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. sampleassignmentsDecember 26, 2023 at 4:38 PM

    "Beautifully penned reflections on Christmas at Bethlehem! This insightful blog captures the essence of the season. For excellent assignment help, visit audomyassignment and Pay Someone to Do My Assignment on such topics.

    ReplyDelete
  5. 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
  6. 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
47 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
18 comments
Read more

I’m Alive

Illustration by Copilot Designer How do you prove to anyone that you’re alive? Go and stand in front of the person and declare, “I’m Tom, Shyam or Hari”? No, that won’t work in India. Let me share my personal experience. It’s as absurd as the plight of Kafka’s protagonist in The Castle. A land surveyor is summoned for duty, only to be told that the mere fact a land surveyor was summoned does not prove he is that land surveyor though he has the appointment letter with him. I received a mail from the Life Insurance Corporation of India [LIC] that I should prove my existence in order to continue receiving my annuity on the sum I had invested with them five years ago. They’re only paying the interest on the sum I have given them. They’re not doing me any charity. Yet they want me to prove to them that I am still alive in order to continue getting the annual amount they are obligated to pay me. This is India. LIC is a government undertaking. If I don’t follow their injunction, I wil...
11 comments
Read more

Hindutva’s Contradictions

The book I’m reading now is Whose Rama? [in Malayalam] by Sanskrit scholar and professor T S Syamkumar. I had mentioned this book in an earlier post . The basic premise of the book, as I understand from the initial pages, is that Hindutva is a Brahminical ideology that keeps the lower caste people outside its terrain. Non-Aryans are portrayed as monsters in ancient Hindu literature. The Shudras, the lowest caste, and the casteless others, are not even granted the status of humans.  Whose Rama? The August issue of The Caravan carries an article related to the inhuman treatment that the Brahmins of Etawah in Uttar Pradesh meted out to a Yadav “preacher” in the last week of June 2025. “Yadavs are traditionally ranked as a Shudra community,” says the article. They are not supposed to recite the holy texts. Mukut Mani Singh Yadav was reciting verses from the Bhagavad Gita. That was his crime. The Brahmins of the locality got the man’s head tonsured, forced him to rub his nose at t...
14 comments
Read more

Independence from Dictators too

Kerala Governor Rajendra Arlekar asked the state to observe ‘Partition Horror Day’ on 14 Aug instead of celebrating the country’s Independence. His organisation, the RSS, as well as its ideological sibling the Hindu Mahasabha, had explicitly directed its members not to celebrate the Independence on 14-15 Aug 1947. From Bombay Chronicle, 9 Aug 1947 Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins gave us a graphic description of what the RSS did on 15 Aug 1947, in their classic book Freedom at Midnight . When the rest of India celebrated its new Independence, the RSS hoisted its own flag, “an orange triangle, emblazoned upon which was the symbol that, in a slightly modified form, had terrorized Europe for a decade, the swastika.” About 500 RSS men stood saluting the swastika on 15 Aug 1947 in Poona. Lapierre and Collins describe the RSS as a “para-fascist movement” whose members “saw themselves as the heirs to those ancient Aryans.” Rajendra Arlekar is an RSS man. He has been doing whate...
10 comments
Read more