QUESTION : Why do you think Christ is the need of India? – Fr. Jose K.A.

ANSWER: Jacob Parappally MSFS

During the Advent Season and the Christmas time it is a relevant question: why is Christ a necessity in India? This question needs to be raised about the relevance of Christ not only in India. We can ask further, why is Christ a necessity at all for the entire world. The New Testament gives sufficient reasons for the hominization of the Word or Logos who is God for the world or for the entire humanity. St Paul tells us: But when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons (Galatians 4:4-5). John the Evangelist shares the experience of the early Christian community after experiencing him as Lord and God and tells us the reason for the hominization of the Word or the incarnation of the Word. The gospel according to John says: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him (John 3:16).
It is the faith-experience of all Christians that Jesus Christ is a necessity for the entire world because it cannot save itself from the situation of misery and misfortune and humans cannot become truly humans by their own effort. By God becoming human, humans are enabled to fulfil their vocation to be authentically humans. The integral liberation which Jesus Christ brought to the world is all the more needed for India where a large number of its people still cannot live and fulfill their destiny as humans due to the religious, social and economic discrimination, oppression and injustice.

India needs Christ for Integral Transformation
India is the entire world in miniature. All the complexities, varieties of all sorts: cultural, religious, ethnic, linguistic, classes, castes, development and under-development, riches and poverty etc. are found in this country. Saints and satanic characters, those who build harmony and concordance as well as those who fragment and divide people through religious bigotry and political allegiances – all exist here side by side. But nowhere else in the world do we find such an inhuman system of discrimination as caste-system, sanctioned by religion, justified by a social hierarchical system and actually practiced everyday by the dominating castes and suffered by the dominated ones. The kingdom values Jesus preached to the people of his time and as narrated in the gospels are more needed in India than anywhere else in the world. A prominent disciple of Ram Mohan Roy and a reformer, Keshub Chander Sen, who founded the Church of New Dispensation, in one of his lectures, India Asks: Who is Christ?, says, “ At the very threshold of the inquiry, we find the ethics of Christ asking us to accept it, and give it a place in our hearts. And we readily acquire it. The sublime and marvellous ethics of Christ who can condemn, and who will not honour? Its rules of forgiveness and love, meekness, humility, charity, justice, sincerity, and simplicity, the rules of poverty, self-restraint and asceticism, constitute the highest standard of true ethics, which must find acceptance in all parts of the world. Although we are Hindus, we cannot help admiring the superior and exalted ethics which Christ brings to us. You cannot deny it, you cannot set it aside. It is from God. Your conscience attests to it. Ancient philosophy bows before it. A greater than Socrates has taught us this lofty ethical code, and we are bound for truth’s sake to accept this legacy from Christ. We have all agreed, irrespective of differences of creed and caste, as to the supremacy of the ethical law embodied in his teachings and character. …Christ as a moral teacher of the highest order, we, at this moment are ready to enshrine in our hearts. For the exemplary purity of his character, we would at once give him the heart’s allegiance and loyalty (Keshub Chunder Sen, David.C.Scott, ed, p.202). For K.C.Sen, who experienced Jesus Christ and confessed that “Unless I can live Jesus to some extent at least, I cannot talk Jesus”, the exalted ethical values which Christ taught, if practiced, can bring a positive transformation to India and to the entire world. This truth was recognized by all the Hindu reformers of the 19th century.
Ram Mohan Roy, the first Hindu reformer of the modern times, who wrote the book, The Precepts of Jesus: The Guide to Peace and Happiness, exhorts his Hindu brothers and sisters to follow the moral teachings of Jesus to lead a life of happiness and peace. His relentless fight against all superstitious practices prevalent in India like sati or the burning of widows in the funeral pyre of their husbands, the practice of idolatry and belief in a plurality of gods that take away the feelings of justice and compassion from the heart of people etc., make him follow the precepts of Jesus as the most reasonable for any human to attain true humanity. From the perusal of the New Testament, in his “long and uninterrupted researches into religious truth,” he found, he asserts, “the doctrines of Christ more conducive to moral principles, and better adapted for the use of rational beings than any other which had come to my knowledge.”
Moral principles are ingrained in the minds of humans by God. All authentic moral principles are for the harmonious living of humans in communion and to experience peace and harmony in life. Religions need to enunciate them for the practice of every believer in his or her everyday life. However, when selfish and unscrupulous human beings interpret the sublime ethical truths for their own advantage and present them as religious truths revealed by God, many adherents of religions practice them without any compunction. Even today, many people justify caste, class and gender discrimination as sanctioned by their religion. The standard answer to those who question them on this evil practice is that “It is their fate” or “It is the will of God” or in the previous birth they had committed some sins for which they are paying a price in this birth. India can justify caste discrimination on the basis of the Hindu scripture. The Purusha Sukta of Rig Veda, X, 90 says that the origin of humans was from the Primordial Purusha. “The Brahman was his mouth, of both his arms was the Rājanya made. His thighs became the Vaiśya, from his feet the Śūdra was produced.” Some scholars say that this text was added to the Rig-Veda. It is the origin of varna system. Those outside these four varnas are outcasts. Whatever positive interpretation is given to this Vedic text, generations of Hindus practiced caste discrimination. Even after the Constitution of India declared that any caste discrimination is a crime and positively affirmed the equality of all citizens, it is an undeniable fact that caste discrimination continues in all aspects of life in India. It would continue until a radical transformation takes place in the minds of all Indians. It is the Christian faith-experience that Jesus Christ can effect it in the minds of those who are open to receive him as the Lord and centre of their lives.

