Bible Study

From the Community of Saints to the Community of Friends

Prayer

Gracious parent God,

We thank you for your word which is indeed the light for our paths. Guide us with the counsel of your spirit as we meditate upon your word. In Jesus’ name we pray.

Amen

Greetings to one and all in the name of our friend and saviour Jesus of Nazareth! When I thought of preaching the sermon on a difficult theme like loving our enemies I thought of starting it with a very concrete picture of it from our Indian situation. And as my search continued I came across an article written by Arundhati Roy, the renowned writer and brave activist, which appeared in one of the issues of the news magazine Outlook dated 29^th march, 2010. The article titled “Walking with the Comrades” is a thrilling narration of her befriending encounter with the members of the armed resistant movement in the central India, usually named as the Naxal threat or the Maoist rebellion. Her journey into the jungles of Dantewada the epicenter of the so called Maoist movement in the state of Chhattisgarh was much risky at the same time much rewarding as a great learning experience. Her journey to the meeting with the greatest “internal security threat of India started at Raipur” the capital city of the state. She was informed to be greeted by somebody from the group at Jagadalpur bus stand the district headquarters to which Dantewada belongs. The understanding conveyed on a type written note to identify the meeter was that the person will have a cap, Hindi Outlook magazine and bananas in his hands. And the Password: “Namashkar Guruji.” She was well in time for her appointment, waiting with the camera, red tika on the forehead and a small coconut in her hand, the features suggested for her easy identification by the group. And after some time there appeared a young boy and asked her whether she is the person going in. There was no greeting “namaskar guruji” as it was expected. The boy took out a note out of his pocket and extended it to Roy; it said “Outlook nahin mila” (couldn’t find outlook). And the bananas; the poor boy said he ate them as he got hungry. What a sarcastic yet thoughtful way of presenting the greatest security threat of India. Who are these people, whom we name along with the popular media, the government, the politicians and the police as the Maoists, the greatest security threat and the enemies of the country, to be exterminated without considering any other option of interacting with these people. They are none other than the ordinary villagers as we see in the pictures projected on the screen. Arundhati says the predominant thoughts of their minds are not about war and killing, and they are not nihilists either as we often think of them, but they are people who are very passionate about the life in their tribal dwellings. In her few days life within the jungle, she depicts how inspiring and refreshing the general ambience of the jungle of Dantakaranya was, which was full of activities to sustain life, a life threatened to be extinguished by the mega mining projects. Arundhati puts up reasons why she supports this movement even though it has a lot of violent repercussions. She says, “I am not supporting violence. But I am also completely against contemptuous atrocities."  What about the possibility of a Gandhian way of protest? Her answer to the guardians of peace goes like this, “Gandhian way of opposition needs an audience, which is absent here. People have debated long before choosing this form of struggle." She is much against severing the present struggles with the history of resistance of the tribals of central India that even predates Mao. She would like to link it with the history of the Ho, the Oraon, the Kols, the Santhals, the Mundas and the Gonds tribes, who have rebelled several times in history against the British, against the zamindars and moneylenders over their contemptuous treatment of the tribal people.

The rebellions were cruelly crushed, many thousands killed, still the killing goes on, but the people were never conquered.  The Language of genocide the media, the police and even the church leaders use like “Maoist infested”, reflects our lack of sensitivity and uncritical animosity, suggesting any infestation should be terminated. What made Arundhati to swim against the current of a consensual political opinion that, the Maoists in Dantewada and elsewhere have to be finished with. I think, in short spell, it is because of a very genuine passion for life.

Why did Jesus expect something impossible from us? That is to love our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us. Some say it is to drive us into despair by proving how incapable we are of satisfying God’s righteous demands. Was it a strategy then, like many of our mission strategies are, to win over our opponents, who hates and persecutes us? Or was it a humanitarian ideal meant to be used often in rhetoric, but seldom or never in practice? All these are improbable wild guesses for those who know who Jesus was. If it is so, how should this be interpreted in situations where we find our life is threatened by terrorism, extremism, communalism and so on?

