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eter Kreeft in his book Jesus Shock makes a statement, “only a
live wire can shock you. A dead wire can’t.” I agree with this statement
because I had an experience of catching a dead electric wire. My memory goes
back to my childhood. We were playing ‘hide and seek’, I climbed on a tree top
and just above the tree were electric wires passing. I accidently caught one of
the three wires. I was surprised that nothing happened to me. I reasoned,
‘maybe there was a power failure at that time.’ I was not thrown out or burnt
or received a shock. My resurrection faith tells me that ‘Jesus is Alive!’ If
he is alive, the believing me should have a qualitative impact on my being a
Catholic. If not, there are possibilities that you consider Jesus as a distant
historical figure. You are born a catholic but never seriously thought over the
Jesus impact. I tried to think it over. The following is the result.
Jesus Christ is the Answer to Which Every Human Life is the Question
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‘Jesus
Christ is the answer to which every human life is the question,’ said St. John
Paul II. Scripture says that “There is salvation in on one else, for there is
no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved” (Acts
4:12). That name is ‘JESUS’. This is a bold and unique claim that Christianity
makes. My faith tells me that it has everything to do with you. The crucifixion
and death of Jesus has eternal influence on me. However, I find myself a human
being prone to error, doubts, weaknesses, sickness, death and other human
proclivities. Why do I not experience the fullness of existence? Is it because
I am free to choose when there is an offer of salvation/fullness? Why do I
still see evil in the world even when I profess that God is good? Why do people
still suffer and die? Amidst the coronavirus pandemic, human beings everywhere
are under constant fear, there is a scarcity of enough healthcare facilities,
angst, pain, sorrow, hunger, etc. Why can’t God put a stop to the pandemic
Covid-19? All these questions are connected to our human condition.
Human Condition
The characteristics and key
events that compose essentials of human existence, including birth, growth,
emotions, aspiration, conflict and mortality can be understood as our human
lot/condition.
Sometime back, a person asked
me to pray for her father because he is addicted to drinks. He had been to
several retreats and treatments, but he can’t just come out of his addiction to
drinks. She specifically asked me to pray for him because she believed he would
be eternally damned. I told her to love him as he is loved by God. He is sick
and is stuck in his addiction. Now how can a human being lift himself up? He is
created free but landed up in a situation in which he cannot lift him up. Will
God save him, grant him the grace to overcome his weakness? If the man addicted
to drinks takes his addiction till his death, is he really responsible? The
force of habit has weakened his will. That is his condition. Will he be
eternally damned? A human being endowed with reason is responsible for his
actions. And so a psychologist applying the principle, ‘every man makes the
best use of the resources available to him at a given point of time,’ would say
that the opportunities that the addict got to transform himself like retreats
and treatments would have been properly used. The principle of the psychologist
does not work if the patient is untreatable.
Innocent suffering and unjust
treatment are part of our human condition. Look at the lot of Lazarus as
portrayed in the gospel of Luke (Luke 16:19ff). Lazarus is a poor man, covered
with sores, at the gate of the rich man. He was very poor and was unable to
provide for himself. He longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the
rich man’s table. Both the rich man and the poor Lazarus received their rewards
in the afterlife – Heaven for Lazarus and Hell for the Rich man. The rich man
in his freedom would have used his abundance to ease the situation of Lazarus.
But when someone gets too cozy with what is given, it is difficult to
fundamentally opt for good. I tend to think that the freedom given to man is
tricky and difficult. It became so due to the fallen nature of human beings.
