Sankaracharya lived 800 years later. His Vedantic interpretation raised another important question: is all creation, and therefore all humankind, God? An interesting merger of the two problems was attempted in these columns. Christ had said, about himself only, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30). In a Christmas-eve piece, “Sri Sri” Ravi Shankar extended Christ's claim to all creation, adding, “The creator, if he is different from the creation, then he is not present in his creation. Then he is not omnipresent.”

That is much like saying that if a person is not a house, he cannot be present in the house. God, as Jesus taught us, may have access to the ‘inside’ of a subatomic particle and to the farthest reaches of outer space - all his creation. But he is not them! He can exist without them. That is why when Moses, in the Bible, asks him his name, he replies, “I AM.” The essence of the difference between the two views the author tries to combine lies in the difference, of the essence, between the Creator and creation.

Historically, Jesus showed as probable his claim to be the Divine: through ancient predictions before he came, his miraculous birth, his love-filled sinless life, the miracles he performed, and his rising up from the dead which we celebrate as Easter. If merger with the Divine is our goal, then one would expect Christ, the only guru who ever said that he came from a God who is a Father, to teach that.

Instead, he said: “No one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” (Matthew 11.27). Jesus did not say he forgot and re-attained that identity. He was that. He did not suggest re-merger with God to his twelve closest followers, one of whom, St Thomas brought Christ's message to Kerala, where Sankaracharya was born later. Over the centuries, the philosophies never converged except on the fact that humans are far from what they should be.

Good Friday, the remembrance of Christ's death as a sacrifice for others' sins, highlights the further division between God and man caused by man's wrong moral choices.

Men and women are sinful and in need of help - not to become God, but to become men and women again - and for that restoration, Jesus came at Christmas, died as a sacrifice on Good Friday, and at Easter, rose and filled us with the hope of a new life that lasts beyond death.