By Valson Thampu
Indian Christians appreciate that the PM bothered to greet them on Good Friday. I remember an edition of Modi’s man ki baath a few weeks ago in which he quoted an instance from the life of Jesus, highlighting the latter’s respect and compassion for the poor. I rejoice each time Modi affirms his commitment to the poor of this land.
I also remember, while serving as the principal of St. Stephen’s College in Delhi, being faced with the painful dilemma of having to comply with the government instruction to observe Christmas Day (December 25) as a working day, in order to celebrate it as good governance day. The excuse? December 25 is Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s birthday.
I remember too five churches in Delhi being vandalized, allegedly by Hindutva brigades, soon as NDA-2 came to power at the Centre.
Also, the disruption of an innocuous prayer session in a church in Gorakhpur quite recently.
So, it is eminently appropriate that Modi greets the Christian community in India on the occasion of Good Friday. The name -“Good” Friday- is a trifle misleading; for it is a day of epic and unmerited suffering. But Jesus was not suffering for the sake of Christians alone; but for the sake of humankind as a whole.
That includes Modi as well as the Hindutva brigade, which my fellow Christians forget at times. We are under obligation to love even our enemies. (That is tantamount to rejecting the idea of enmity lock-stock-and-barrel!).
I remember organizing a pilgrimage of compassion to Gujarat in 2002, when that state, under Modi’s watch, was reeling under riots. I visited Sonia Gandhi, as I did Vajpayee (for whom I still have much respect), to secure their endorsements.
Sonia was surprised that I, a Christian priest, should be so troubled and affected by the riots that I was willing to risk my life in order to reach out to the shattered and beleaguered Muslims in Gujarat. I told her that I am not a Christian if I do not empathize with, and feel in my whole being, the pain of all my fellow human beings, irrespective of who they are. She respected that and gave me her endorsement then and there.
A similar thing happened in an unexpected quarter. Swami Agnivesh and I co-authored a book on Gujarat riots titled Harvest of Hate. This was published by Rupa & Co. Vishnu Hari Dalmia, who was at that time the national president of VHP, was upset by this publication. He contacted me on phone and asked me to keep off Gujarat.
We met later, quite unexpectedly, in a media event. That gave me the occasion to explain to Vishnu ji that the core of the biblical faith is universal and sacrificial love. I opened my heart to him and he was convinced that I was sincere to the tip of my nails. His attitude towards me changed. We became excellent friends. Thereafter not a Christmas or Easter passed, as long as I was in Delhi, without Vishnu ji sending me a bouquet early in the morning.
Hand on heart, I can vouchsafe that the hostility that today prevails between religious communities is rooted entirely in ignorance. We cannot “know” each other in truth and then hate each other. The pity is that we are aliens and strangers to each other, even though we are fellow Indians. Rather than remove this huge hurdle of alienation from the country, agents of darkness are aggravating and glorifying it.
Spirituality, as known in every religious tradition, is love. Love is light: the light to see the other, especially the worth of those who are with us, or near us. “Love your neighbor as yourself” Jesus said. Neighbor is near-dwelle
If my spirituality does not burn within me and produce the light by which I see my “neighbors” –be they Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, or atheists and death-dealing hate-mongers- as my brothers and sisters, the light of spirituality is not in me. Then, rather than being the light of the world, I spread darkness in the world. This is, unfortunately, the reality today. The worst is that we think we serve our respective gods, smaller than our own petty egos, by doing so.
Hate is today the preferred default option; especially for the keepers and defenders of religion.
Hate thrives in ignorance. Hate is like certain types of bacteria that proliferate in twilight or semi-darkness. There are some bacteria, by the way, that thrive in heat and a few that are at home in highly concentrated acid! They are called acidophiles.
Human beings are, I am told, ethically and epistemologically superior to bacteria. So, here are a few things that, perhaps, our Prime Minister does not know and did not know when he greeted Christians on Good Friday. I shall only bullet-point a couple of them.
At the heart of Good Friday -the day Jesus was crucified for being innocent- is the total collapse of man’s justice delivery system. A man was tried, found to be utterly innocent and condemned to death. (You think this could happen then and not now?
Surely you have heard of Satyam Babu in the Ayeesha Murder case. Totally innocent, he spent 8 years in jail. Just Google “Innocent people punished” and see the materials that pop up!) I would request Modi to pay his tributes, next time, not to Jesus but to a man called Graham Staines who was burned alive in Manoharpur in 1999. He too was killed, as Sister Rani Maria in Indore was, for being a friend of the poor.
Good Friday signals a vehement rejection of the old doctrine, “a tooth for a tooth”. So, if certain Hindutva mouths brag about exacting “a jaw for a tooth” –never mind whose jaw- it mocks the spirit of Good Friday.
What makes this Terrible Friday so very good is that it signals the affirmation and ascendancy of love over hate and cruelty. On the Cross Jesus faces man’s incapacity to love. When love departs it leaves behind its specter, which we call hate. We hate each other only because we are made for love.
Hate is ruined love, or love gone mad. This makes us inwardly miserable. We treat that misery with outward celebrations of hate. When we boast of hate we are only saying, “We want to love; but we can’t. This is all we are capable of. So, take it.”
So, merely greeting Christians on Good Friday without a commitment to what this radically transforming event means in human predicament and history, is to unwittingly discredit it. It is because we separate meaning from the symbolism of events that they shrink into insignificance.
Will the people of India, every one, irrespective of money, religion or region, get justice? Ensuring this honors Good Friday.
Here is the second issue, which has a touch of profound irony about it. Cross is about coming together! You can’t crucify without coming together, can you? Tragically, in hatred and cruelty we are closer each other than we are in normal circumstances. That is the measure of the degradation we have suffered. In the brave, bold world we have created, all life-sustaining values look alien and repugnant.
We are social creatures. So, we cannot but be close to each other. But we don’t have the spiritual maturity and wealth of heart to manage the challenges of proximity. People think that coping with loneliness is the greatest challenge in the world. No, not at all. It is coping with nearness. More people are killed by proximity than by loneliness. (99% of the crimes committed involve proximity). War is not a state of loneliness but of perverse and frenzied proximity.
Why is unity such a crucial issue for all nations? Of course, we can mistake unity for uniformity and kill our need to be together with the sword of homogenization. Unity issues from love; whereas uniformity or homogenization is premised on hate.
Surely, unity is an issue no one, especially the prime minister of a sub-continent as diverse and varied as India is, can by-pass. How do we promote our national unity and oneness? By propagating hate and homogenization? Or by accepting each other, wart and all, as members of the family called Bharat?
Jesus dies again and again whenever injustice and cruelty are inflicted on innocent human beings. The Jesus I know weeps over the Dalits who are killed under the pretext of gau raksha. Also, when poor farmers commit suicide out of sheer panic-stricken helplessness.
Jesus continues to suffer with all those are at the wrong end of the man-held stick called law. Jesus agonizes each time that people, out of sheer ignorance and prejudice, hate and hurt each other and gloat over it.
Good Friday is “good” because it validates love. The Indian Christian community feels happy at being loved and remembered by the PM. They would be happier when the PM remembers the poor and the oppressed of this land and protects them against the cruelties hatched by organized loveless-ness.