Counter-public Witness

Lent in the Syrian Orthodox church commenced with the biblical passage – The Wedding at Cana - wherein which the water in the six stone jars was transformed to wine by Jesus the Christ. The six stone jars represent the six weeks of lent. The Church with great theological anticipation set the almanac with this pericope at the forefront of Lent explicitly urging the faith community to transform our six weeks of ordinariness (water) to extraordinariness (wine).

The Church has reached the mid of Lent today. On the one hand it is indeed a great joy because our three jars are full at the same time we ought not forget that our three more jars remain empty.  Mid-lent should engulf us with a commingling of feelings so that we could draw impetus from them to carry on this transformative and explorative journey forward with great enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is not an abstract emotion rather it is a derivative of the Greek word ‘enthusiasmos’ which means ‘to be possessed by the Divine’. Thus drawing inspiration from the meditations of our past three weeks let us be inspired to explicate our radical and discerning witnessing.

In the Syrian Orthodox tradition, during the Mid-Lent service, a cross (Mnortho) is erected right in the middle of the Church among the people replicating Golgotha. Calvary, or Golgotha was a site immediately outside the walls of Jerusalem where Jesus was crucified. It also signifies the serpent erected by Moses in the wilderness. We are aware that Moses lifted up the bronze serpent in the middle of the wilderness while the Exodus. Moses lifted up the serpent so that those who were bitten by the snake might look at it and have life. Similarly the cross is lifted up in the middle of the church so that we may be reminded that we who are bitten by sin can look at the cross and gain eternal life.

However there is another reason which fascinates me. Golgotha (Mnortho) is erected in the middle of the church among people to signify that God came down from heaven and dwelt among us. This is a subversive interpretation; an interpretation where God is no longer an object of faith. The subject-object dichotomy is put to an end. It is an act of reminding the merging of the transcendence with the immanence. This Golgotha continues to be in the middle of church among people till the Passion Week symbolically depicting the public ministry of Jesus. Thus Mid-Lent service is a call to rekindle our vocation of Christian witnessing. A call to be martyrs for Christ for the sake of the realization of the kingdom of God.

Martyrdom is an expression usually attributed to death which is not true. Traversing the etymology of the word ‘martyr’ we come to the Greek word ‘marturia’ which means ‘to witness’. Martyrdom should not be petrified with suicidal connotations rather it should reinvigorate the extinguished embers of Christian witnessing.

Where do we make our witnessing evidential today? ‘Witness in the public sphere’ has turned out to be a cliché for me especially in India’s current malicious political fray. Public sphere is no more public in essence rather these spheres have been wittily eroded and colonized by the dominant and powerful elites. Liberalization has divided the society into public and private spheres presupposing a singular public where differences are erased for the singular common good. Cynthia Moe-Lobeda a well-known Lutheran ethicist, problematizes the term ‘Public’. She opines;

Unquestioning acceptance of a singular public with singular common good may become a veneer for the legitimation of elite interests excluding the perspectives and interests of the less powerful.

At this time I urge the faith community to identify counter-public spheres i.e. the spheres of the margins and the subalterns. Nancy Frazer, an American critical theorist defines;

Counter-publics as parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counter discourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests and needs.

As I mentioned Golgotha is erected in the middle of the church among people to symbolize the ministry of Jesus. Where did Jesus start his ministry from? It was from the town of Nazareth a province in Galilee. Nazareth was a Jewish enclave. It was also relatively poor and overpopulated; there was scarcity of natural resources such as water and fertile soil. In such a situation, there tended to be a fair amount of sickness and disease. No wonder Nathaniel asked “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Jesus through his witnessing in the margins keeping himself at bay with the ‘public’ transformed Nazareth and subsequently Galilee into a counter-public discursive sphere, an arena formulating counter hermeneutics, epistemologies and discourses. Thus Christian witness should not be ‘public’ but counter-public.

To conclude, Mid- Lent is a time to create and identify similar counter public spheres of our times and witness among them to eradicate systemic evils. The Church can no longer stay numb. Let us bring to our memories the Open Letter to the silent leadership of Church written by 101 Christian intellectuals from all walks of life;

We, as Indian Christians, are concerned at the steady shift we see in our country from a pluralist, secular, democracy to a Hindu Rashtra. What used to be fringe, has now become mainstream. There is a systematic design to undermine the Constitution. Official machinery often seems working in tandem with the ‘vigilantes’. Street lynching, victims charged as accused, stage-managed trials; all on the basis of one’s religious and caste identities. Media seems mute, silent in self-censorship, coerced by the state, or leashed by its corporate ownership. Fake News is the final straw…. The Church, guided by you, needs to act before it is too late. This is the lesson we learn from history. It is time to stand with the victims to be the voice of poor and marginalized; time to collaborate and partner with the civil society to spread the truth; and time to take bold initiatives and action to prevent further erosion of our humane and constitutional values.  

Prayers

Dn. Basil Paul