GANDHI

Why have so many Christians pointed to Gandhi – a lifelong Hindu! – as the most Christlike figure they have ever known? Gandhi obviously had a decisive impact on the history of India; but if we consider has influence on America’s Civil Rights movement, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s campaign against Hitler, Nelson Mandela’s toppling of Apartheid in South Africa, and the way Christian missionaries in Asia do what they do, we realize his life bears much reflection – especially as we move toward World Communion Sunday.

The outline of his life is familiar enough, and Hollywood even bequeathed to us a superb film on his life (starring Ben Kingsley), winning the 1982 Oscar for best picture. Born in 1869, Gandhi grew up in a fine family with stellar political connections, and studied law with distinction in London. His work as a barrister took him to South Africa, where he first got involved in the early combat against racial prejudice. With that experience under his belt, he returned to India in 1915, and organized mass protests against excessive taxation and discrimination, most famously with the Salt march of 1930. He was a pioneer in nonviolent political protest (or an imitator of Jesus!): donning a loincloth and armed with a bamboo walking stick, Gandhi waged peaceful war against the greatest world empire in history.

But he had the advantage of an idea: he could match his capacity to suffer against others’ capacity to inflict suffering; he refused to hate, but he refused to obey unjust laws. As the famous Christian missionary E. Stanley Jones put it, “He marched into the soul of humanity in the most triumphal march that any man ever made since the death and resurrection of the Son of God.”

Jones could not help seeing parallels between Gandhi and Christ: when Gandhi was assassinated in 1948, Stanley, who had become a close friend of Gandhi, sadly wrote, “Never did a death more fittingly crown a life, save only one – that of the Son of God. On the human level this was the greatest and most befitting climax: a man on the way to a prayer meeting where he would pray for himself and his people, and where he would give his daily counsel, dies a martyr for an Indian for all.”

Our interest in Gandhi is from this kind of Christian perspective. This lifelong Hindu studied Christianity in considerable depth, although never considered conversion: “I like your Christ, but I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” Gandhi believed the Christians have “inoculated the world with a mild form of Christianity, so that it is now proof against the real thing.”

Missionaries sought his counsel – and his advice to foreign missionaries might be taken to heart by those of us back home: “First, I would suggest that all of you Christians, missionaries and all, must begin to live more like Jesus Christ. Second, practice your religion without adulterating it or toning it down. Third, emphasize love and make it your working force, for live is central in Christianity. Fourth, study the non-Christian religions more sympathetically to find the good.”
Jones reflected on the wisdom of this, and saw everything with new eyes: “Too often our evangelism has been verbal instead of vital – an evangelism of the lips instead of evangelism of the life. The whole life has not spoken the message… In penance for this we might very well impose silence upon our lips until our lives have caught up with their testimony.”

Gandhi’s most powerful message was, curiously his silence. He was no spellbinding orator; he was childlike in a way, humble, soft-spoken, more likely to be caught at his spinning wheel than behind a microphone rallying the forces. As we think about our world, Gandhi reminds us we could use more love and less talk.

In a way, we might grasp the subtle truth that he gave the loveliest conceivable expression of Hinduism, and perhaps as he did so, Christians noticed in him an illustration of what Christ was about; this coincidence can draw people together from differing religions and viewpoints and can help them make peace with each other. His dual life mission was 1. freedom, and 2. unity. He was killed because he wanted India to be a safe home not only for Hindus and Christians but also Muslims – and there is something about the nonviolent protester who won’t play by the might makes right rules that elicits the rage of killers, like James Earl Ray, the assassins of Anwar Sadat and Yitzhak Rabin, Oscar Romero, those medical missionaries in Afghanistan… and Pontius Pilate.