The Essence of Christianity - Part 1
by P. Abraham Paul Karottuveettil, Trivandrum
After hearing many of our religious sermons we often end up sadder, feeling more confused and hopeless. Most of the conventional preaching mainly dwells on the negative thoughts and aspects of early scriptures making things too complicated, difficult and impossible for us to follow in real life. Few seldom specify in any clear and practical terms, what one should do to lead a good Christian life. The objective is to highlight that in contrast to above; Jesus Christ was very precise and gave us the true Essence of life in very simple, clear and practical terms.
The essence of teachings of every righteous religion: Obedience, Tolerance, Forgiveness, Humility, Humbleness, Compassion, Kindness, and Love
It is by making these four worthy virtues the four corner stones of our life and our home, we become good human beings. We should meditate on these often and the grade ourselves and see how you fare. However, don’t despair if you are not perfect. To err is human, nobody is perfect. Go on trying.
The Christian Differentiation
For Christians, there is absolutely no need to be despondent because we have the marvelous promise; that if we whole heartedly repent and truly confess, our sins will be forgiven, on the condition that, we should not fall into same sin again. It should not be like our New Year resolves, easily made and quickly forgotten. Remember that the biggest ever sin is sinning against Holy Ghost, by falling in the same sins for which we have confessed and sought God’s pardon.
The Essence of Christianity
Introduction: The following discussion is aimed in relating Christ’s teaching about living with compassion, kindness and love and seeking God’s Forgiveness - the corner stones of the Essence of Christianity.
Love and Forgiveness are the Essence of Christianity:
St. Mathew 22:37-40. Christ said “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” ‘This is the second most important commandment.’ St. Mathew 9:13 “It is kindness that I want, not animal sacrifices.”
Compassion, Kindness, Love: Let us see how this commandment of Christ correlates the Situation in Earthly Life, Death and Situation after death.
The Earthly Life and How It is Related to Situation After Life
We resolve to live as good human being with righteous behavior and as good Christians by following the teaching of our religion. Is that the end of it? What happens then? Is there anything more? If there is, then how these are related to the situations of our life? Firstly let us look at what is taught about situations after life and then its correlation with our life here.
What are the situations after life?
· Death
· Rising from death
· Final Judgment. Salvation
· Eternal life, Kingdom of God.
Death
Death is the most certain thing. Who ever is born has to die. Can we do anything to prevent it? Nothing at all, at least as far as we know now.
Fear of death: Is any one happy about death? Mostly not.
How many of us are happy during today's religious sermons? Most of us usually sit grim and grumpy faced during our religious sermons because what is talked in most of the sermons is sin, death and the horrible things waiting for us after death. These are often used as sticks with the intention to ward off people from sin. Most of the sermons tend to make us believe that we have broken many rules of the scriptures and sinned against God and therefore, are beyond any salvation making us feel hopeless. We start feeling as if we are in a death house and our faces show it. Either we turn off ourselves thinking something else, or go to sleep. Actually, the time we spent in prayer and religious interactions shall be an experience of enlightening, happiness of rejoicing in Christ; not an experience of desperation and hopelessness.
Why we fear death (Reason 1)
Fear of Worldly losses: Reluctance to leave our worldly possessions, our family, our wealth and all many other good things we acquired. If we have more earthly possessions we will dislike death more.
What is the most valuable thing for us? There are so many things dear to us. “What is the most valuable thing for each of us?” Parents, Wife, Children” Is it any of our worldly possessions? No? Then what can be it?
“It is Our Next Breath”. Yes, the most valuable thing for us is “our next breath” Is it not? It was not given by our parents, neither is it earned by us. It is God given. It is His. It is given free. Need we complain if the giver takes back what is his?
What shall be our ambition at any point of time? Our ambition at any point of time in our life shall be to see the next day.
Fear of death (Reason 2)
Fear of Spiritual loss. The uncertainty of what is waiting for us after death. Heaven, Hell, something else. We learn in scriptures that Death is the wages of Sin. To live without sin is almost impossible. The more our sins are the more will be our fear about death.
Situation after Death
Death is certain, but situations after death, everything seems to be uncertain. Do we believe in what the scriptures say about Rising from death, Final Judgment and Eternal Life as certain as we believe in death? If not, why not? Do we think it is only nothingness after death?
We always try to understand these from its literal explanations, but most of these things are beyond our comprehension. Then, many things in life are hard to believe if we try to understand from only its literal explanations.
Let us talk a little philosophy here. The Universe has existed from a very, very, very long period of time. The infinite nature of Universe, its beginning, its age, wonderful creations, and the marvels of its functioning etc., always remain as mysteries and beyond the comprehension of mankind. Only in the recent past, a poet said: 'Infinite, unknown and beyond explanation are the motions and paths of the Universe; Just a trifle little is what the humans toddling at some place somewhere in it known.'
The earliest known civilization is that of 7500 B.C. i.e. just less than ten thousand years behind us. This is a very small period when compared to the existence of Universe. Nevertheless, the Human beings at every stage of the evolution had strong conviction about what they believed at that point time. At every point of civilization, they tried to interpret their experiences with literal explanations as known to mankind at that point of time. They also experienced existence of some power of a higher and supreme nature and gave different shapes and meanings for the concept of God.
A few thousands years ago, it was thought that Earth is flat and the sky we see above is the limit and there are different Gods sitting above it and some place like hell somewhere down below. Later we learnt that those beliefs were wrong. But when Galileo told that earth is round, no one believed him at that point of time.
Jewish Scriptures
According to Jewish scriptures, Abraham lived around 4000 B.C. Exodus led by Moses was in 13th Century B.C. Many different civilizations existed before and along with their period. When we look at the history of Jews, it was only few thousands of years ago, they started calling God as Jehovah the God and our Lord (may His name be exalted), they visualized and described creation of this planet and everything in and around it according to their perceptions and convictions. The few learned ones literalized and conveyed these experiences at different times in human history in a way to make it understandable to the laymen and primitive ones amongst. A part of it we have in the Old Testament in the Holy Bible as a book mixing the profound wisdom and experiences of sages through the centuries. These were passed down to later religions who converted these into their scriptures and liturgy.
In the pages of this Holy book, it is described About Adam and Eve, how they came into being and how their disobedience to God in committing the unpardonable sin caused them to suffer God’s wrath and punishment. About their descendants, Cain, Abel and Seth, and how the mankind in earth came to being, about the happenings in the times of Noah, Abraham, Jacob (who later became Israel), Moses and David and all the prophets in between and after them.
Are everything contained in the old scriptures fully convincing to every one now?
As these scriptures were written later on assumptions of happenings of period of non-existence of human kind, the scriptures in it its literal form do not seem to be convincing now, to at least for a few.
source: http://www.socdigest.org/articles/06may07.html
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