What Change Did Jesus Want?

The summary of a talk given at a YMCA meeting at Kottarakara on Nov 14, 2013

YMCA celebrates this week as its prayer week all over the world, and its topic of meditation is "Be the change". In relation to this, let us ask some fundamental questions: What kind of change do we want, and how do we expect the change to take place? As this is an organization based on Christian principles, we need to make sure that our answers are aligned with the Christian ideals and principles. We may modify the questions as follows: What kind of change did Jesus want, and how did Jesus expect the change to happen? Whatever Jesus wanted is what the christian church would want today, and whatever Jesus did to make the change is what the Christian church is supposed to do today. 

What change did Jesus want?
Jesus wanted our world to become heaven. The change Jesus wanted was nothing less than this. Jesus proclaimed the good news of the kingdom of heaven. The mystery of the kingdom of heaven was the topic of his talks everywhere. He encouraged people to pray, "Let thy kingdom come!"

We imagine that there is a world up there called heaven. When we say our world become heaven, we mean its becoming like heaven or its becoming a part of heaven. In the Lord's prayer, God is the king of the kingdom of heaven, and human beings, the children of God, request God to extend the rule of God to earth as well.

No one has ever seen heaven. So we have to imagine heaven. Our mental picture of heaven cannot be the same. However, we see heaven as the ideal world. Heaven may be defined as the ideal world; only the ideal varies from one to another. There is a well known story of a swan inviting a dork to visit heaven. The swan described heaven as a beautiful place with attractive landscape, with plenty of fruit trees, etc.  But the dork was not interested in such a heaven. All that he wanted to know was this: Are there crabs in heaven? A cat's heaven will have a lot of rats, and a dog's heaven will have a lot of bones.  A child's heaven will be a place of candies and toys. A countryside dweller might imagine heaven as a city, but a city dweller might imagine heaven as a peaceful countryside.

The Bible gives us two pictures of heaven-- one at the very beginning of the Bible, and one at the very end. At the beginning, the Bible gives us a picture of the Garden of Eden. It is a place where God dwells with people. Everything is at perfect harmony. At the very end, we see the new heaven and new earth. There also God dwells with people, and everything is at perfect harmony. 

St. Paul says that the Kingdom of God is not about food and drinks, but it is righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.

All relationships are intact in heaven. There are no walls of separation of any kind. There is perfect unity and love and harmony in all relationships. As a result there is joy and peace in heaven. There is a story of a child making a tour in heaven and hell with his tour guide, an angel. The angel showed him hell first. It was a mess there. Although there was plenty of food there, the inhabitants of hell were all hungry and frustrated, for they couldn't bend their elbow. They loudly cursed each other and God for their miserable situation. Now the angel took him to heaven. To his amazement, the inhabitants of heaven also had the same handicap-- they couldn't bend their elbow. However, they were joyfully eating food by serving each other. There was love, peace and joy there.

Jesus wanted our world to become like heaven-- a place of love, joy and peace. He wanted all people to live together as a family.  

How did Jesus want the world become heaven?
Aristotle thought that the world would become a more peaceful place without war if it were one brought under one king. His disciple, Alexander, tried to put it into practice by conquering the known world. Karl Marx thought that a classless society can be made in the world, and some nations tried to put it into practice. But we know that all these attempts failed. It seems that at the beginning of his career, Jesus also was tempted to bring heaven by force. One of the temptations of Satan was to become a king and make the world heaven-like. However, Jesus rejected it. He knew that heaven is not something that can be forced on people. Hell is often forced on people, but not heaven. Heaven is to be willingly chosen by people.

Adam was given the choice, and he rejected heaven and chose hell. Following his example, a lot of people continue to reject heaven and choose hell all over the world. Jesus, however, chose heaven, and showed us an example.

Jesus said that the kingdom of God is like yeast. A very small amount of yeast has the power to leaven the entire dough. Similarly, heaven has the power to spread unseen and unnoticed throughout the world. 

