The following article was written by a member of the Servants India team.
Not too long ago we were sitting in a friend’s tiny house, on the concrete floor where her two sons sleep. We’ll call her Moshumi. We told her we were happy because N’s Dad was arriving at the airport in four hours. She asked us to come over for dinner the next night. She made us a fantastic meal over her one-burner kerosene stove: fried rice with peas, potato and egg curry, chicken for my Dad, and rice pudding for dessert. One of the first things she said as we were eating was, “What is your father thinking of us, in this tiny room?” I translated for my Dad, who said: “This is good, you are good people, you have a beautiful home and family, and I’m happy to be here,” to which she replied unbelievingly, “ami choto, tumi boro,” a refrain of hers (and so many others we interact with every day). I am small and you are big. I sighed, translated for my Dad, and again we said “No, no, no, no.” I said to her over and over: “amra shobai shoman.” We’re all equal. I made her say it a couple times. She laughed. Before leaving I begged her to repeat it to me a couple more times.
She has been made to feel inferior her whole life. “When I was a small child,” she told us, “People from your country would come in taxis to where I lived. They were white and they had cameras. They took pictures of me in my dirty and torn clothing.”
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Once every month or two we spend a few nights at a Jesuit ashram (Indian spiritual retreat centre). It’s the only place we’ve found church services that rejuvenate us instead of wear us down. Neighbours always want pictures of wherever we’ve been so we handed her my phone with some pictures of the Ashram on it. There were Indian depictions of Mary and Jesus, some pictures of ponds, birds, plants, and one photo of a sculpture of Jesus washing Peter’s feet. “This is Jishu (Jesus)?” she asked.
“Yes, that’s Jishu.”
“And this is Jishu’s guru.”, she said, pointing to Peter.
“No, that is Jishu’s chatro (student)”.
She rolled her eyes, exasperated at us still not being able to speak Bengali right after all this time. “No, no, no,” she said, “Look. This one is washing his guru’s feet. This one is the student. This one is the teacher.”
“No,” we said, “That’s Jishu on the floor. He is washing his student’s feet. This is Peter. He is Jishu’s student.”
She gave us definitions of guru and chatro, repeated again the obvious facts of the case. We pieced together as best we could for her the story of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples.
She sat in confused silence for a few moments looking down at the picture of the statue. “Jishu shobhaike seva kore,” she eventually concluded. Jesus serves everyone.
Excited we’d convinced her we weren’t just idiots who didn’t know the words for student and teacher, we said, “Yes, yes, that’s exactly it.”
She sat looking perplexed for a while nodding her head at the image.
Since then her fascination with Jesus has increased. She asked to see more pictures of Jesus. The crucifixion was an obvious fixation. “Who killed him? Why did they kill him?” I can’t adequately answer these questions in English (Powerful men? Because he didn’t buy into their domination system?) and our answers did not satisfy so she moved on to ask of the men on Jesus’ left and right, “Who is this? And who is this?”
“Chor,” we answered. It means “thieves” but also means spy and it’s what the news anchors tend to call suspected terrorists.
Again she thought we didn’t know what we are talking about. “This is Jishu. Jishu is a god. A god does not die with chors. These aren’t chors. Chor means somebody who is a criminal and steals things. Why would there be a thief with Jishu? Are they good or bad?”
“They are chors. They were killed for being chors. Jishu was killed for being Jishu. The government killed lots of people in those days to keep everyone afraid.”
“Jesus died together with chors,” she repeated, looking in awe at the picture.
From Bible story book illustrations she’s grasped a terrifying simple truth of the Gospel narrative. God is not interested in upward mobility and the upwardly mobile will not see God. God likes the poor, sick, and rejected best, and has no aims to show them their place below him. Their place is with him.
Some Christians take offence at the notion of God having a preferential option for the poor. I suppose they don’t grasp how much the world hates the poor. A straight-forward reading of the Gospels is a terrifying experience for a wealthy person (like ourselves). God incarnate did not set up a corporation in an office tower, make some big plans, and implement them. God incarnate chose to debase himself washing his students’ feet and then be stripped naked and tortured to death between two chors.
What can we do?
We plod along here, trying to speak with honesty and simplicity in a language we barely speak and culture we barely know. Pray that we’d find ways to lower our status, to become less successful, to shrink our plans, and have less faith. And pray that we’d find more theologians like our friend Moshumi, who gets it.
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