Message ~ Dr. Jojo Varakukalayil CST

by | Jan 1, 2022 | Vol. I, No.1 | 0 comments

Dr. Jojo Varakukalayil CST

A member of the Little Flower Congregation (CST Fathers) Fr. Jojo is the present Superior General of the community. He holds a PhD in Systematic Philosophy from the Catholic University of Leuven. Former president of Little Flower Institute of Philosophy and Religion (LIPAR), Aluva, he is a very much sought-after teaching faculty in many institutes of Philosophy and Religion in both India and abroad. He has produced many scholarly articles and writings in English and Malayalam on diverse subjects.
 

Christmas is all about God becoming human as revealed in the Bible “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (Jh1/14)!

Incarnation – the mystery of mysteries – is the mystery of Christian life and faith. A God who becomes flesh is the one who is made felt to everyone. Incarnation of God would thus mean that he becomes touchable. God is becoming one like us in his compassionate being for the other. This is the Christian thinking of God, not an abstract God, or transcendent God, but a God who is transcendent through the body. It is not thinking of God in an abstract way in categories or intentional. God is accessible beyond the self-interest. What we grasp, the intentional, becomes the tangible. The embodiment of God is the way of being-with-beings. God moves towards the other despite self-interest. This could be the meaning of “being born in the likeness of men” (Phil 2/5-11). It is the self-inflicted humiliation on the part of the Supreme Being, of descent of the Creator to the level of the creature. The compassionate ‘touchability’ of God is thus the nature of God as love for his creatures. It is through the body that God becomes transcendent. So, to say, Christianity is the mystery of revelation of God’s love to his creation in incarnation that the Jewish minds could ever hold it. The unfathomable love of God is the compelling character of God to be one like us amidst us. God is moved despite of himself towards the other. The being of God that moves beyond itself to the human.

The incarnation of God is not a particular idea of Christians by their accidental intuition, rather it is something really essential to think of God. God’s being is moved from within without self- interest. The dis-interested-ness of God is the kenosis of God becoming human. The kenotic being of God is the love of God itself (Jh 1/18), and it is the radical passivity in the Being of God, for God cannot be otherwise. Nonetheless to say that the radical passivity of God is the activity of God itself. God’s action in the world is the way of His Being. There is nothing as to be chosen by God but it simply flows from the Being of God. The true essence of God must be the one that proceeds from God’s Being, and it does not reserve for itself as self-involution, as a being that bites upon its tale, or as turned upon itself; on the other hand, it proceeds to the other. Incarnation of God is the manifestation of this mystery to the humans and it is the Christian mystery of Christmas. God remains God in incarnating. God cannot but incarnate. God cloths with flesh, embodies in a vulnerable exposure. Being in flesh as incarnate is far more different than having a material body; given this, it would imply, one can touch, feel joy or sorrow, hunger or thirst, and undergo each of these pain and penury as one’s own.

In being affected by the other and for the other God touches the real human being and the real Divine being. This makes sense of God incarnate as the human that is the mystery of Christianity. The incarnation is not just a mystery but the sensibility of God as loving, caring, and providing. Hence, Christmas is not a romantic idea but essential for our thinking of God. Angels cannot understand what it means to take body and incarnate. A story about protesting angels has the sense of it.

Read the story

According to a story about protesting angels in an ancient Talmudic apologue the angels in heaven one day found out that God in His unfathomable wisdom wanted to entrust the Torah or the Law to humans. Not only were the angels surprised, they were also perturbed. They did not understand why God ignored them and turned to beings of a lower status. Thus, they organized a protest march to prevent the Torah from leaving heaven. With the archangels leading them they set forth to meet the Lord, who had already seen them approaching from afar. And since at that moment He was not yet omniscient, He wondered what was going on (only one who is not omniscient is curious about what the other has to say). When the angels arrived, they questioned the Lord. In their opinion, He had to justify Himself for His choice, which to them seemed more foolish than wise. And the Lord seemed prepared to tell them why He wanted to give the Torah to humans, on condition, however, that the angels first answered His counter question: ‘Do you work by the sweat of your brow for your daily bread?’ The angels looked at each other for they actually did not understand what the Lord was asking about. To save face, they decided not to answer. Then likewise did the Lord not answer their question and He withdrew back into hiddenness. After a time, however, God was overcome with sadness for He did want to shed light on His decision. Thus, He posed a second question to the angels: ‘Do you buy and sell?’ The angels were shocked for they had heard of machinations, corruption and abuse of power that arise because of money – dirty money! – amongst people. But because they only knew about this from hearsay, they did not dare answer. And again, God withheld His answer. He again withdrew until it became too much for Him again, for He does not shield His wisdom in fear and jealousy from His creatures. Since all good things exist in threes, He decided to give the angels a third chance. His new question then went: ‘Do you bear children?’ The angels were even more scandalized by this question than by the former. The stories of humans and sex – and everything in between – had even reached up to heaven. But the angels kept those stories at bay as much as possible for they did not want to be infected by human desires, so much so that they again withheld their answer. And God withdrew Himself definitively, without answering the question of why He had chosen to entrust the Law of Life to earth. Here ends our retelling of the story. The question is still left unanswered, however, like a pebble in the shoe.re
God takes body for the lower human beings, which the angels (Who as spiritual beings stand closer to God and are thus loftier) and humans (who as earthly beings stand lower on the ladder of being) is reversed radically.

The human person is a being that can suffer. Precisely because one has a body, or stronger still, because one ‘is’ a body. But by means of one’s sensibility the human person is also touchable by and sensitive to the suffering of the other. Thanks to their ‘vulnerable body’ humans are bonded with each other, are attuned towards each other, are responsible for each other, and are meant to care for each other. Thanks to their so-called ‘low-life’ nature and their bodily condition, humans stand above the angels. This is truly a paradoxical situation: the lower opens up the perspective towards the higher, the humble to the sublime! Thanks to the ‘sensibility’ of our body we are vulnerable by and for the other so that we as inspired or animated – literally ‘ensouled’ – beings are ‘created’ or ‘conditioned’ to take upon ourselves the being and the fate of the other. In this sense, the incarnation is not only a religious category, but also an anthropological category of our human condition that unsettles many of our settled ways of being human resonating in the strange ways of being human in what is gloriously common in us. May browsing through ‘Theresian’ open up new avenues of revelations to you about ‘Immanuel’.

Jojo Joseph Varakukalayil CST Superior General, Little Flower Congregation (CST Fathers)

 

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