Jesus did not make the entire world heaven. He himself lived in heaven. His thoughts, words and acts were heavenly. He invited people to follow his example. Even today his invitation stands, and a lot of people respond to his call. Baptism is the expression of a decision to reject Satan and his ways, and to follow Jesus and his ways.

You and I cannot make the world heaven. However, I have the power to live in heaven if I choose to, and you have it too. None of us have the power to force someone to heaven though. When my neighbor sees me living joyfully in heaven, he might get attracted to heaven, and may choose to live in heaven. This is the only way heaven can spread.

Peter advices women in his epistle not to try to change their spouses. All that they need to do is to be an example living a heavenly life. Any attempt to change their spouse can have negative effect.

Jesus compared human individuals and communities to a field that can choose its plants and trees. We can choose to have thorns and useless weeds or fruit trees and vegetables. If our life is filled with the thorns of evils, we have the option now to pluck them out and plant fruit trees.

God wants to help us do this. But a lot of people remain in their miserable life of evil ways. They belong to two groups. One group of people are not aware of the fact that they are sick and need healing. They think that they are already healthy and they don't the help of anybody. The other group of people are aware that they are sick, but they don't think they can be cured. They don't seek help either.

The Pharisees in the gospels belong to the first group. They think they are already righteous, and that they don't need any help. Many other people Jesus met, such as the sick one at the pool of Bethsaida, feel absolutely doomed, and they don't seek help either. The people who actively sought the help of Jesus belong to the third category, and they had a chance to be changed. The gospels say that they had faith. They knew that they were sick, and they believed that they could be healed. Which of these three groups do we belong to?

Let us Create a World of Shalom

The summary of a talk given at a meeting of YMCA on Nov 11, 2012. Read a summary in Malayalam here. 

 

How do we greet someone we know? We wish a Good morning or a Good evening or a Good night or a Good day depending on the time and situation. We wish happy married life to a couple. We wish happy new year and merry Christmas. We also wish happy birthday and happy wedding anniversary. Whatever be the situation we wish for happiness and wellbeing. We always wish for the wellbeing of someone we care for. Malayalam, my native language, seems to lack enough expressions for greeting. When we want to greet someone, we use minimal words and expressions in our culture. Although the words are minimal, we also mean the same-- a wish for wellbeing.

 

In Hebrew, the language of the Bible, people greet each other with shalom. We often translate this word as peace. The word peace has a narrow meaning as well as a wider meaning. Most often it is used to mean the resolution of a conflict, which is its narrow meaning. However, traditionally, this word is used with a much wider meaning, which is not only the resolution of conflicts but also all the other aspects of wellbeing, which involves joy, prosperity, justice, and health. When this word is used to greet each other, this broader meaning is used.

 

Salem and Salom are variations of Shalom. Thus Absalom is the father of peace, and Jerusalem is the city of peace. To say hello or goodbye, Jews still say shalom. On a sabbath day, they greet each other Shabbat shalom. In Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, shalom became slomo. In the Syrian Christian traditions this word is frequently used in worship. In Arabic, shalom became salaam. They greet each other salaam aleikum (peace be to you) and responds aleikum salaam (to you as well). The Christians in Arabic speaking countries and Muslims all over the world greet each other with salaam. In Sanskrit the word for peace is shanti. From the similarity of sound, we may suspect that both shalom and shanti are from the same root. Every greeting in every language may be seen as a form of shalom, a wish for wellbeing

 

Often we wish for shalom for our friends and family. But occasionally we wish shalom for a community and even for the whole world. How can individuals have shalom if our our community has no shalom? Every civilization seems to have a wish for shalom for the whole world. When someone gets sick, a doctor identifies his sickness by comparing his present condition with his condition when he was well. An elevation of temperature or blood pressure will confirm that someone is sick. It is a deviation from the norm. In order to identify the sickness of a community, they often imagine a healthy state of the community. When we celebrate Onam, we remember a time of shalom for our Kerala. It was a time of wellbeing-- of prosperity, joy, and peace. Compared to that time of shalom, we find our life in the present time very much deviated from shalom. We are sick, and we identify and measure the degree of our illness using the criterion of shalom in the past. We also imagine a shalom in the future when we celebrate Onam. It is like being hopeful about someone sick. Someone is sick now. But he was well before; and he will become well once again in the future.