Dilemma: Man has Mastery over Nature but not Himself
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A human person is endowed with
freedom. If man is free why can’t he master himself? The predicament of man’s
condition to master himself is best expressed by Fulton Sheen in his book, The
moral Universe,
“It is one of the curious anomalies of present day civilization that when man achieves greatest control over nature, he has the least control over himself. The great boast of our age is our domination of the universe: we have harnessed the waterfalls, made the wind slave to carry us on wings of steel, and squeezed from the earth the secret of its age. Yet, despite this mastery of nature, there perhaps never was a time when man was less a master of himself. He is equipped like a veritable giant to control the forces of nature, but is as weak as a pigmy to control the forces of his passions and inclinations.”Fulton Sheen, The Moral Universe
Man is trying to get at something as
he is driven. Different psychologists in the past answered the question – what
drives man? Sigmund Freud suggested that it is his will to pleasure; his ardent
disciple Adler disagreed him and said, ‘it is will to power’; and Viktor Frankl
through his experience at the concentration camps proved that it is ‘the will
to meaning’ that drives man. If you read the confessions of St. Augustine, you
can find all the above mentioned drives – pleasure, power and meaning. But what
stands out is his being found by God or his innate drive characterized by ‘God
search’ as expressed in his own words, ‘my heart is restless until it rests in
God.’ Can a God
search drive man to be found by God? This brings us to the point of fundamental
option.
Fundamental
Option: Either Or
The fundamental option is a gradual development
of a basic orientation of one’s life either for or against God. This
fundamental option is said to be for God if one’s life is fundamentally devoted
to the love and service of others, and against God if one’s life is essentially
devoted to self-love and self-service. In the context of St. Augustine’s life, the question is, how can you opt
for God when you are a sinful man of concupiscence? This is a human
predicament. Let’s understand this predicament through the phenomenological analysis
of lust as given by St. John Paul II,
“The flaring up in man invades his senses, arouses his body, draws the
feelings along with itself, and in some way takes possession of the heart. It
causes the “outer man” to reduce the “inner man” to silence. Because passion
aims at satisfaction, “it blunts reflective activity and disregards the voice
of conscience.” Once the outer man has suffocated the voice of conscience and
given his passions license, he remains restless until he satisfies the
insistent need of the body and the senses for gratification. One might think
that this gratification should put out the fire, but on the contrary, as
experience attests, it does not reach the source of inner peace. He is only
consumed.” [Christopher West, Theology of
the Body Explained: A Commentary on John Paul II’s Man and Woman He created
Them (Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 2007), 216.]
Every sinner desires that God may dramatically
intervene to change his life. God intervened in the life of Francis of Assissi
in the Church of St. Damiano. Or rather God prepared his heart for such an
encounter. Saul became Paul through that intervention of God at Damascus, which
in turn changed the course of his life. Does this mean that they had no
problems with their daily choices and life situations? Don’t think so. They too
had to struggle. Let go and leave it to God. Their heart was prepared gradually
to opt for God. The saints allowed their passions to undergo a radical
transformation and that’s how they could desire to love as God loves. Saints
consciously searched God, found him and proclaimed him. With the treasure of
the Christian revelation, what do I make of the uniqueness of Jesus?
Uniqueness of the Christian Claim and the Necessity
to Correct the Existing Relativistic Patterns of Thinking
You hear in normal
conversations today – why do you want to have an absolute claim that ‘Jesus is
the ultimate Saviour of Human Kind? Why don’t you preach what Christ stood for
like compassion, love, peace, healing, reconciliation and Joy? Or be like
Christ and preach only when necessary as Francis of Assissi would say? After
all, all religions are finally propounding ideals that are good for humanity. Finding
yourself in a pluriverse of religions, can you digest the absolute claim of
Christianity and understand its uniqueness? For peace and tolerance, are you
still holding on to the view that ‘all ways of belief are equally valid and
that the sages believe that ‘Truth is one, the wise perceive it differently’ (‘Ekam sat viprah bahudha vadanti?). Or are you under the influence of a
relativistic mentality? Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI identified that the biggest
threat to Christianity today is ‘dictatorship of relativism’. The Christian
claim is that God has absolutely revealed himself in Jesus Christ and Jesus
Christ is our savior. Are you burdened by this conviction?[1]
You might think that claim to
absolute truth is intolerance.[2]
Not at all. Perhaps, the view of tolerance that we may have is ‘negative
tolerance’ as often seen in not saying or doing anything that might offend the
religious sentiments of other people (for the sake of not offending anyone
setting a standard of behavior for all). When you use statements like, ‘in my
personal opinion’, ‘I feel that’, ‘I sense that’, etc., you might be in the
group of relativists or in the mindset of taking caution that what you say
might not offend anyone who hears you. As against a relativistic mentality, man
is capable of truth and that the truth requires criteria for verification and
falsification. It must always be accompanied by tolerance. You might ask, how?
