Jesus-Sadhu

… mystical exultation and bitter facts

S

undar Singh wore the yellow robe and turban of a Hindu Sadhu (holy man). He was born and raised as a devout Sikh. He boldly shared divine revelations in the strictly closed Buddhist and Muslim kingdoms of Tibet and Afghanistan. His bare feet were always bleeding and his heart was on fire for Jesus Christ.

Sadhu Sundar Singh was born in 1885 in the north of India. He spent a happy childhood of deep participation in both the Sikh religion of his father and the devout Hindu practices of his mother. He was sent to a Christian school to learn English. Upon losing his mother at 15, he began a violent rampage that culminated in buying a bible and then burning it page by page. All three of his faith communities reacted to this with a horror that brought him to the brink of suicide.

At 4:30 AM on the morning he had determined to place his head on a railway track, his desperate prayers were interrupted by a glow in the room.

“Then I saw a figure in the light, strange but somehow familiar at once. It was neither Siva nor Krishna nor any of the other Hindu incarnations I had expected. Then I heard a voice speaking to me in Urdu ….”

Jesus spoke to Sundar Singh and he was completely overwhelmed. His newfound faith brought with it peace, joy and a final curse from his father:

“We reject you forever and cast you from among us. You shall be no more my son. We shall know you no more. For us, you are as one who has never been born. I have spoken.”

He became homeless for life.

At age 16 he began life as possibly the first Jesus-Sadhu the world has known. After an abortive attempt to study at Anglican theological college, he began treks into areas considered completely closed to Christian witness. His sense of humour and depth of spiritual insight gained him crowds of both eager listeners and violent enemies in village after village.

He taught Jesus through penetrating parables that were spiritually fascinating to all sorts of people. Those eventually included large crowds in Europe, America, Britain, Australia and Japan.

At the age of 40, the Sadhu’s body was wasting away from his habits of intense travel and periodic starvation. After having committed most of his parables to writing he headed off into Tibet on foot, against the advice of all of his friends, and was never seen again.

His journey with Christ was marked by both harsh rejection and unlikely acceptance, a rare mixture of mystical exultation and bitter facts. He deserves a good long listen today!

Learn more about the Jesus-Sadhu by reading his own words. Click here to download a fascinating 207-page e-book called the Wisdom of the Sadhu (a 512 KB pdf), produced and shared by the Bruderhof Foundation.

Writer of this introduction for theRubicon: Dave Sutherland lives, works and shops in the same neighbourhood. It is also the neighbourhood in which he is part of a tiny nucleus of intercessors who are praying a Christ presence into existence. He grew up as the only non-ESL [ed: English as a second language] kid in his class, got called into Christ’s service through some face-to-face encounters with disenfranchised youth, married the life guard who tried to save his brother’s life and is the father of two young kids. He currently works as a high-school teacher of physics, mathematics and computer science at the high-school a 10 minute walk from his apartment door. His life is based on the hope that even spoiled nerds can be redeemed and put into urban service for Jesus.

The e-book is copyright 2003 by The Bruderhof Foundation, Inc. Used with permission.

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