Kurien Kunnumpuram

To work for peace and reconciliation is central to the mission of the Church. For the Church exists in order to carry on the saving work of Jesus under the guidance of the Spirit. And his saving work is interpreted in the New Testament as reconciliation and peace-making. According to Paul, God was in Christ Jesus reconciling the world to himself.

To follow Christ is also to identify ourselves with the poor and powerless as he did. The Incarnation is the symbol of this identification. Through his incarnation he inserted himself into the human family and became one with us. As Soares-Prabhu observes, “Jesus ‘declasses’ himself and adopts the life of an itinerant preacher without a home or means of subsistence.”

The Church of God becomes concrete and visible only in a community of people who have experienced the presence of God and responded to his saving activity.

Transcendence is the way God is immanent. God is present in every created reality, without being identified with it. This is the meaning of God’s transcendence.

It is our Christian task to make ourselves increasingly more free. As one of the beautiful hymns has it: “It is a long road to freedom”. There is a great danger that we will give in to external force or internal compulsion, thus jeopardizing our freedom.

Uniformity is the death of life. Wherever there is life, there is diversity.

The biblical understanding of the human person is holistic. It makes no distinction between body and soul. The human person is not a soul living in a body, but an animated body, so perfectly integrated that the person in his totality can express himself/herself and be apprehended in any part. “It is the body rooted in the cosmos and related to other human beings, which gives the person his or her identity.”

Christian hope asks us to regard every stage in the growth of a person and every phase in the development of the Church as merely provisional. It has to be transcended. We are still on our way to the final Kingdom.

Mission of the Church is to collaborate with God in his work for the wholeness of the human person, the human community and the cosmos according to the pattern revealed in Jesus Christ.

In recent times, we are becoming increasingly more aware of the cosmic dimension of salvation. The destiny of humankind and that of the cosmos are inextricably intertwined. In the past, Christians often thought of their relationship to the world in terms of domination, possession, use and enjoyment. There was little awe and wonder before the mystery of the universe. This arrogant and irreverent attitude to creation is largely responsible for the serious ecological crisis was are facing today.

The Church in India needs to take more seriously the option for the poor and take concrete steps to alleviate poverty and misery in India.

In the religious traditions of humankind there are at least four ways in which people have encountered the divine. First of all, there is the experience of God in nature, as the power behind natural phenomena. Such an experience usually leads to belief in nature gods. This is clearly seen in Hinduism. Secondly, there is the experience of God in the depths of one’s being. God-ward movement often takes an inward direction. This leads to the cultivation of interiority. The Upanishads bear witness to this kind of an experience of God. It is also found among the Christian mystics. Thirdly, there is the experience of God mediated through the rites and doctrines of religions. This is probably the most valued form of God-experience in popular Catholicism, in which the frequent reception of the sacraments is highly esteemed. Such an approach to the experience of God is found also among the followers of other religions. Finally, there is the experience of God in inter-human relationships and socio-political involvements. This form of God-experience is, I believe, typical of the biblical tradition.

The foundational God-experience of Israel was the Exodus – the experience of God in the liberation of slaves. Israel also experienced God as the one who was active on its behalf in the decisive moments of its history. And the early Christians experienced God in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, who was done to death as a political criminal. For us Christians, the human person is the privileged locus of God-experience – we encounter God first of all in Jesus of Nazareth, and then in every man, woman and child.