I find the answer in what Pope Benedict XVI writes,
“The truth comes to rule, not
through violence, but rather through its own power; this is the central theme
of John’s Gospel: When brought before Pilate, Jesus professes that he himself
is The Truth and the witness to the truth. He does not defend the truth with
legions but rather makes it visible through his Passion and thereby also
implements it” [Benedict XVI, Light of
the World The Pope, the Church, and the signs of the Times: A Conversation with
Peter Seewald (Bangalore: Asian Trading Corporation, 2010), 51].
The answer is that the Truth
is a person – Jesus Christ. Jesus makes himself visible or as he says, “All
things have been delivered to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except
the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and any one to whom the
Son chooses to reveal him” (Mat 11:27). Perhaps, the question of tolerance
arises when religion is understood as ‘man’s search for God’ (personal effort
at understanding who God is) rather than ‘God’s search for man’ (God reveals as
man can be fully understood only in the light of God who shares in human
condition).
In the multi-religious context
of India, we can easily know how each religion takes on the human condition and
speak of salvation. Buddhism would say that life is a cycle of suffering, death
and rebirth and liberation from this cycle is through the practice of the
eightfold noble truths. Hinduism with its deterministic view suggest that as
you sow, you reap.[3] Moksha/salvation is your
way up to God.
Christianity believes that
Human beings are created in the image and likeness of God, endowed with reason
and freewill. He has the capacity to either accept God and fulfill the purpose
of creation or entirely reject God. With the doctrine of Original Sin, it is
believed that everyone is prone to sin. What God does through Jesus Christ is a
rescue operation – redemption. St. Paul’s letter to the Romans tells us, “…all
have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his
grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put
forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith”
(Romans 3:23-25). God became human to raise us up. “For our sake he made him to
be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of
God” (2 Cor 5:21).
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All
those who seek truth, seek God, whether this is clear to them or not.”
-
Edith Stein
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Christianity
is revelation of God’s way down to man. Now what necessitated God to become
man, suffer, die and rise again is God’s answer to the puzzle of human
condition as expressed in the cry of St. Paul, “wretched man that I am! Who
will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ
our Lord!” (Romans 7:24, 25). St. Augustine discovered the newness of finding
God and with great conviction, he said, “Late have I loved you, beauty so old
and so new.” How did St. Augustine, who lived in the 4th century
discover the Truth of Christ? Was he not chronologically distant in history? Christ is The Timeless Truth and “all those
who seek truth, seek God, whether this is clear to them or not” (Edith Stein).
Jesus made that exclusive claim, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life” (Jn
14:6). Jesus is unique because he did not say that he found a way as Buddha or
Confucius might say. He claimed that he is God, “I AM WHO AM”. He is a
crucified Risen God. The first century Christians had the courage to die for
him. My salvation is Jesus.
Jesus is risen! The Straightforward Answer of the First Century Christians
to the Question Why they were Christians
Though Christianity was a
banned religion in the Roman Empire, it grew exponentially. The cause of this
exponential growth was the ‘Easter Effect’ as George Weigel calls in his
article, “The Easter Effect and how it changed the World.” He speaks of the Easter
effect:
“There is no accounting for
Christianity without weighing the revolutionary effect on those nobodies of
what they called “the Resurrection”: their encounter with the one whom they
embraced as the Risen Lord, whom they first knew as the itinerant Jewish Rabbi,
Jesus of Nazareth, and who died an agonizing and shameful death on a Roman
cross outside Jerusalem.”[4]
The Resurrection of Jesus
Changed everything as Jesus himself said, “Behold, I am making all things new”
(Revelations 21:5). N.T Wright, a biblical Scholar would say that ‘the answer
of the first Christians to the question why they were Christians was Jesus the
Risen Lord.’ In fact, the Easter effect changed the early Christian’s
understanding of the resurrection itself. The Jewish Christians believed in the
general resurrection of the dead but what happened to Jesus was something new.
St. Paul grasped that what happened to Jesus would happen to Christians too –
“For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be
united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:5). This insight of St.
