If we read our Bibles and pray every day, we will grow, grow, and grow in the knowledge that serving God and serving our neighbor is actually one commandment. This is explicit in Luke 10. If God is our parent, as Jesus taught us, then we are family—Kapamilya at Kapuso—we are sisters and brothers. God’s question to Cain, found in Genesis, remains the same—“Where is your brother? Where is your sister?”
Yesterday, today, and tomorrow—our primary task, no, our primary responsibility as a child of God is to be each other’s keepers. The only way to serve God our Parent is to serve God’s children, is to love our brothers and sisters. This is the surprise of the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats in Matthew 25. This is the message of the Johannine gospel and epistles. This is the heart of the Letter of James. This is the gist of the Law according to Paul as found in Romans 13:9 and Galatians 5:14.
This is the point of the Parable of the Samaritan. Among the Priest, the Levite, and the Samaritan who chanced upon the wounded Jew on the road connecting Jerusalem and Jericho, the Samaritan was the one who showed mercy, the one who was neighbor to the person who was left half-dead, the one who stopped and helped a brother in need.
That is why we call the Samaritan Good. He did what the Law required. He did what Jesus commanded. But more importantly, he did what sisters and brothers do for one another. Like the Morong 43. We call health workers Good Samaritans. We even have Good Samaritan Hospitals to celebrate what they do for the sick, for the wounded, for the ill, for those whose only hope is God.
Community-based health workers, most especially, minister to the “least among Jesus’ sisters and brothers.”
Thus, the Morong 43’s illegal arrest, their continuing illegal detention, the torture many of them have experienced, the harassment they endure, and the lies that the military has spun about them have driven a shocked world to ask, “Has the Arroyo administration gone mad?” Only in the Philippines, under this morally bankrupt administration, are Good Samaritans demonized and victimized.
This madness should stop now. If there is a hell, then Arroyo and her minions do not deserve to go there. They deserve worse.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Sunday, May 24, 2009
The World Needs Soup
Poverty: Bane or Blessing of Ecumenical Relations
Maryhill Mission Lectures, 25 May 2009
"...When Jacob had cooked soup, Esau came in from the field and he was famished; and Esau said to Jacob, 'Please let me have a swallow of that red stuff there, for I am famished.' Therefore his name was called Edom. But Jacob said, 'First sell me your birthright.' Esau said, 'Behold, I am about to die; so of what use then is the birthright to me?' And Jacob said, 'First swear to me"; so he swore to him, and sold his birthright to Jacob. Then Jacob gave Esau bread and lentil soup; and he ate and drank, and rose and went on his way. Thus Esau despised his birthright." (Genesis 25: 29-34)
The World Needs Soup
The world needs soup. Unfortunately, millions of people cannot even have or afford a decent cup of hot soup. Many in this country are so poor they gargle water for breakfast, take hot water for lunch, and force themselves to sleep at night in place of supper. Mas emphatic sa Tagalog: Marami tayong kababayan na mumog ang agahan, nilagang tubig ang tanghalian, at tulog ang hapunan.
Kailangan ng mundo ang sopas. When Esau, in the Genesis text above, came to his brother, he was close to death. And he asked for soup. For billions of dispossessed people today who struggle against death forces everyday, John 10:10’s ”abundant life” is soup. When our sisters and brothers’ homes and livelihood are destroyed by flash floods, our relief operations bring soup. When we offer feeding programs to our malnourished grade school children, we bring them soup. When our churches and church-related institutions welcome the homeless and street-children into our “soup kitchens,” guess what we offer them?
But as Matthew 25: 31-46 and Luke 4: 18-19 remind and challenge us, soup is more than food for the hungry and drink for the thirsty. It is also just wages for workers, homes for the homeless, justice for the oppressed, care for the sick and dying, welcome to the stranger, land for the landless, liberation for those in bondage and captivity, solidarity with those whose only hope is God.
