Jesus preached love and forgiveness. He often preached through the form of parables—disarmingly simple stories from nature, agriculture, and the life of the common people, which nevertheless carried profound and difficult teachings. It is said that his teachings left people baffled and tongue-tied, shaken out of their complacency and self-righteousness. He spoke of loving God above all other things, caring about all other people as much as we care about ourselves, the coming kingdom of God and eternal life.
Once Jesus stood in the marketplace. He was surrounded by a crowd of eager listeners. To them he spoke of deep truths of the Spirit in a language they could easily understand, for he spoke in stories and parables.
The Master spoke of a king whose son was being married. The marriage feast was kept open to all who would care to come. The rich and the poor, the old and the young, men and women, boys and girls—of all faiths and no faith—all, all were welcome at the marriage feast. There was but one condition to be fulfilled: whosoever joined in the festival must put on a new robe. So many came dressed in their old garments: the king gave them new robes to wear. All who sat at the feast were clothed in new, shining robes.
“Put off the old, put on the new!” In these few, simple words, as it seems to me, is summed up the teaching of Jesus. We, so many of us, are clothed in old robes. They are the robes of selfishness and greed, of passion and pride, of anger and lust, of envy and hatred. So it is that we cannot enter the festival chamber of the King. We must renounce our old clothes: we must slay the old self of desire and craving that is at the root of all the misery there is in the world. We must put on the new robes of purity and peace, of humility and harmony, of compassion and love, to enter the Kingdom of God. These robes the Lord Himself giveth freely to all who ask for them. “Ask and ye shall receive!” said Jesus.
December 25 is the Sacred Christmas.
Dada J P Vaswani was a humanitarian, philosopher, educator, acclaimed writer, powerful orator, messiah of ahimsa, and non-sectarian spiritual leader.
