will’. So, Christians in Kerala can now rest in peace and sleep secure. We have a saviour in Radhakrishnan. Never mind that our fellow Christians in the neighbouring state of Karnataka are tormented by Radhakrishnan’s party.
The priest in this episode is not a stand-alone silo of insecurity. He reflects the general outlook of insecurity embraced in varying degrees by churches in Kerala. What makes this significant is that of all states in the Indian mainland, it is in Kerala that Christians are most secure. Yet, many among us choose to be in fear psychosis. Psychosis indicates a failure in social adaptation. Ecclesial psychosis is symptomatic of a sub-spiritual disposition to the given social and political context. It betokens illness, not health.
How we relate to the world is crucial in biblical spirituality. We are called to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world. We cannot, hence, live in world-despising escapism or fear psychosis. Of course, the world is difficult and dangerous. But we are required to love the world, all the same. Love can insure us against distorting truth; for love is the light of truth. The corruption of love into hate activates a penchant to embrace falsehood preferentially. The irony is that spirituality is the antidote precisely against this malady! The fact that such fears seem plausible to us does not mean that they are real. Rather, it proves that ‘the truth is not in us’.
Jesus sent his disciples out on their missions as ‘sheep among wolves’. They were to be innocent as doves and subtle as serpents. That is to say, they were to be neither doves nor serpents separately; but both together and at once. It means that being the dove and the serpent, in the holistic mode, means being more than both separately or alternatingly. In holism, the whole is greater than the sum of the constituent parts. A higher state, with emergent properties, comes into being.
The worldly perceive the world in terms of ‘doves vs. serpents’. We too do the same, so long as our outlook is worldly. Those who are good to us are doves. Those who are inconvenient are serpents. Put differently, he who is not with us, or is different from us, is against us. The world knows only two ways: the way of those who are for us, and the way of those who are against us. Spirituality belongs to none of the two. It is the ‘third way,’ the way of Jesus.
Consider, in this regard, the stark contrast between Jesus and the Judaic religious establishment. The latter divided the world into Jews and gentiles. This division became the seed of enmity in perpetuity between Jews and gentiles. How much the Jews suffered from this, right down to the Holocaust, is too well-known to be recounted. When I, as a Christian, read Holocaust literature, I experience a painful ambivalence. I feel terribly sorry that it, the unthinkable, happened. But, I also feel sorry that the Jews contributed to it in their own way. It might seem cruel to say so. But the truth needs to be faced even if it hurts.
We know that Luther and Calvin, among many other pious souls, endorsed the persecution of the Jews. They did so because the Jews crucified Jesus. But what they did not realize was that the in-principle crucifixion of Jesus will continue in Christendom so long as the Judaic religious mindset continued. Let me explain.
What does the Cross of Jesus mean? Had Jesus accepted the traditional Judaic way he could have been the greatest of High Priests. Had Jesus taken to the path of worldly power, he could have been the Caesar of Rome. Jesus chose the third way. He said, ‘I am the way’ (Jn.14:6). That way is the way of truth and life. It may seem to many too terrible a thing to say, but it needs to be stated still, if we dare to be followers of Jesus. The way we choose as Christians is ever apt to fall short of ‘truth and life’, against which we need to remain vigilant.
This is easy to see. Violence runs like a red thread through the tapestry of church history. Violence thrives through untruth. Insecurity is its flip-side. We cannot resort to violence and live in security. America, the foremost superpower in the world, is also the least secure society, domestically and internationally. Americans cannot travel in peace overseas. American children are not secure in their schools. We choose the path of violence, as Caiaphas the High Priest did, not accidentally, but deliberately. The crucifixion of Jesus is an unavoidable consequence of that ‘religious’ choice. Every form of violence is violence, first and foremost, against reality.
The Way of Jesus rejects polarisation and categorisation. He transcended categorisations of every kind: Jew vs. Samaritan, saint vs. sinner, friend vs. foe, man vs. woman, tax-collector vs. zealot, purity vs. pollution, and so on. He understood spirituality as the discipline of wholeness; that is, understanding reality in terms of its wholeness. We chop up situations, life itself, into separate compartments, guided by expediency alone, and read each part as per the mental conditioning, skewed by preconceptions, we have imbibed. Delivering human beings from this mental prison is basic to biblical Christianity. Enmity is entirely a product of the fragmentation of reality, which breeds the worldly logic of ‘us vs. them’, which is the Hindutva creed. It is quite significant, in this light, that some, if not all, church leaders feel a sense of affinity to the Hindutva camp.
So long as we entertain the worldly, polarised idea of reality, as against the holistic spiritual vision –the truth that the world is established on God-centred oneness- we cannot believe that Jesus is the Son of God, or our Saviour. This makes us look for alternative saviours. All through history, they have abounded, and responded in wolfish readiness. Our present predicament is nothing new. The historical church has existed in the wilderness between Jesus and Caesar, between the Spirit and the Sword, between truth and falsehood. We cannot deny or delete history. There is no gain in doing so. It only shuts the door against our repentance and regeneration.
When our spiritual robustness is compromised, the focus of our life shifts from inner intimacy with God through Christ – the well-spring of enduring stability and coherence – to worldly props. We begin to believe that we are in a jungle where wild animals roam, against which we need to defend ourselves with wilder beasts. This might seem right till you ask St. Francis of Assisi, who’d say, ‘Well, what manner of Christians are you that do you cannot teach wolves to pray with you? Or, think you, that running with the wolves and sharing their spoils is your way; and your way, the Way of Jesus?