Cold winters, warm fires, Christmas cheer, chocolates, cakes and gifts from the heart greeted us in this festive season when we were young and the world was a little more innocent. Sheer happiness undiluted by the glitz and glamour of the modern festival of consumerism that runs counter to the spirit of Christ. The nativity is the story of deprivation. The Holy family had only a manger as its shelter and Christ’s life was one of simplicity and minimalism. In the Sermon on the Mount, He tells his disciples to live like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field.
In the midst of the festive spirit my thoughts turn to the Bible. To me it is more than a religious text, it is a work of great literature. The Lord’s Prayer, the venerated Christian prayer that Jesus taught as the way to pray, “Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…” which we mechanically repeated in school and later studied with academic rigour is one of the perfect poems in the English Language where not a single word could be replaced. The most beautiful lines in the prayer to me are those that say “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us”, which so simply enshrines the theme of the Bible—love and forgiveness. To sin is the human predicament but we need to forgive if we want to be forgiven. While impaled on the Cross, Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”. There can be no one-liner in English more effective than that
When the Jews came with a coin with the engraving of Caesar and asked whether the coin should be given to God or Caesar, He said, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, Render unto God the things that are God’s.” There can be no better rejoinder than that. Mahatma Gandhi said, “Jesus was the most active resister known perhaps to history. His was nonviolence par excellence.”
A few years ago while staying at Holiday Inn in London I came across a Bible in the British Isles and the flyleaf said of the Book, “It is eternal in duration, divine in authorship, infallible in authority, inexhaustible in meaning, universal in readership, unique in revelation and powerful in effect.” Whenever I read the Bible I am overwhelmed by its linguistic excellence, lyricism, simplicity of expression and its wisdom and grace.
Sudha Devi Nayak
Email: sudhadevi_nayak@yahoo.com