Merry Christmas

People like the Buddha, the Christ and the Mahatma were acutely aware of the absurdity of human life and sought to bring more meaning to it. Their perspectives differed significantly from the ordinary man’s. They looked at life in substantially different ways, in other words.

Jesus’ focus was on love and compassion. He was born a Jew and the Jewish people were highly ritualistic and juridical. Jesus questioned that way of life which was plainly more absurd than the life of people who practised other religions which the Jews regarded as gentile and inferior.

Love is the ultimate foundation of Jesus’ teachings. That is diametrically opposed to the Jewish weltanschauung. The Jewish God was a whimsical entity characterised by jealousy, short temper, vindictiveness and a ridiculous share of frivolousness. He created the Paradise apparently only to drive out the human beings from it. He could ask Abraham to sacrifice his own son just to prove the authenticity of the latter’s love. He could send his people marching through a desert for 40 years in search of a Promised Land which in the end turned out to be a far cry from “a land of milk and honey”. As if the travails of the exodus were not enough, Yahweh gave them the Ten Commandments too on the way. Commandments play a vital role in Judaism.

Jesus sought to change that by focusing on love. He encouraged people to break the rules if love required that. When he raised the question, “Which of you, having a son or an ox that has fallen into a well on a Sabbath day, will not immediately pull him out?” he was dismantling one of the fundamental perspectives of Judaism. He replaced rubrics with love.

Jesus could easily forgive the adulteress precisely because of his love for fellow beings as well as his desire for others to practise that love. “Who among you has not committed a sin?” He asked the people who were anxious to follow the rule and stone the woman to death. Sin is a part of human existence, he knew. Every person has frailties and flaws. We need to come to terms with them and be ready to forgive others.

The basic message of Jesus is love and compassion. Eventually the various religions that came up in his name forgot that message. They chose to imprison Jesus in the tabernacle and build palaces and empires in his name.

Well-known Catholic theologian, Hans Kung, has wondered time and again whether Jesus is part of the Catholic Church at all. In his history of the Church, he asks: “But is this Christian church [Catholic church] which is so successful, this greatest and most powerful of Christian churches, right in appealing to Jesus?” Kung goes on to suggest that if Jesus returned to earth today he would have “become involved in dangerous conflicts” with the churches founded in his name.

Jesus was not at all interested in the kind of splendour and glory that the churches display today. He was interested in making man a better creature. He was interested in making the earth a better place. Love and compassion were his ways. Christmas will be meaningful only when that love and compassion find a way to the human heart once again.

Wish you a Merry Christmas, a meaningful Christmas.