but on the mystery
of his person, the gradual way in which
the disciples reach an understanding of him
which remains hidden from the crowds.”
Even the disciples have a hard time
understanding that he must die out of love.
At Mark 8:31 we get the first prophecy
of his passion and Peter cannot grasp it
and at Mark 9:9 Jesus tells them again
to keep it a secret that he will be killed
but then be resurrected from the dead.
At Mark 9:30 he repeats the secret and
only slowly do they come to understand
the relation between agape and being
killed out of love for others and then
this strange mystery of rising from the dead.
They are being taught the great mystery
that Christmas can be everyday
especially on Good Friday because of
Easter Sunday and it wasn’t until
he died and rose from the dead
that they would begin to understand.
Three times Jesus predicts his passion,
death, and resurrection and each time
he is misunderstood by his followers.
How to redeem suffering and let it be
even joyful is the mystery of agape
and is central to the mission of Jesus.
Bhakti
The Bhakti of the Bhgavad Gita
We now get to explore the Hindu love of bhakti
and the Christian love of agape in their differences,
their likenesses and how they might complement each other.
The Bhagavad Gita is a beautiful, wonderful poem
that can introduce us to the varieties of Hindu mysticism.
It is part of humankind’s longest poem, the Mahabharata,
and in it Lord Krishna is explaining to Arjuna,
who is a member of the warrior caste,
why it is his duty to kill some of his relatives
in a just war to maintain the Kingdom as it should be.
Lord Krishna shows three paths to Arjuna as to why
he should fight; the paths of knowledge, action, and devotion.
The path of knowledge is metaphysical and teaches
Arjuna not to worry because persons do not really die
but continue on with rebirth and become other beings.
The path of action is ethical and shows Arjuna that
he should act out of duty alone and not for self-gain
and then he will receive a good rebirth.
The path of devotion teaches him how God loves him
and gives him the grace to love God so that he is
no longer motivated by freedom from the wheel of rebirth
but rather by the salvation to love God forever.
Thus there are two main mystical ways in the Gita.
The metaphysical and ethical paths take us beyond illusion
so that we see that each person is Atman, the great world soul,
and Atman is Brahman or pure Being-Consciousness-Bliss.
The devotional path of Bhakti believes that each person
can love the supreme spirit of the personal God
here on earth and then be happy with him
for ever in a heaven of eternal love or bhakti.
From Bhaj to Bhakti
The etymological root of bhakti is the word bhaj
which means “to share,” “to partake of” and “to participate.”
The ancient Sanskrit word for love is Prema which
means affection, eros, friendship, and devotion.
Prema and bhaj in the variety of their meanings
were synonyms for each other and from earliest times
in the great hymns of the Rig Veda there was
an outpouring of reverence, devotion, friendship and love
so that a scholar like Raj Singh can claim that
bhakti was already there throughout the whole history
of the Indian culture in all of its art and literature.
But the bhakti that is in the Bhagavad Gita
is very different in its world view from
the Advaita Vedanta view that is in the Gita also
and that developed in the Upanishadic times.
Scholars like Dhavamony see a great difference
between bhakti in the Gita and anything that
came before it in the entire Sanskrit tradition
and they ask where this bhakti came from.
They show why they think it came from
the Dravidian culture of the Tamil people in the south.
They have a special kind of literature which
is often written from the woman’s point of view.
Whether this view of God’s love for humans and
God’s grace that lets humans love God came from
