You Can’t Reject The Other And Accept God

You can’t reject the other without rejecting God first; for these acts happen simultaneously. These are two sides of the same coin. If you think that you are loving god and hating others, you are just loving and accepting a god of your convenience.

Young Mohandas Gandhi was quite disturbed by the fact that in his country all people could not go to a common temple. The high caste Hindu had his temple, the low caste Hindu had a temple for them, or they did not have any at all. Then Mohandas left for South Africa to practice law. There he came in closer contact with Christianity, the gospels and the man called Jesus. He was quite happy and thought that Christianity would be an answer to the caste struggle in India.

One day, Mohandas Gandhi was passing by a church and he felt like entering in it and spending some time in silence. He walked to the entrance, and he was stopped and a white voice that told him, “this is not a church for you if you want to pray go to a church of the blacks.”

The newly found hope of Mohandas Gandhi was shattered. And as he was walking away on that lonely road of confusion and disillusionment; he meets the Christian god walking ahead of him. He caught up with him and pressed him for answer to his question, “aren’t you all-embracing, then why am I cast out from your church?”

The Christian god replied, I too am in search of the answer to the same question, something has terribly gone wrong somewhere. Remember “before they rejected you they have rejected me already, if they have hated you they have hated me already” (John 15: 18-21).

Secondly, we come to the question of, what do we do if people begin to hate us, reject us, persecute us for what we are doing as true Christians? The chapter 15 of John’s gospel begins with the metaphor of vine and the braches, which categorically said, remain with me and bear fruit (bear my kind of fruit). What is his kind of fruits? His kind of fruits are forgiveness, love, compassion, kindness, etc. these are the survival tools of every Christian; or we go extinct from the face of this earth.

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