Walking the Path

God may only show the way, and it is for us to walk the path; after all, God cannot force us to walk the entire journey. As the famous Indian proverb goes, we may only take the horse to the waterside, but we cannot force it to drink water. The drinking part has to be done by the horse. When we are confronted by problems and challenges, God may help us, but he may not force us to be freed from the tricky situation. We need to cooperate with God in order to help ourselves. If God were to force us to live in safety and security, then it would not be we who live, but it would be God, who would be living our lives, and that would be quite contrary to the plan of God. He may provide us with the finest food, but we need to undertake the eating part; he cannot eat for us.

God invites us to help ourselves, though he does his part in clearing the hurdles which block our way to freedom and happiness. There are numerous miracles that Jesus performs, where he invites the sick to do their part to be completely healed. Look at the story of the ten lepers coming to Jesus and asking him to heal them; Jesus who respected the role of the high priests, tells the lepers to show themselves to the high priest… that is the little bit that they could do without much difficulty. The second part of the story only shows how wicked and cunning we could be, forgetting the goodness of God, and even failing to be grateful to him for the healing we have received. The Gospel says that as they were going to the high priest, they all were healed, and only a Samaritan returns to thank God.

Or let us take the story of Namaan from the Old Testament… the prophet had invited him to go and dip seven times in the Jordon river, so that he might be cleansed of leprosy. He was indignant, the Bible says, because he claimed there were cleaner rivers such as the Euphrates, and why he should have come all the way… But strangely what God asks of those who seeking healing is something so negligible and insignificant that we might think it silly and too trivial. If Namaan was too upset for being asked to take a dip in Jordon river, he might not have experienced healing. Perhaps we might be prepared to do something more demanding and challenging, but to do what is silly and trivial is too hard for us; if God does the 80 per cent of the job of healing, he wishes us to do the 20 per cent, to bring home the point that we have our role to play in the process of healing, for part of the healing comes from within our own selves.

We could take the story of Moses leading the people of Israel out of Egypt, and now they have come to bank of the Red Sea, and find it difficult to decide what they would do. Was it impossible for God to separate the waters so that his people could walk through it? Then why should he instruct Moses to tap his rod on the water, so that the water might divide? Similarly, when the people of Israel were asking for water, the Lord asks Moses to strike the rock with his rod, and water gushes forth. What is the point in these stories that God seeks the instrumentality of human persons? God is all powerful and nothing is impossible for him, and yet he depends on the human persons to bring to fruition his own divine plan, and therefore we become the collaborators in God’s salvific plan. For God, the little that we might offer to him is sweeter and tastier than all the rest.

Let me conclude with the famous story of the widow’s mite; what she had offered to the temple treasury is insignificant, and not worth mentioning, but Jesus takes note of this gesture of the widow, and appreciates her for the generosity with which she had offered to the temple. What is more important here is not how much she had contributed, but with what disposition she had done this act of contributing to the temple. One thing is sure, God cannot demand from us something which we cannot afford to give him, and he would ask us only what we can happily give to him, and he could multiply manifold what we offer him. Let us remember the wonderful story that Rabindranath Tagore narrates in his Song-Offerings about the Greedy (Kripon) man, who offers one gain of rice to the king who begged of him, and finds on reaching home that the grain he had gifted to the king had returned to him as golden grain, and he cries bitterly, ‘Why did I not give all that I had?’