My grandfather! says a Christian, “Was a Brahmin before he converted!” “Yes, it’s the second time, you’ve told me that!” I tell him pleasantly. “We even told our daughter this, so she can be proud of her heritage!” says his wife to me. “You should add that after your name!” I say jokingly, “So that people will know!” “Oh yes my brother has retained his old caste name after his Christian name!” she says proudly.
When Jesus gathered people around him as his followers, he did not look for pedigree. He did not look for people who served in the temple or from high families. He picked anybody and everybody, mostly nobodies who He made into Somebodies through Himself.
Let me take you through the ancestry of Jesus. Jesus came from the line of David! Wow, heavy stuff, pedigree, right, and who was the great grandmother of David? Ruth, the Moabite woman who followed Naomi her mother-in-law, saying, “Whither thou goest I will go!”
And who were the Moabites? They were descendants of Lot’s elder daughter, who’s child, came out of an incestuous relationship with her father! Yuck! Not an ancestry to boast about, isn’t it? And yet from that terrible sin, came the line of Jesus! God, couldn’t have been more explicit in telling us He cares nothing for ancestry!
But you do, don’t you? You love telling the world, you are descendants of the first Christians converted by St Thomas, two thousand years ago, or that your grandmother was from a high caste, or grandfather was from a royal family ( yes, my mother loved telling me this, and I loved telling her, that some of the royal wealth, not heritage would have helped! Tongue in cheek of course!)
I know Christians in the south, who don’t allow their children to get married to others from another caste! Sad! Because Christ came to break such thinking, and clinging onto such thoughts, shows sadly that you are not proud to be a soldier in His army, but continue saying, “My loyalty is to my old king!” During the Second World War, thousands of Americans citizens of Japanese origin, were put into fenced camps, because the government suspected their allegiance as the US was with war with Japan.
I wonder whether the same should be done by a casteless God, to His followers who still cling to their old systems because it’s only when you give up such wrong thinking, that you can reach across with confidence to anybody anywhere and tell them of your God, through Whom you can do all things, because He strengthens you, but if you are still clinging to previous links to show your importance, then it comes from a sense of inferiority and insecurity, and you are actually telling the world, your God, couldn’t lift you out of that inferiority complex and neither can He do it for them! Just say, you are a child of God..!