The United States of America has resources to feed 40 billion people. That figure is six times the current population of the world, yet, according to UNICEF 25,000 children—5 years old or younger—die each day due to poverty. UNICEF estimates that it will only take 6 billion dollars annually to make sure that every one on earth receives basic education. It will take 9 billion dollars each year to make sure that everyone gets safe water and sanitation. 12 billion dollars a year would ensure that all women will receive reproductive health services, while 13 billion will ensure that each human being will receive basic health care. Yet, we know that three out of every four people in the world survive on 1 dollar or less than 50 pesos a day. The world—especially that larger part of the world that calls itself Christian—apparently does not prioritize or find important to allocate funds, services or resources to provide the “soup” for food, education, and basic health care.
Consider these figures: The United States spends 8 billion dollars each year on cosmetics. Europe spends 11 billion a year on ice cream. The US and Europe spend 12 billion annually on perfume and 17 billion a year on pet food. Japan spends 35 billion annually on business entertainment. Europeans spend 50 billion a year on cigarettes and 105 billion on alcoholic drinks. And, most unfortunate of all, the world spends 780 billion each year on weapons of mass destruction, on the most effective and efficient implements to kill people.1
And to bring these figures closer to home: Filipinos spend 7 billion pesos a year on whitening soap. Pitong bilyong piso taon-taon ang ginagastos natin para sa sabong pampaputi.
What Ecumenism?!
Over half a century ago, in Prapat, the very first regional ecumenical organization, the East Asia Christian Conference, was organized. At that time many in the West seemed against the conference that brought together ecumenical leaders from Asia and Africa who were united against colonialism and Western hegemony. Prapat become a landmark in Asia’s ecumenical history as it set out to overcome the West’s domination of the ecumenical journey. Prapat made clear the direction that the Asian churches intended to take: to become the subjects, not objects, of ecumenical history. The united declaration was “working together for our common task.”
Unfortunately, the Congress of Asian Theologians’ meeting in Chiangmai in 2004 noted that Asia, almost 50 years after Prapat, remains “dependent on financial support from mother churches in Europe or America, and that the present state of ecumenism and the churches in Asia reflect the fragmentation of these churches and their limited, exclusive theologies. It is ecumenism tending towards stagnation and the protection of the status quo of churches in the Pax Americana. D. T. Niles’ “Christianity as a potted plant” in Asia is, today, actually more of a transplanted forest! Ecumenism in Asia has become an “us” and “them” affair.2
Laura Donaldson, a Cherokee, writing in Semeia 75 convicts us when she asked, “What civilization invented the most brutal system of conquest and exploitation the world has ever known? Christian. Who made slavery the basis for capitalist expansion? Christians. What religion has been the most responsible for the genocide of aboriginal peoples? Christianity. In my view, the Christian church has a much more substantial record of pure evil than any final good.”
The first one thousand years of Christianity was one millennium of war and destruction in the name of Jesus Christ. And those “civilizing missions” have not stopped. Even today, the most oppressive and dehumanizing societies are led by “Christian” centurions who have no qualms maiming and destroying those who are not “one of them.” And we know at least two of these Christian “centurions.” One was in the White House for two terms. The other is still in Malacanang.
The July 2006 Manila Declaration3 of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches says:
Western Christianity has been closely related to empire since Roman days. Since then it has spread throughout the world, and now it is being used to provide ideological legitimization for today’s empire. Globalized Christendom and the ‘crusades’ it embarks upon today are symbiotically intertwined with global capital and the power of the global empire. In its triumphalistic pursuits, it discounts if not condemns all other religious faiths and cultures. The indigenous religions of many communities are destroyed and Islam is vilified.
The convergence of Christian religion with Western modernity has destroyed the religious and cultural life of peoples and their communities throughout the world. The powers and principalities of the global market and empire are being baptized by these theological distortions of ‘Christianity’, which promote religious conflicts and bigotry globally.
The Christian religion of empire treats others as ‘gentiles’ to be conquered, as the ‘evil empire’ to be destroyed, or as the ‘axis of evil’ to be eradicated from the earth. The empire claims that the ‘goodness’ of the empire must overcome these ‘evils’. Its false messianic spirit is imbued with the demonic.
These false claims destroy the integrity of faiths, and radically erode the identity of Christian faith in Jesus Christ. As the spirit of empire penetrates souls, the power of global empire possesses the bodies of all living beings. Lord of its domain, it builds temples for the global market to serve Profit (Mammon).