The socio-religious life in Palestine in Jesus’ time was acted out in different complex planes. There were devout Jews, who stuck on to the Torah in all occasions of disaster and crises. They were expecting a retaliation on the enemies of the religion as God in God’s perfect justice is not going to spare the enemies. Even the perfection of the God was, for them very much related to the strict judgement God is going to unleash upon the evil doers. They too find their perfection only when they deal strictly with the enemies of their religion. There were people who were declared ceremonially unclean and they stood outside the perfect observances of the perfect religion. The tax collectors were despised by the loyal Jewish population because of their unpatriotic job and their constant contact with the Gentiles. The gentiles were ascribed with a sort of essential imperfectness, as they were not ritually perfect, as they could not fulfill the demands of the torah in their day to day lives. Thus the first century Jewish religious leadership indulged in a sense of perfection, which they could not find in persons with belongingness to any other cultural and religious communities. They were a community of saints with very limited contacts with a world of imperfect beings out side.

Jesus’ life and practices in Galilee challenged this notion of perfection of the cultic leadership in a very bold way. Jesus redefines the whole concepts of God, religion, love and enemy on the basis of a new organic vision of life, which was his faith response to the ethical exigencies of the time. The Matthean Jesus defines the religion as simply as the love of God and the neighbour, the fundamental ethical practice on which all other relationships depend. For Jesus love is not something to be grasped as a utilitarian principle, where it benefits the person who loves because he pleases the person whom he loves. But for Jesus love is our positive and creative openness to life in all its varying forms. In other words it is the passion for life. Some one has to start seeing his/her enemy in the light of life. Jesus further tells that the act of loving your enemies make you the children of God. To become a child of God is to participate in the divine nature. Here Jesus draws the picture of God, which is not based on God’s abstract moral perfection, but on concrete indiscriminate goodness. When God is thought as a moral perfection, God appears to withdraw from the sinful worldly affairs, but when God is thought as indiscriminate goodness, God appears to involve very actively in the material world to share life with all without any reservation. This is the difference that Jesus intends to make that by conceiving God as indiscriminate goodness, he conceives a religion which is indiscriminately good and by doing that he expects the followers of that religion to be indiscriminate goodness.

I know I cannot stop my homily here, without addressing one more probing question. Does indiscriminate goodness mean a humble submission to all the injustices we face? The scripture portion read to us today is the culmination of Jesus’ admonition starts in verse 38. Most difficult verse comes in verse 39, that is, turn your left cheek to the person strikes you on your right one. For Jesus turning the other cheek was an act of symbolic resistance whereby some one invites the striker for other respectful means of interactions than the present contemptuous one.  Differences usually frighten us, we fear that we may not be able to manage the differences. For the Jews whatever things not conforming to their religious practices and cultic values were irreconcilable and hence their enemies. But Jesus never seemed to have frightened by the differences and always thought of them as reconcilable, which he encountered in his mission. When he was put in situations to encounter people like the Syro-Phoenician woman, he could really avoid the temptation of dealing contemptuously with them. Jesus’ initial words affirming the Jewish ethnocentrism was a slap on the woman’s face and she turns the other cheek by saying that there are other respectful ways of interactions that are possible between them. He was transformed by her faith to see in her the perfection of the perfect God, which he proclaimed in public without any hesitation. He stoops down from the halo of a Jewish Rabbi to be a friend and companion of ordinary people like her. The tribals in Dantewada by offering their bodies to be blown up by the sophisticated weapons of the Indian military invites the governments and the public for interactions which may really affirm the sanctity of their life in the tribal dwellings.

The church by analyzing her missionary experience of the past is today overwhelmed by the feeling that what we need to do at this juncture is not a missionary practice, which recruits people to the club of saints by considering their respective cultures as worthless. But what we need to do today is to create communities of friends which transcend all human made divisions existing amidst us on the basis of caste, gender, religion and cultures. Friends, as Christian ministers undergoing training in a theological college our responsibility is to take initiatives for creating communities of friends where the differences of the people are reconciled, but never cancelled. We can definitely start it here from this college. Let us open our clenched fists and release all the thoughts of self righteousness and get engulfed by the vision of divine life, which throbs in every living being. Let the love for life prompt us to endeavour this precarious yet meaningful mission in our times.

Amen

 (Sermon done at Gurukul Chapel on 11th August, 2010.)