Are We Alive?

"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean.” Matthew 23:27. How Jesus addressed the ministers of the land is not much disputed because everybody knows that the Scribes and Pharisees were not as clean as they appeared to be. Peeping into the inner meanings of these verses we see that Jesus saw those hypocrites as corpses well in vaults. Corpses are lifeless, they are rotten. Did He mean that they were really dead? 

Let us look at a model human being of a mature temperament. Where does he live? He exists in a world of rituals for sure. He is blindly following all social, religious and cultural traditions, sensible or not. He hesitates to be an individual. He sees only his own personality everywhere and does not even think of another entity of any nature, having equal rights. He has a pack of formal expressions that fit all occasions. Does he ever open his mind? Can such a being be alive? As Pope Francis recently commented, in spite of all the explosions in communication, man actually is alone (alone in a custom cocoon?). Though alone in the crowd, they damage themselves and also their world around.

There is the famous story of a boatman who worked all day in the river that separated the city from the village. His small open boat was always busy porting the villagers back and forth. One day morning, as usual, just before moving out he shouted aloud, “Anybody else?” No answer; he gently turned his boat and moved a few meters into the river. Suddenly, a gentleman appeared from nowhere shouting, “Me too!” Before the boatman could do anything, the guy had jumped into the river in a hurry. He caught hold of the boat. In his anxiety to get into the boat, the boat lost its balance and gently sank there, dropping all the passengers in water.

This boat story is not directly related to any hypocrite. But, all the hypocrites with double faces definitely are like the guy who came in the last minute and caused damage to all in the boat. This is because hypocrites never see anything else in the universe worth the pleasures of existence. They think that it is for them that the globe is rotating; it is for them only that Sun and Moon shines; it is for them that there is Winter and Summer; it is for them that the trees bear fruits and plants bear flowers….. The more we turn away from the solidarity of nature the stronger the universe pushes us into the abyss of loneliness – in effect, a world of lifeless spirits. 

Joseph Mattappally