Christmas

A Time to Celebrate God’s Hospitality Toward Humankind

Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus, the Christ, about whom the Bible says ‘the king of peace’ (Is. 9:6). While it is a joyful occasion, Christmas is nonetheless not any ordinary celebration of a birth whatsoever. It is indeed the feast of the Nativity of the incarnated God, the God who visited humankind in its own backyard – the humanity. In fact, God was visiting humankind when they (Adam and Eve) first said ‘No’ to God. About 4000 years later, it was again during God’s visit to humankind that Mary said ‘Yes’ to God. During this period, God was visiting humanity in a number of means and forms in the Old Testament. In the New Testament, Christ was repeatedly found visiting men and women on their own shores – beaches, plains, tax collector’s desks, houses of reputed sinners, etc. Therefore, it is only in His hospitality that God could liberate humanity from the bondage of sin. 

Christmas, therefore, is the celebration of God’s great hospitality shown to humankind. It is indeed great because, according to Rahnerian thinking, if God were to become anybody else other than God, He only became and continues to become a human being (and not any other created species). Christmas is therefore the culminating point of the long contemplation that the perichoretic triune God had in order to participate voluntarily in the joys and sufferings of humankind. “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (Jn 1:14).

Given this liberating hospitality of God, Christmas invites us to participate in such divine nature in the context of Sri Lanka today. Were we hospitable to our Sinhalese as well as Tamil brethren before, during, and after the war? If ‘yes’, then why was the need to take arms at all? Such hospitality is still a felt need in post-war rehabilitation camps; in prisons wherein live those whose trials were unjust or not tried at all; in youth who are wooed to destructive abuses; in nursing homes and hospitals wherein a person-in-need is often considered as a ‘case-to-gain’ rather than a ‘brother/sister-in-need’; in children’s homes and in homes for the aged where loneliness engulfs the warmth of hospitality found in the Bethlehem’s manger; in the affected masses of the recent climatic situations which are often a result of lack of discernment (both locally and globally) on our mother, the earth, who groans in pain; in the poor and the voiceless whose silence cries the loudest before God. Were we hospitable to those Myanmarians who sought refuge in Sri Lanka recently? How can we say that we are hospitable to those who labor in plantations when they are still not entitled to the rightful benefits enjoyed by any ordinary citizen or employee on the Island? As different cults and sects, how hospitable are we when we defend our own faiths in the efforts of reconciliation?

It should be highlighted that when God visited humanity in its flesh, the latter was in sin. It is god’s merciful hospitality that did not make human beings outsiders of His Kingdom. When encountering the woman alleged to have been caught in the very act of adultery (by men), Jesus did not make her an outsider of the Kingdom. He was rather hostile towards the wrongs committed (by the woman and the accusers) and hospitable towards the wrongdoers (the woman and the accusers). ““Woman, where are your accusers? Has no one condemned you?” “No one, Lord,” she answered. “Neither do I condemn you.” Jesus declared. “Now go and sin no more”” (Jn 8:10). Pope Francis refers to the Church as a field hospital after battle, the last resort of the wounded. Are we, the Church of Sri Lanka, hospitable to our own woundedness as well as to the wounded other? If so, then how can we consider a person as deserving to be deprived of the country’s citizenship just because of an act he committed or refused to commit, when (though totally deserving) God does not remove us from our sonship in His Kingdom even in the gravest act we commit or omit? Can we, the Church of Sri Lanka, be more hospitable and discerning towards wrongdoers in our words and deeds? 

Therefore, may this Christmas be a time to experience and share with one another, especially with those most in need, the divine hospitality shown to the entire humanity by God. Starting from the season of advent, it is also a time to feel sorry for the times in the past we have not been so hospitable towards our fellow brothers and sisters (both personally and collectively) as a country or as those belonging to different political and religious groups. Let’s also not forget to take some special efforts to rectify the moments of hostility shown to mother earth in the past. May we all be touched by the great hospitality that God wants us to live and let live in this Christmas and in the New Year 2018!      