Kingdom Values of Christ as Kin-dom Values
When the early Christian community experienced Jesus as the Lord and God after they experienced him as alive after his death on the cross or after his resurrection they began to look back at his life as a prophet ‘mighty in deed and word’. As a prophet, he spoke with an authority unknown to his predecessors. Unlike other prophets who brought bad news to people, Jesus spoke of the good news of liberation and wholeness. He told them that this good news is of the Kingdom of God that is within them and amidst them to be recognized, accepted and celebrated. It is the kingdom of love, justice, equality, reconciliation, fellowship or communion, peace etc. Its supreme value is the sovereignty of God. If this sovereignty is not accepted the values of the kingdom can be perverted: love will not be self-emptying love, justice will not be based on right human relationships, equality of humans will not be true equality etc. The values of the Kingdom that he preached was real Kin-dom values. Kin means one’s family and relations. Everyone belongs to the family of God or, as St Paul says, “the household of God”. Unlike that of the political and religious leaders of his time, in Jesus’ words and actions there was no dichotomy. He was authenticity incarnate. With prophetic courage and conviction he denounced oppression, injustice, discrimination and dehumanization. He welcomed everyone including the so called sinners, namely, tax-collectors, prostitutes, outcasts and had table-fellowship with them because equality was a value for him. He rejected both a political and a pharisaic interpretation of the Kingdom of God, because in their interpretations of the Kingdom of God there was a hierarchical structure of society in which people were categorized as higher and lower.
The Kingdom of God which Jesus preached and revealed though his life was a real Kin-dom where there were no superiors or inferiors, higher or lower, ritually pure or impure. It was a kin-dom of sisters and brothers. In this Kin-dom what one eats does not make one impure but corruption, manipulation, discrimination of humans on the basis of caste, class, gender, ritual purity, and all other immoral or unethical behaviour and actions do. India needs Christ to challenge and transform it from being a society built on the unjust principles of homo hierarchicus and religiously sanctioned discrimination of humans on the basis of their birth and religion to a society based on the principles of human rights as enshrined in the preamble of the Indian Constitution.
All the reformers of India including Gandhi, could not free themselves completely from the inherited burden of a tradition of a discriminatory religious and social system. Their efforts to transform Indian society could have only a minimal impact on the mind of this caste-ridden society that does not treat humans as humans. In the present situation of the country with growing religious fundamentalism and political polarization, increasing poverty and misery of a large number of people in the midst of the affluence of a few rich, India needs Christ and his kin-dom values more than any time in history. Instead of Hindutva that divides India, we need Bandhutva that unites India. It is our Christian conviction that the real Bandhutva objectively realized in the Person of Jesus Jesus Christ can be accepted subjectively accepted at least through the values he lived, proclaimed and for which he died and rose again, India can attain its integral liberation. Like the remnant of Israel which hoped for the Messiah to come, the disciples of Christ can hold that eschatological hope that Christ would one day transform this fragmented society into a Kin-dom of God!