Wati Aier
Two pieces of heavy wood was the cross where a guiltlessman hung. The man’s face was violently disfigured and his head crowned with a wreath of wild thorns, while his clothes were blood-soaked and tattered. He uttered no words of ill will towards his tormentors but instead, as decreed, placed the cross upon his shoulder and trudged towards Golgotha, the mount of skulls. There, on the carried cross, he was nailed a felon, a rebel, a blasphemer of Rome, a zealot.
Our recollection of Golgotha during this bleakest moment of suffering does not offer us any pleasure, and does not give us any rational sense of hope or salvation. Instead, impulses push us to remember bleak moments atop our own distant hills, evoking memories of Matikhru, Oinam, and Yankeli. What sense lies in accepting the reconciliation offered by a man bloodied and nailed to a splintered, uneven cross? The reality is simply unimaginable and so it is not surprising that peoples and tribes should find it as a scandal and a folly to reconciliation offered by the cross.
We have seen nations build armies and these armies demolish other nations, and many a kedahges and countless kilonsers have come and gone. Yet, even the juggernaut of civilization cannot silence our Christ on the cross. The foolishness of the cross is mightier than the powerlessness of our little kingdoms. Will the seeming fragility and precariousness of the Crucified Jesus be way for the Nagas?
