The Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity : 14.1. Swami Krishnananda.

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Thursday, September 09, 2021. 9:30. PM.
The First Six Chapters of the Bhagavadgita
Chapter -14.The Coming of God as an Incarnation -1.
(Spoken on Bhagavadgita Jayanti)
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Chapter 14: The Coming of God as an Incarnation - 1.

The role of the divine immanence in the processes of this world, which we were trying to discuss yesterday, is effected by the omniscience of this presence through its Incarnation that takes place at that moment when it is felt necessary. The phenomenon of divine Incarnation is something which religious philosophy has not been able to understand clearly. What exactly is the Incarnation? How does it take place? We shall not be able to understand what it is because no one can understand the way in which God works. The coming of God, if it is what we understand by Incarnation, is something known to God only. We may attempt, from our own side, to find a meaning in this occurrence, but however much we may stretch our imagination and reasoning capacity, its meaning will not be clear to us.

How does God come, when does God come, and why does God come? These are hard things for us. We know, as it is assured us in the Bhagavadgita and in the scriptures of the world, that God is the friend of man, the saviour of humanity, and the benefactor of the whole of creation. It is said in all religions that God is the supreme friend of every created being. The final succour of everything mortal is in its relationship to the immortal, as the extent of our life in this world is conditioned by the extent of our relationship with the vitality that is in us. As long as the vitality operates in us in a meaningful relation with our living process, we shall be alive. When this relationship gets thinned out, we become feeble; we become senile and unable to act, both physically and mentally. When this relationship is snapped, we become corpses, nothings, insignificant existences.

We have enigmatic, unintelligible but profound references to the fact of Incarnation when we hear it said that Christ is the son of God. Christ also is the son of Man. We find such references in the New Testament. We can understand, to some extent, the meaning of Christ being the son of God because he has descended from God, has come from God, was sent by God as an ambassador of God, was God Himself in one proportion of intensity. But he is also the son of Man. You would have observed that the word ‘man’ is spelt with a capital M. He is not the son of any particular man; it is the son of Man as such. I have heard it explained by theologians that this M has a significance, and it is never written with a lowercase m.

God’s coming is an effect, a response, as it were, to the call of man as such. A crucial circumstance arises in the very living conditions of mankind. It is not the problem of any single person; it is not a little man that is calling God, it is a big man that calls. You may remember that in one of our earlier sessions we had occasion to conclude that perhaps the whole of mankind is one man, that there are no ‘many people’ in this world. The total man is like the organism of humanity, and the redeeming forces in the organism begin to unleash their energy when there is some threat dealt by the intrusion of elements that are extraneous, inorganic, and toxic – toxic intrusions into the very purpose of creation.

To be continued ...

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