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Around 600 years before Christ came on earth (the event celebrated as ‘Christmas’), the highest-ever standard of spiritual aspiration was being set on the Indian sub-continent. The Vedas, still in oral form, were almost complete. Teacher-priests were progressively postulating that the ultimate reality was union with Brahman (‘God’, in simple language).
By contrast, around the same time, in the land of the Jews, a prophet was writing, “Will you say, ‘I am a god,’ though you are but a man and no god?” (Ezekiel 28:9). About 600 years later, Christ said about the teacher-priests of his time, “They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them” (Mathew 23:4). Whether high aspirations (such as realising godhood) or never-ending ceremonial minutiae (as at Jesus's time), the cumulative burden on common people can become very heavy.
If ancestral sin or karmic debt is believed to carry across multiple generations or births, then especially for people born in supposedly lower spiritual strata, their sense of self-worth can take a heavy blow right from birth. The Jewish teachers, who assigned themselves highest spiritual grade, said to an oppressed man whose blind eyes Jesus had miraculously healed, “You were born in utter sin, and would you teach us?” And they threw him out of the temple (John 9:34).
A popular Christmas carol has the words, “sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying” to express human vulnerability – and Jesus’s union, as God, with humanity, rather than the other way around. For Jesus, tat tvam asi (“That Thou Art”) referred to the hungry, the thirsty, migrants, the naked, the sick or prisoners: He said that what was done for them was done for him (Matthew 25:35, 40). “Though he was in the form of God, he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, being born in the likeness of men” (Philippians 2:6, 7).
This is joy to the world: that Jesus Christ was born, and his eventual “bleeding, dying” on the Cross was a sacrifice that eternally cancelled every believer’s accumulated debt. It allows God’s goodness to be mine, through a union that was attained for me, rather than by me!
(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.)