Religion Must Help Greater Acceptance And Not Control

 What if you see people who never came to your church or never were part of the universal Church found with God; forgiven by god, loved by god, helped by god, and even pampered by god? Our average human spirit and mind will feel a bit of discomfort and repulsion. That exactly is what is happening with apostle John in Mark 9: 38-41.

Membership in a religion in many phases in history, and religious practices like praying, church-going etc. has become tools and means of exercising superiority and control over others, or it becomes a means to exclude people. In the name of religion and religious practices we take control of what can be done, who can do it, what is good and bad, what is moral and what is immoral. This approach creates an exclusive moral, good, pure, and authentic race or people or group. We keep doing it as individuals and institutions for the fear of losing control over others. And that is the end of humanity. Stopping others from doing good comes from a sickening closed mentality.

We make one humankind possible only by acknowledging, accepting, and including others: others who are smaller than us, others who are equal to us—like the case here, others who may even confront and oppose us.

Jesus in multiple times made it amply clear that we must accept and include people who are smaller, and less significant, and less powerful than us. The passage, Mark 9: 33-37, talks about how we must accept and respect people who are as small and insignificant as children, thus we become testaments of God’s Kingdom. We don't enter God’s Kingdom, there is no physical place like that; we become God’s Kingdom.

We need not exclude and destroy who disagree and oppose us. In Luke 9: 51-56 we find Jesus sending some of his disciples ahead of him to a town in Samaria to make everything ready for him. But the people there would not welcome him; in other word they confronted and showed their opposition to what they were doing. James and John seeing this said, “Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven and destroy those people?” Jesus turned and scolded them, asking them, what kind of spirit and spirituality they belonged to.

Inclusivity, acceptance is the core of Christian spirituality. Then he added, the Son of Man did not come to destroy exclude and destroy people but to include and save them. Please note this too, ‘then they went to another town’. Some times we must change our ways and journeys to include others.

Sri Narayana Guru had a beautiful way of interpreting the Gitas and Hindu scriptures. He always saw elements of kindness, mercy, inclusivity etc. in it. Once another scholar challenged him, saying, Guru you are seeing too much in the scriptures, those texts do not have these elements of kindness, mercy, inclusivity, etc. The guru bluntly added, ‘if they are not there, add them.”

The word religion may have come from the Latin word religãre, which means ‘to tie fast’, ‘to gather back’, to connect back’, or ‘to include back’. Religion is an institution sacred and set apart to exercise acceptance and inclusivity.