CHRIST’S CODE OF COMPASSION
We may be a secular nation but I believe children must have moral science classes. How quaint and alien words like “goodness” and “moral” sound in a world driven by the bottom line. If the bottom line doesn’t get you, political correctness will, as liberals skitter away nervously from preferences to religion and faith. Yet we cannot doubt that any foundation for the human future is complete without a framework of ethics, a code of compassion – especially relevant for a society divided by inequalities.
Perhaps that is why we turn for answers and for healing, to spiritual texts like Christ’s Sermon on the Mount which is of particular and poignant meaning to us in India. Like the greatest texts, its message of brotherhood and caring is universal and belongs to us all. You don’t have to be a Christian to subscribe to its values and though thousands of learned interpretations stress the doctrine of faith, these words spoken long ago in Galilee, transcend limits of religion to reach to all mankind. The sermon described the attributes we recognize today, purity, compassion, forgiveness, non-violence and the importance of being non-judgmental. Interesting to speculate what Karl Marx would have made of the Sermon on the Mount. Would he had seen an activist who spoke for those without a voice? Or would he had better appreciated the concept of mutual human responsibility and caring, enshrined in Christ’s words, “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them”?