Skip to main content

Christmas at Bethlehem

From the Washington Post


Bethlehem, the place of Jesus’ birth, is not celebrating Christmas this time, says the Washington Post. The only scene related to Christmas is Jesus entering the world amid a pile of Gazan rubble.

Christmas is a festival of joy, peace, magnanimity – goodness, in general. It is a terrible irony that the very place of Jesus’ birth is marked by the opposite of all what Christmas stands for. What meaning will a Christmas carol like Joy to the World have in Bethlehem today?

What would Jesus say about the kind of religions that we have today? Isn’t religion the cause of all the strife in Bethlehem and many other places in the world? The Hamas who attacked Israel were motivated by religion. Israel is a nation founded on the bricks of a particular religion. It is another irony that Jesus was born in that religion.

Did Jesus found a new religion? I would hesitate to say ‘Yes’ to that question. His intention was to reform Judaism, his religion, not establish a new one. The problem is not with religions but with the believers, Jesus knew. That is why he said, “The Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath” [Mark 2:27]. The Jews were very particular about obeying the laws and rubrics of their religion. The Muslims are no less particular in that regard. Nowadays, this sort of vehement adherence to the rubrics at the cost of human love and relationships is contaminating Hinduism in India too.

Jesus would have questioned all these religions. If your religion makes you a blind follower of certain rules and rituals instead of making you a better human being, then your religion is useless, Jesus would affirm without any hesitation. Love was Jesus’ religion, not Christianity. Christianity as a religion is an invention of Saint Paul who came after Jesus. Jesus wanted people to love one another. And where there is love, there is no need for rules and rituals. That is why Saint Augustine said, “Love, and do as you will.”

Too many of our religions today (yesterday, as well) do the opposite of what they should be doing. Instead of promoting love, they generate hate. Jesus wasted his life!

My elder sister rang me this morning to greet me on Christmas. During the course of our conversation, she said, “Kerala (our state) has so many churches, religious programmes like retreats and Bible conventions… yet why is evil flourishing more than ever?” Jesus wasted his life!

The last sentence of the only novel I ever wrote, Black Hole, ends with these lines: “The cross smiled at Jesus. Jesus smiled back. They were in love with each other.” Those were the last words of the gospel being written by the protagonist of my novel, Ishan Salman Panicker. Ishan was of the view that Jesus wasted his life.

Jesus must have realised towards the end of his life that humankind was rather irredeemable. Will he choose to return to earth once more if his father, God, demands that?

Can there be another real Christmas, I mean?

Well. 


Labels:

Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanDecember 25, 2023 at 6:41 PM

    Hari OM
    As ever, you hit the mark with your words... Love is it, with the capital 'ell', universal and untarnished. Turning ourselves to the Love is what builds and binds us. Blessings and Love to you this day, dear blogpal! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 25, 2023 at 6:45 PM

      Thanks, Yamini... You do mean a lot to me in this environment...

      Delete
  2. Liz A.December 26, 2023 at 3:30 AM

    Religion was created by man to serve man's needs. This is why I don't have one.

    ReplyDelete
  3. magiceyeDecember 26, 2023 at 8:28 AM

    Nailed it!

    ReplyDelete
  4. MurthyDecember 26, 2023 at 7:00 PM

    Religion is a powerful tool to fight with the surreptitious intention of imperialism and to get united sometimes.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 26, 2023 at 7:23 PM

      The problem is when religion becomes a political tool it is more dangerous than bombs.

      Delete
  5. CloudiaDecember 27, 2023 at 1:24 AM

    Thank you for this thoughtful discussion. If you look into the historical record and the archeology of the region, the Jews are the indigenous people of Judea and Israel which were ancient kingdoms. People deserve to live in peace. Best wishes to you friend

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 27, 2023 at 8:25 PM

      The Jews had a painful and conquered history. But that doesn't justify what Israel is doing now in Palestine.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
44 comments
Read more

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand
6 comments
Read more

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv
10 comments
Read more

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation
4 comments
Read more

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af
8 comments
Read more