Jesus said, "Surely, Allah is my Lord and your Lord"
(Qur'an 3:51) Surely, Allah is my Lord and your Lord; so serve Him alone. This is the straight way.'
As with other Prophets, the fundamental points of Jesus' mission were the following:
(1) Man should acknowledge- the exclusive
sovereignty of God which demands absolute service and obedience to Him,
and Him alone. This principle serves as the basis for the entire
structure of human morality and social behaviour.
(2) Man should obey the Prophets since they are the representatives of the true Sovereign.
(3) The Law which should regulate man's
conduct by elaborating what is right and what is wrong should be none
other than the Law of God. The laws devised by others should be
abrogated. There is, thus, no difference between the missions of Jesus,
Moses and Muhammad (peace be on them all). Those who think that the
missions of the Prophets differ from one another and who believe that
their objectives vary have fallen into serious error. Whoever is sent by
the Lord of the Universe to His creatures can have no other purpose
than to dissuade God's subjects from disobeying Him and assuming an
attitude of vanity and disregard towards Him, and to admonish them
against associating anyone with God in His divinity (that is, either
holding anyone to be a partner with the Lord of the Universe in His
Sovereignty or recognizing others beside God as having a rightful claim
on part of man's loyalty, devotion and worship), and to invite them all
to be loyal to, and to serve, obey and worship God alone.
It is unfortunate that the Gospels in
their present form do not offer as clear a picture of the mission of
Jesus as that presented by the Qur'an. Nevertheless, we find scattered
throughout the Gospels all the three fundamentals mentioned above. The
notion that man ought to submit himself totally to God is embodied in
the following statement:
You shall worship the Lord your God and Him only shall you serve' (Matthew 4: 10).
In addition, Jesus believed that the
object of his efforts was that God's commands relating to the moral
realm should be obeyed in this world in the sphere of human conduct just
as His commands about the operation of the physical universe are obeyed
in the heavens:
'Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven' (ibid., 6: 10).
The fact that Jesus presented himself as a
Prophet and a representative of the Kingdom of Heaven, and that in this
capacity he asked people to follow him is borne out by several
statements. When, for instance, he began his mission in Nazareth and
when his own kith, kin and compatriots turned against him, he remarked:
'A prophet is not without honour except in his own country . . .'
(Matthew 13: 57; see also Luke 4: 24 and Mark 6: 4). And when
conspiracies were hatched in Jerusalem to put an end to his life, and
people counselled him to go away, he replied: 'Nevertheless I must go on
my way . . . for it cannot be that a prophet should perish away from
Jerusalem' (Luke 13: 33). When Jesus entered Jerusalem for the last time
the disciples cried with a loud voice: 'Blessed be the King who comes
in the name of the Lord' (Luke 19: 38). This angered the Pharisees, who
asked Jesus to rebuke his disciples. But he replied: 'I tell you, if
these were silent the very stones would cry out' (ibid., 19: 40). On
another occasion he said: 'Come to me, all who labour and are heavy
laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you. For my yoke is
easy, and my burden is light' (Matthew 11: 28-30).
The fact that he invited people to obey
the Laws of God rather than the laws made by man is evident from his
response (found in both Matthew and Mark) to the objection raised by the
Pharisees to the conduct of their disciples who ate with defiled hands,
that is, without washing.
'Well did Isiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written:
This people honours me with their lips,
but their heart is far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching as doctrines the precepts of men.'
And he said to them: 'You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment
of God in order to keep your tradition. For Moses said, "Honour your
father and your mother", and "He who speaks evil of his father or
mother, let him surely die", but you say, "If a man tells his father or
mother what you would have gained from me is Corban (that is, given to
God), and then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or
mother, thus making void the word of God through your tradition which
you hand on"' (Mark 7: 6-13; see also Matthew 15: 2-9).
Post a Comment