Paul that what happened to Jesus also will happen to us grew. And this insight
is an “evolutionary leap’ in the human condition, as the Pope emeritus Benedict
XVI described in the second volume of his Book Jesus of Nazareth.
The early Christians were not
afraid to proclaim the absolute truth of the Risen Christ. Look at the
transformation brought about in the lives of individuals soon after the
resurrection. Having met the resurrected Jesus, the persecutor Saul was transformed as Paul, an ardent disciple of Christ. He proclaimed
Christ fearlessly. He regarded “everything as loss because of the surpassing
value of knowing Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:8). ‘Woe to me if I do not preach
the gospel’, such was the stand of St. Paul. The discouraged disciples going to
Emmaus were met by the resurrected Christ, were cleared off their false notions
of the Messiah, and were left with their hearts burning though the disciples
were very offensive in their speech.
What should shake you and me
out of our feeble faith is an ever fresh awareness of the eternal presence of Christ. Jesus is eternally new. He
is eternally present. I peculiarly found a newness in Christ. He is alive. HE is a live wire and there is power. He is true
to what he says, “I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).
Perhaps, in my life nothing was making any headway because I considered Jesus
as someone distant in history. Jesus though physically absent, he is ever
present. The newness of Jesus is his shock treatment to you and me. You may be
like the blind man at Bethesda, lying down sick for 38 long years, doing the
same thing over and over and expecting a different result. But you can retrace
your steps if you are willing to just blindly believe in the words of Christ,
‘get up and walk’ and sin no more. ‘I can get back’
realization of the prodigal through a thorough self-assessment of his
condition of starvation, loneliness and death may enable us to understand that
it is our wrong choices and decisions that led us to starve for the grace of
God. When we choose what is godly, we can retrace our
steps back in humility. Jesus is Alive!
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“Keep back
nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing
in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for
yourself and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness,
despair, rage, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and
with Him, everything else thrown in”
- C.S Lewis, Mere Christianity
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[1] Shashi
Tharoor in his book, The Hindu Way
seems to suggest that there is a burden in being convinced of being in the
group of those who claim to be in the true path. He writes, “…as a Hindu, I
belong to the only major religion in the world that does not claim to be the
only true religion. I find it immensely congenial to be able to face my fellow
human beings of other faiths without being burdened by the conviction that I am
embarked upon a ‘true path’ that they have missed. This dogma lies at the core
of the ‘Semitic faiths’, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. ‘I am the way, the
Truth and the Life; no man cometh unto the Father but by me’(John 14:6), says
the Bible; There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is His Prophet’, declares
the Quran, denying unbelievers all possibility of redemption, let alone of
salvation or paradise…….i am proud that I can honour the sanctity of other
faiths without feeling I am betraying my own” [Shashi Tharoor, The Hindu Way: An Introduction to Hinduism
(New Delhi: Aleph Book Company, 2019), 12.] The way I read his statement is
that he seems to suggest that absolute claim to truth is intolerance and a
spirit of tolerance that motivates relativism is your desire to respect all
views and all claims.
[2] In fact the
Second Vatican Council’s declaration on the relation of the Church to
non-christian religions states: “The Catholic Church rejects nothing of what is
true and holy in these religions. She has a high regard for the manner of life
and conduct, the precepts and teachings, which, although differing in many ways
from her own teaching, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that truth which
enlightens all men” (Second Vatican Council, Declaration Nostra Aetate, 2).
[3] This is not
the only view in Hinduism because as Shashi Tharoor writes that it is a faith
without dogma, it has no supreme authority. “IT is a timeless faith, populated
by ideas at once ancient and modern, hosting texts, philosophies, belief
systems and schools of thought that do not necessarily all agree with each
other. But none has ever been rejected by some supreme authority as beyond
pale; there is no such authority in Hinduism” (Shashi Tharoor, 14).
[4] George
Wiegel, “The Easter Effect and how it changed the World,” originally published
in Wall Street Journal, 30 March, 2018; retrieved from https://eppc.org/publications/the-easter-effect-and-how-it-changed-the-world/
, accessed on 14/04/2020.
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