 

Mahatma Gandhi spoke about a Ramarajya. It was both a memory of a past shalom and a hope for the future shalom. Marxist ideology sees a past shalom in primitive communism, and imagines a future shalom as a classless society.

 

The civilization that produced the Bible remembered a past shalom as the Garden of Eden. It also imagined a future shalom as a new heaven and new earth as presented in the last pages of the Bible. In the Garden of Eden we see God walking among men, and we see human beings and other beings in perfect harmony. Human beings take care of the animals and plants and the land, and they in turn support human beings. This story tells us that our world had a shalom in the past. Although we don't have shalom now, we hope that our world will have a shalom in the future.

 

Jesus Christ proclaimed the good news of the Kingdom of God, and he asked us to pray, Let thy kingdom come. The kingdom of God is nothing but the future shalom in our world.

 

Based on this view, we prescribe a treatment for ourselves just like a doctor prescribes a treatment for a sick person. The world was once a place of shalom, and we want to make it a place of shalom again. So what treatment do we follow? I want to bring to your attention a treatment that almost all the traditional religions prescribe.

 

We are now sitting in a special building. This is a house of prayer of a religious community, specifically the Christian community. This is called the house of God by this community. This building represents a world of shalom, to be specific, the Garden of Eden. You can see plants and vines painted on the altar. You might have heard a priest saying when a baby is given the Holy Communion that it is the same fruit of the tree of life in the Garden of Eden that Adam and Eve could not taste. When a community assemble in this building bowing their heads before God, it is a representation of a world of shalom. Here is a group of people in unity and in submission to the will of God. Regardless of all those factors that distinguish and differentiate each person in the community, they stand together as one body.

 

This is a weekly exercise done by this community-- an exercise that keeps the world in existence. This exercise keeps the world closer to shalom. This may be said about a community of Muslims assembled in a mosque, a community of Hindus assembled in a temple, or about any other religious community assembled at their place of worship.

But this is a temporary arrangement like a medical treatment. Once a sick person regains health, he will not need to continue the treatment. Once our world becomes a world of shalom, we will not need this building here. Once the whole world becomes the house of God, why would we want this building as a house of God? No wonder St. John did not see a temple in the new Jerusalem of the new heaven and new earth. Religion is a temporary thing with a specific purpose. It does not have any lasting value. Religions exist to convert our world into a place of shalom. Religions exist for man; not man for religions.

It does not mean that we want people of other religions to get converted to our religion. We don't want any such conversion. Even if all the people in the world get converted to Christianity, our world won't become a garden of Eden. We want all people to live together as a family in spite of their differences in religion, culture, gender, color, or race. It has to be a unity in spite of their diversity. That is why Jesus called the temple of Jerusalem a house of prayer for all nations. A house of prayer that is not open to all the people in the world is a den of robbers. This is true about a house of prayer of any religion.

 

What we want is a world of shalom. The purpose of every religion is to facilitate the emergence of a world of shalom. No religion exists for itself; it exists for the wellbeing of the whole world. As our rishis prayed: Loka samastha sukhino Bhavanthu!

 

I am glad that YMCA is an organization that is well-grounded on Christian principles with its arms stretched to all humanity. It welcomes all people to its fold regardless of their religious affiliation. The YMCA of Mukhathala can have the goal of making this a place of Shalom-- a Garden of Eden. Under the leadership of YMCA, all the Christian churches of this place can stand united and strive for the wellbeing of all the people in our place. May God help us to make this dream a reality!