Mutholil George S J
Curia Generalizia, Rome

‘And Saul said, “Who are you Lord”?
The Lord said, ‘I am Jesus, who you are persecuting’ (Acts 9:5).
Just as Paul was knocked down to realize that his persecution of Christians was persecution of Jesus himself, these reflections are an invitation to see the enormous suffering of the Indians today and to see them as continuation of the passion of Christ.
In reflecting on the passion of Christ and the people, I use the simple advice of Saint Clare to Sr.Agnes, ‘Gaze, Consider, Contemplate and Imitate Jesus’

Gazing and Considering
I begin with my own inner circle. I see an enormous pool of suffering around. A family that struggles with terminal illness, another with addiction, yet another with family conflicts, another with financial troubles and it continues. At times, it feels like an inundation of sufferings. For many of those whom I know, it takes many a herculean effort to keep their heads above the flooding water.
My own state, ‘God’s own country’, has become a land of killing smoke, polluted waters, conflictual social life, corrupt political systems and cynicism of the unimaginable kind. The arrogance in the air is suffocating. The insensitivity to the poor citizen is unparalleled. What Vivekananda called Kerala in 19th century seems to be coming back. ‘A madhouse’.
Bereft of any gripping vision or capable leadership, polemic in nature, arrogant to a fault, the Church in Kerala is becoming everyday a laughing stock for everyone, promoting Islamophobia and projecting sectarian community needs to be the whole world they are living in. The speed and eagerness with which the Church hierarchy ‘orders and commands’ reminds one of the old saying, ‘the last act of a dying organisation is the improvement of its rulebook’.
India! A land of huge contradictions. A few indicators to see the precarious situation.
India is the fifth largest economy in the world. As per the Reserve Bank of India, ‘at current prices and exchange rates, India will be USD 3.7 trillion economy in 2023, maintaining its lead over the UK’
Now, let us open our eyes and look around the India we know. It is a land of the largest poor in the world. ‘ As per UN records, the number of people living below the poverty line in India decreased by 415 million between 2005-06 and 2019-21. However, India still has the world’s highest number of poor at 228.9 million, followed by Nigeria.
Who are the poor? They are the tribals, the migrants, the fisher folk, in other words those on the margins. We can easily forget them. They don’t come into the mainstream of life or the media.
On a recent trip to the states of Jharkhand, I was shocked to see large stretches of roads and surrounding areas covered by dust. There was nothing but dust in the air. The trucks carrying coal or rocks just added to the dust. Hills are flattened. Fertile agricultural fields are dug into deep lakes of coal. Hills are ravished for minerals. The poor tribals and villagers who are the real owners are driven out. Nobody can question. The Government sides with the corporates who have no other motive than profit.
Just one evidence. During the Covid pandemic, the rich men of India became hugely richer. In 2921 CNN reported that ‘as Indians struggle to live on a few dollars a day, the country’s ultra-wealthy have gotten even richer and more influential, as their combined fortunes have soared by tens of billions of dollars in the last year (2020). Mukesh ambani is worth more than $80 billion, some $15 billion more than a year ago…’ Remember this was when the poor migrants were sprayed with pesticides and were not allowed to travel, and left to starve. Re-imagine some of the scenes of the migrants who tried to move during the Covid lockdown in India, you see the passion of Jesus re-lived in all its intensity.
The passion of Christ is lived most intensely by the Human Rights defenders languishing in Indian jails. Names like Late Fr. Stan Swamy, Apoorvanand, Sudha Bhardwaj, Sidhik Kappen and hundreds of others should make us reflect on what is happening to our nation .
Similarly, the other under trials in Indian Jails are living the passion of Christ every day. As per National Crime Records Bureau(NCRB), of the 554,034 prisoners, 427,164 or 77 per cent were undertrials in 2021. This was a 14.9 per cent increase from 2020. Not only is the number of under trials increasing , the capacity of jails to hold prisoners has also been exceeded. Remember every under trial is a living human being sharing the passion of Christ.
One can go on. Let me finally point to what is happening to Democracy in India. In a very recent article in New York Times, Nicholas Kristoff said, “Sweden’s V-Dem Institute, in a new report, listed India not as a democracy but as an “electoral autocracy” ranking 108th among 179 countries in its electoral democracy index. “It’s very scary what’s happening,” said Bunker Roy, founder of Barefoot College, one of India’s most celebrated rural development initiatives. “I think we’re going into authoritarianism.”
Think of the Detention centres in Assam; recall the states where vigilantism is active. Recall the faces of the victims of cow rakshaks and ‘anti-conversion’ activists, you have the story of a day-to-day passion of Jesus narrated.

A call to contemplation
While my narration above has been sketchy and random, the invitation is obvious.
Can this Paschal week be an invitation for every Indian, especially the Indian Christian to contemplate the multiple levels of suffering of the ordinary citizen of India, including himself and herself, and feel like Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane? Can you and me cry, ‘Lord, why have you forsaken me/us?’
This paschal week, can every Christian as he or she listens to the passion narratives, juxtapose those scriptural narratives with the above stories of living passion and contemplate, allowing the Lord to talk to us, to inspire us and to transform us.
Contemplation leading to Action
St. Ignatius of Loyola professed the concept of being contemplatives in action. The contemplation on the passion of Christ in our contemporary world calls us to action. Let me articulate some of the priorities for us in the above socio-political context that we live in.

Call to be prophetic in word and living
Prophets are never liked the public or the authorities. They dare to say the truth, that the emperor is naked. Added to the contemporary situation is the element of fear. Anyone who opposes the authorities are incarcerated or haunted. In this terribly fearful context of the country, we need prophetic voices, men and women who are not afraid to call out the truth. Or like the courageous journalist Faye D’Souza once said, people who are not overly concerned about ‘I have got a family you see…I can’t speak out like you’. In a critical time like this as we celebrate the passion of Jesus, we need to acquire qualities of a prophets, the least being the courage to talk truth.

Practising compassionate love around us
In a highly polarised and polarising world, where even the Christian churches seem to be active in promoting division than unity, can our contemplation on the passion of Jesus lead to practice of compassionate love around us?
The primary call is, to quote St Clare once again, ‘to become vessels of God’s compassionate love for others’. What marks contemporary society is a severe lack of compassionate love. May be modelling on the civil government, even the church seems to rely on populism, polarisation and post truth. (Moises Naim). Come to think of it, many of the burning problems of the church and the world could be handled by a dose of compassionate love and dedication to truth. The call to everyone, not just believers, is a call to genuine compassionate love.
Karen Armstrong, the author of 12 Steps to a Compassionate life , said, “I think it’s always been a struggle to be compassionate. It’s a struggle to our dying day, because we like to put ourselves first. Religions have always stressed that compassion is not only central to religious life, it is the key to enlightenment and it the true test of spirituality. But there have always have been those who’d rather put easier goals, like doctrine conformity, in place. We’ve made religion simply a matter of believing a set of doctrines – so much so that we call religious people “believers”. The practice of compassion is left far behind.”

Imitating Jesus
As St. Clare reminded us as you gaze upon, consider and contemplate the Passion of Jesus, not only in his life on the earth, but also in history today, around us, let us have the courage to imitate Jesus in his passion. Jesus allowed himself to fully experience the pain, cry out, groan, but refused to despair, and most importantly he foresaw the power of his passion to fashion a new life , a resurrected life.
May the contemplation of the Passion of Jesus in his earthly life and today, lead us to hope and courage, to live like Jesus, in total self-giving.