 

Women's Day - Miséricordiae et Misère (Mercy & Misery)

Miséricordiae et Misère (Mercy & Misery)

Dear Friends,

Happy Women's Day to you! Let me add some beans into your soup.

     It is the human mechanism of the mind that, when given an occasion wherein one party is more at the receiving end than the other, it tends to accuse the mightier while having pity over the weaker. For example, in the case of marital abuse, it is often the man who is made the culprit while the woman is justified. Or in the case of abortion, the woman is always accused while the silent cry wins over sympathy always. Or in the case of rape, the muscle-makers are often condemned while the life-bearers are sympathized. Likewise, when it comes to moral issues concerning the Church and the larger society, the former is often accused to be conservative while the latter is being flared up as pro-liberalists. In this way, when it comes to the Church and women, Church is always given masculine treatment while Mary is hailed as an icon of the feminist movement.

    But the difference between the Church and the above-mentioned human tendency is that the Church refrains from such an exercise of dichotomizing power which fundamentally gives the green card to one party while the other is condemned. Instead, in that place, the Church is occupied with creating a more win-win situation such that none of the party is left abandoned and wherein prevails, to use the Augustinian term, only two inclusive possibilities: miséricordiae et misère (Jn 7, 53 – 8, 11). This way, the church is neither traditional nor progressive, but it tries to be more human in preaching the Incarnated Message of God who was bent on becoming one like us. The Church is therefore evangelic in its approach than falling prey to any categorical thinking or construction, I believe.

     Secondly, the term Ecclesia in Greek means the assembly from which derives the term Church. While priests make up only one element of the assembly, it includes the people of God (for where there is no people, there is no assembly), rites, rituals, customs, etc. In brief, assembly is the people of Alliance who are greater and larger than priests, the should-be-servants-of-Christ following the words of their master, “No servant is greater than his master” (Jn 15, 20). Hence while the Pope, Cardinals, Bishops, Priests, Religious, and all the clergy are not the Church in themselves. Mind you that this position is very different from the ‘Not All Men’ purification. It simply asserts the point that the ‘Whole is Greater than the Sum of its Parts’. In short, even if we say all priests, to make it all-inclusive as it is applicable to other denominations as well, they still make only one constitutive part of the Assembly.  

  

   Finally, it might be consoling to notice that, theologically speaking, the Church has always identified itself as ‘She’ and not ‘He’. And in the liberation theology of Asia, when speaking of the compassion of God, Aloysius Pieris, a Sri Lankan Jesuit, and a theologian speaks of the Incarnated Son as ‘She’ when he says: “Mercy is the sacrifice that pleases the Lord and makes us most like her” (A. PIERIS, “One of Francis’ Many Dreams for the Year of Mercy”, Vagdevi, N°19, January 2016, 5).     

     All that was said would sum up therefore to say that the Church, when faced with the incidents that wound her with cutting edges such as that which is being reported in Kerala on 6^th of March, 2017, is neither passive nor does she maintain silence. But she is reading and discerning her signs of the time at hand ever more fervently than before. Either in Asia or in Africa, either in Europe or in America, or in any seen or unseen corner of the world, she is trying to be more compassionate because she is becoming increasingly aware of her humanness and, in that, her rightlessness to judge. For, “there is only one lawgiver and he is the only judge and has the power to acquit or to sentence. Who are you to give a verdict on your neighbor?” (Jm 4, 12) It follows that all our mundane judgments, as a result, are according to the human-maid laws and, therefore, they lack compassion.

     Faced with such incidents as recently being reported, would it be said that the God of Christianity, the God of compassion, would give up His own essence – ‘compassionate’? No! God cannot but be compassionate. And it is in this steadfast compassion that God establishes His Justice which human justice is incapable of grasping. For, 

“The King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world…Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me’. Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels…Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me’. Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.” (Mt 25)

Happy Women's Day to All Who Recognize Their Animus Within! 

[Image: Courtesy Google]