Come on dear 'Myself,'

Jesus was critical about the holiness based on religious righteousness, where performing religious rituals would render an image of a holy person. Holiness, for Jesus, meant a living based on justice and charity. Jesus did not put on a holy man’s image, but he was a friend. We cannot fake in true friendship. It is an option which demands strong stand.

The way we understand holiness also may depend on how we understand ourselves. Perhaps we have been nurtured on an idealized angelic anthropology where our human elements are put to freeze. Such an anthropology was cultivated in a guilt culture which as widespread in the post-renaissance Europe. The whole human essence was reduced to be that of sin. The culture promoted a collective sadness thinking of the human frailty, death, and decay, a refusal to accept one’s own body and bodiliness. The pathetic poor condition of that time saw the logic "‘sinful nature’ as causality for all suffering" acceptable. The horror of hell and the sufferings of purgatory were the greatest concerns. The whole aim of life was to fight against sin. Guilt can breed fear, and manipulating that fear is a tool of power. More than seven hundred years we theologized and spiritualized this guilt culture.

In different times the human quest asked us to retell the redemption story, but we refused and liked to be in imprisonment and ransom theology. The unheard-human went to the extreme ideologies on human nature. Today perhaps is the time we need a different reading of the story of redemption. It is the religious righteousness that promotes a redemption of ours as if from a judged, condemned and imprisoned state. Jesus had no figure of a super hero, of a savior. He was not doing a favour to anybody in his healings, he respected all for who/what they were. He healed, he came to give life, as the sick needed a physician.  He comes near as we need someone on our side. 

In many ways we do lack the grace of God. If we lack life, there will be weakness and illness, which situation we call ‘sin,’ because of which we cannot be what we really are. To be human is our nature, and to live that nature well is our call. Here what we are aware is a need of a physician and willingness to recover. We are not burdened by guilt, but looking forward in hope. It is an embrace of God into a newness life, an experience of love, affirmation and joy. In the process we grow life our damages are healed.

Our faith must help us to live as human beings. Guilt culture can manipulate our vulnerability, and we can find easy hiding places in spirituality based on guilt. We can play all fake-games here in the forms of sentimentality of holiness and sinfulness. In friendship we cannot play fools, it asks for a responsible and honest response. But only if it is done we can dare for a holiness of justice and charity that Jesus lived. To call to such a holiness is a personal matter, religion does not have upper hand there and so it may not prefer it. Yet if it is convinced of its human and just call from God, religion can kindly listen to the words of Jesus: "Give her something to eat (Lk 8: 55)," "untie him and let him go (Jn 11: 44)."