Jesus and the Incas

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A few years ago I made a trip to Peru with some friends and visited Machu Picchu, the famed Incan ruins near Cuzco.  Because of the high number of tourists who visit the site, tour groups are assigned a specific time to enter the ruins.  Even so there are so many tourists that the walking paths are quite congested and the pace of walking can be quite slow.  As I was making my way along one of the paths, I can into earshot of a couple of young men standing alongside the path talking about religion.  One of them was saying something to the effect that religion is only a human invention that helps people find meaning in life.  Just like the ancient Incan religion that is no more, one day Christianity will pass into the ash heap of history and be replaced by something else.  The other young man was making the case for Christianity and gave a brief summary of basic Christian doctrine rooted in the life and death of Jesus.  By this time, I had walked far enough away to be out of range of their conversation, so I don’t know how it ended.

The first young man had observed in his life that so many of the ancient religions of the world, such as that of the Incas, Aztecs, Maya, Egyptian, or Roman, are no longer practiced.  In his way of thinking, if hundreds of ancient religions were wrong and not objectively true, the same must be true of Christianity.  However, that is not a logical conclusion.  If a university professor gives the students a problem to solve, and the first 100 students give the wrong answer, it does not follow that the next student will be wrong too.  At some point, some student will give the correct answer.

One thing the ancient religions have in common is they generally believe in multiple gods and the people had to really work to get their attention.  Humans had to make sacrifices, placate, beg, cajole, or manipulate the gods in order to obtain the desired result.  With Christianity, it is the exact opposite.  Rather than having the people work to get God’s attention, it is God who did the work for the people.  It is God who sent his Son, Jesus, to the earth to bring the divine message of mercy, justice, truth, and forgiveness to all the human race.  Jesus tells us that our heavenly Father is close to us, and even knows what we need before we even can ask for it. (Mt 6:8)

St. Paul had his own “Machu Picchu” moment when he went to Athens and observed the altar “to a God Unknown.”  He had his own answer to people of his day who wondered how Christianity could be true if the prevailing one was false.  As St. Paul writes in chapter 4 of Galatians, “when the designated time had come, God sent forth his Son born of a woman, born under the law, to deliver from the law those who were subjected to it, so that we might receive our status as adopted sons.”

The Incan religion, rather than proving that human beings need to invent something to give meaning to their existence, shows that all human beings instinctively know that what is ultimately good, true, and beautiful lies outside themselves.  It took the coming of Jesus to give us a clear picture of what this looks like.