As Christians begin Holy Week it is necessary to remember that Jesus hates hating and loves loving. Jesus stood for life, cared for life precisely because God is the God of life. He is the God of the living. Jesus did not live for himself alone but for others too for nobody can live for oneself. Likewise Christianity is not for itself, nor for its own sake, but for non-Christians as well. There is a need for Christianity to go beyond Christianity. The true quality and measure of Christianity is the manner in which Christians genuinely love, serve and die for others.
Jesus is the truth. He is the absolute truth. There is nothing beyond Jesus. Jesus is everything in this universe. We cannot kick Jesus out of history (which is what some anti-Christians are trying to accomplish nowadays) simply because God is in and with him. God has already, decisively and absolutely sided with Jesus. God took the side of Jesus all throughout his life and mission and by so doing God said Jesus had been right through and through.
Read moreDeath and Real Living
By living for others, he truly enjoyed his life. He took delight in life to the fullest. True joy stems from a life lived for others. By totally emptying himself, he lived fully. Had he not totally emptied himself, He would not have been fully alive. He is truly alive amongst us now because of the way he died. Had he not died loving us, he would have been long dead and forever forgotten. But he is absolutely alive and memorialisable now.
Does our fear of death keep us from truly living? Are we not, most of the time, dead men and women walking? Are we not walking cadavers? Unless we die unto ourselves daily, we will not grow spiritually. In order to grow, we need to kill our bloated egos. The pettier and more insecure we are, the more bloated and monstrous our ego becomes. The true holiness, the authentic sanctity is a result of daily death of our ego. The death of ego is the birth of holiness.
Jesus is the saviour par excellence. Salvation is only in Jesus, through Jesus, by Jesus, from Jesus, with Jesus and within Jesus. Human existence has no meaning whatsoever without him. Without Jesus, life is an absurdity, a useless passion, an aimless search, a pathless land, a trackless forest, a bottomless abyss. The most meaningful life one can have is to live as a friend and follower of Christ.
Faith and Values
To cultivate faith in Jesus is to become a man like Jesus. To sustain faith in Jesus is to live like Jesus. Jesus was the happiest and the most joyful man ever lived on earth for he had the perfect faith. The deeper one’s faith is, the more exuberant one’s deep-seated joy becomes. Faithfulness means the stability of the heart and only such people can become deeply loyal to their spouses, friends, country, church, creed, culture, convictions and vocations.
Faith is toiling, labouring, sweating and suffering without expecting immediate results during one’s life time. Faith is its own reward for we may not be able to see the fruits of our own toiling in our life time. Faith assures me, guarantees me, promises me that it will bring forth fruit thirty-fold, sixty-fold and a hundred fold unbeknownst to us. Faith will shatter, scatter and litter our conventional and complacent ways of thinking and our frozen lazy, cozy and rosy habits. It challenges our neat and ready-made categories about what is to be human. Faith is the transvaluation of all our cherished human values. Faith transforms, purifies and deepens our conventional cultural values.
Jesus donated his life totally, utterly, completely and voluntarily out of love for us. He is the Lord of life. He in fact made a conscious decision to donate his life for us so that we may continue to live fully and joyfully. “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10).
Giving and Receiving
The more we give, the more we receive. When we stop giving and sharing, we also stop receiving and growing spiritually. Giving and receiving become the same in the final reckoning. Whatever is not shared with others will be lost permanently. What is lost is the real cost of life. Whatsoever is so lost due to our selfishness can never be recovered or redeemed.
What do we do when we receive a gift? Do we hide it, keep it to ourselves or throw it away? Or do we not break it open, unwrap it, expose it and share it with others? To share it is to bless it and be thankful for it. In that way, we could truly do justice to the gift received.
When we receive a gift we receive much more than a gift. A gift is a symbol of a bigger reality; that is, the gift makes us get in touch with the Giver, the Giver of all gifts and all good things.
Life is a precious gift from God and therefore we do not own our life. It has been given to us as a gift to be broken, blessed, given away and shared with others. To live is to share and to live fully is to share fully. As long as there is no giving of oneself, there is no real giving. Oneself as a gift is the real giving and the real gift.
Jesus lived his whole life, from birth to death, as a gift from God. By totally donating his life, he totally gained it. Whatever is given away is retained and it is one of those paradoxes in human life.
Love and Forgiveness
The unconditional love of God for us and forgiveness of our sins are the two sides of the same coin and Jesus is the embodiment, emblem and concrete manifestation of that covenantal relationship. The one who loves forgives and the one who forgives loves too. To love is to forgive and to forgive is to promote life. Forgiveness is the natural fruit of love. Love and forgiveness took flesh in Jesus and were made manifest and concretised on the cross on Good Friday.
Forgiveness is, theologically speaking, the genetic make-up of the universe. The universe is structured according to divine mercy and clemency. Forgiveness is the DNA of human existence and proper human relationships.
We are also invited to a laying down of our lives for others, so that there will be life the way Jesus lived it. Ultimately all the suffering, all the hardships, pain, difficulties, frustrations we undergo have a meaning in Christ. Our daily struggles are neither senseless, nor useless, nor meaningless. God exists, God matters and hence human life, pain, emptiness, suffering and difficulties too matter. There is no human predicament or human condition that Jesus does not comprehend or understand. Jesus is closer to us than we are to ourselves. He lives more intimately in us than we can ever recognize. Christ is the source of our happiness and the very end of all our aspirations and inspirations.
With the coming of Jesus into our world, God has no future apart from human beings. God’s life is necessarily and decisively tied up with us humans in and through Jesus. God can never abandon us now no matter how sinful or pathetic we become. This is the Good News Jesus brought to us, that is, the Creator of the universe cannot come up with any future plan by forgetting or neglecting us.
So now, is there any reason for us to be afraid of our future? Apocalyptic anxiety about our future is not a Christian virtue.
True life and Intimacy
I become more of myself, my true self, my real self, my original self, my authentic self in Jesus. I attain my true humanness in and through Jesus. We are absolutely nothing without Jesus. Christ is deep inside us, deep within us, so near us, so close to us, with us, within us, in front of us, beside us, above us, underneath us, around us, before us, behind us and beneath us.
There is no way we can escape his presence. He is deeply and intimately present when we feel his absence. His apparent absence is his presence. Christ is everywhere like air. If he is literally absent, then the entire universe would collapse back to its original Infinite Singularity.
Daily Mirror By Professor Anton Meemana
