Till the end of her days my late and formidable surgeon/physician mother-in-law [PT Madhavi Amma] believed that Christians were better people than non-Christians. From a matron in the hospital to a domestic helper at home, other things being equal, she preferred a follower of Christ. Herself a non-believer, she loved to listen to the songs and occasional tirades against other religions that the visiting Pentecostals unleashed in her home while my Father-in-law chuckled. The rest of us either seethed silently or learned to ignore the exercises.

Where did this strong conviction of Christian superiority come from? Where, but from watching people who had indeed behaved in a morally admirable way? Indeed the Malayali Christians and Anglo-Indian Catholic girls that I grew up with were also a cut above the rest of the children in class and made dependable friends. I still recall the shock I felt at the Fr. Benedict case though I couldn’t have been more than 11 or 12. I thought of my brother's teachers and my early tutors at the convent. A corrupt and dangerous priest! Was it possible?

Alas! Much more was to come. One grew up and found out that Jesus could be pinned to the lapel of a dress or tie but it didn’t mean very much more than some other sort of decoration.

Twenty centuries is a long time to find out if something has worked. Or is working. Has Christianity been able to save the world from itself? Considering that the worst forms of war and weaponry have come from "Christian" civilizations, not to mention the cruelest theories of racial prejudice based on colour and facial features, there is something very wrong about the way our dear Lord's teaching has been understood.

What are the public faces of the Teaching that are projected, absorbed and propagated? Lets take it at a personal as well as public level using three extremely commonly understood human norms. Money, enmity, a feeling of communal bonding / exclusivity. Each of these if viewed in a healthy way has enormous potential for growth and if misunderstood can do a lot of damage.

Watching the Sunday TV evangelists is something I enjoy and before I go any further let me say that my vote is for the late Derek Prince. No theatrics, no yelling or joking. Prince's sessions are like being in an English Literature classroom listening to a great professor teaching the scriptures. A man who taught the Bible for nearly 60 years, he settled in Jerusalem where he eventually died in his sleep. He didn’t just teach the Word. He lived it.

On the other hand there is a channel called the Dollar TV. Amazingly, the speakers on this channel assure their viewers that following the Bible will make them rich. It uses Jesus Christ to reach Mammon. I find this most peculiar. ("I recited this prayer for a week and I got $20,000"). Why is no one protesting? Do Christians think it is all right for the great messages to be distorted? I thought Jesus had advised his disciples not to take anything with them except a staff when they set out to preach. His spirit would be with them to empower them. Sell all you have and give it to the poor and you shall have riches in Heaven. The channel does not speak about riches in Heaven but about prosperity here and now. I'd like to use this space to make at least one thing clear--worldly though it is, the goal of Lakshmi Devi pooja is not wealth; it is to gain moral merit from generous acts that are possible only if the Goddess of Plenty showers riches on the worshipper. Does that sound complicated? Believe me, Hinduism is complicated. But Jesus' warnings about human attachment to money becoming an impediment to spiritual growth seem to have been misunderstood by many Christian organizations. A shining example of the opposite is the St Teresa's College in Ernakulam. The older members of the convent were extremely upset when they heard that a fund raising campaign was on to complete their building expansions. They felt that it was not part of their vocation at all to make money out of society and insisted that as soon as the bare minimum had been collected to meet student comforts, all efforts to raise more money should be stopped. The sisters have understood that the greatest bulwark against failure and insecurity is not money, but faith in a Teaching they have chosen to follow. We too can decide, "This is enough. Any more fund-raising would be unseemly. Even this isn’t really necessary."

The challenge before Christianity today is whether its followers are prepared to honour Jesus Christ. Not merely by praising him and showing up in Church every Sunday thereby claiming they are his followers but by acting out the instructions Christ left us with. Jesus is the hardest person to imitate. Just another one of his injunctions-- to bless those that persecute you, would throw the whole Dalit Christian movement out of business because if they blessed and forgave those that had persecuted them and continue to, it would end the careers of their political leaders. Yes, Jesus' teachings only sound and look simple. They are very, very hard to follow. If you are of an extremely worldly bent of mind, find it hard to acknowledge another's achievement, or indeed what they've done for you, then being a Christian is to know lifelong incompatibility with one's way of life.

Turning the last page of the OT and moving into the New makes one think that there was no gap between the two periods. In actual fact 400 years lay between the periods of these two books. And it is against the context of these four centuries that the world's best-known biography began. What do we see? In place of David's throne was the Roman standard, Roman tax-gatherers sat at the gate of every Jewish town and the religious patriotism of the Jews had run so low that whatever was grand and living in the scriptures had been by-passed and the ceremonial elevated to the same rank as the moral. The synagogue, one of the most potent engines of instruction ever devised by any people, had entirely forgotten its true role and become a dry space controlled by men who used their positions for self-aggrandizement, scorning those to whom they gave stones instead of bread. The public conscience was loaded with thousands of interpretations and commentaries every one of which was hammered out and shown to be as divinely sanctioned as the Ten Commandments.

In my opinion, there is not much difference between the descriptions of Judeaean life in the first century AD and the kind of pain and social fragmentation we see today, all around us. What is worse today is that despite being attached to a tradition of personal austerity and love, so few Christians actually practice the simple messages that Jesus Christ left them with. Why call yourself a Christian if you aren’t really one? Jesus did not ask people to fast beyond endurance, stay awake at night, inflict all manner of physical torture on their bodies or deny themselves the comfort of their friends or family. At the core of Jesus' teaching was the insistence that you see the other as yourself. This violently upturns everything that we normally array in life as necessary for personal and emotional safety. Marry only your own kind, don’t eat in the house of someone of another religion or caste, and help only people in your own community. Never give an opportunity to anyone else...s/ he will bring in her/ his whole world of friends. This tendency to build walls of exclusivity was not at all Jesus' way of thinking. Although a Jewish rabbi had to live by very strict rules he thought that most of the rituals and rules of pollution and exclusivity were utter nonsense if it meant that they excluded human warmth and loving assurances.

To my wish and knowledge Christ is One and He should not be broken into pieces among various denominations. Being a true Christian in Society with the image of Jesus Christ in him is the biggest evangelization mission a Christian can do. Nor would there be any conflict concerning conversions or the devious ways in which they are done because people are usually happy to follow those they admire. But where are the admirable Christians today who will step out of their communities to understand and serve people of other faiths?