The empire uses ‘democracy’ as an umbrella term for the kind of political regime that it would like to see installed all over the world. Bringing democracy to countries that do not yet have it is claimed as the defining purpose of US foreign policy. For the US, democracies abroad are regimes that support or follow its dictates.
IS POVERTY A BLESSING TO ECUMENICAL RELATIONS? NO. IS IT A BANE OR A CURSE? NO. POVERTY IS OUR FAULT. MANY OF US, WHO TAKE PRIDE IN BEING CALLED CHRISTIAN, HAVE EITHER COLLABORATED WITH EMPIRE OR HAVE PRETENDED IT IS NOT OUR RESPONSIBILITY OR HAVE SIMPLY DID NOT CARE.
In the Feeding of the 5000, found in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, Jesus seeing the hungry multitudes, tells his disciples, tells us—who love to call ourselves his disciples—to give them something to eat. And what do the disciples do? They tell Jesus, “Send the crowd away” and “Are we going to spend our own money to feed them?” and “Six months wages worth of bread would not be enough to feed them.” It has been 2000 years. We are still coming up with excuses. In the story, a young child offers what he had, five loaves and two fish, in response to Jesus’ challenge.
Today, the multitudes are still hungry and we are still making up excuses.
Which Jesus
Close your eyes for a moment. Imagine Jesus, the one many of us call our Personal Lord and Savior. If the Jesus we imagine looks like an American or European movie star, white, blond, and with blue eyes, then we’re following the wrong Jesus. If the Jesus we imagine is the same Jesus who told McKinley to take possession of the Philippines, and told Bush to bomb Afghanistan and Iraq, then we’re following the wrong Jesus. If we imagine the same Jesus that Gloria Arroyo prays to before she gives the orders to General Jovito Palparan abduct and harass our priests, nuns, pastors, church workers, and militant grassroots organizers then we’re following the wrong Jesus. If the Jesus we imagine tells us to build huge buildings and air-conditioned chapels in his honor instead of reaching out to the poor and the marginalized among us, then we are following the wrong Jesus. If the Jesus we imagine has prepared a mansion in heaven for us, and wants us to spend eternity with him in an other-worldly place, and has no problems when his followers kill people and cultures in his name, then, definitely, we are following the wrong Jesus.
If the Jesus we imagine has no problem with poverty, does not care to address its root causes and its eradication, and believes that being poor is either God’s will or is a result of indolence or is a test of faith, then we are following the wrong Jesus.
Millions of people worship this Jesus, what the World Alliance of Reformed Churches calls the Constantinian Jesus. Patron. Emperor. King of Kings. Lord of Lords. Master of the Universe. Millions follow this Imperial Jesus. Millions have been killed and massacred in the name of this Jesus.
We are so used to that word "Gospel," that it has lost its original meaning. But in antiquity, when the Roman empire went off and conquered another land in the name of their god Caesar, and killed all the men, raped all the women, and destroyed all the homes, the soldiers would come back parading throughout the land announcing "the Gospel according to Caesar," the Good News of the latest victory of Caesar, that another land has been conquered for their god Caesar, and that Caesar's enemies have been killed.4
When the Gospel of Mark announces the “beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God,” he actually announces the most radical, subversive proclamation during that time—Jesus is Lord, and not Caesar; God’s reign has come, and Rome’s has come to an end. Put in another way, in Greek the empire was called basileia; the emperor, basileus. For almost everyone in the empire, Rome was basileia; Caesar was basileus. I said, almost, because for Christians, God’s reign was basileia; Jesus was basileus.
In Jesus’ alternative or counter-empire, there was only one commandment: love for neighbor, especially the least. In Luke 10:28, Jesus tells a lawyer that love for God and love for neighbor is one commandment. He tells the parable of the Samaritan to make his point.
Paul summarizes all the commandments in Romans 13:9 as love for neighbor. James is more explicit in 2:15-17 when he wrote, “If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, Go in peace… and yet do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?” The message of the Johannine letters is straight-forward: if you say you love God, whom you do not see, but not your brothers and sisters, whom you see, then you are a liar. In Mark 17: 21, Jesus tells a rich young man, “Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor… then come follow me.”
Now, if the Jesus we imagine is the Jesus of the Gospels, the compassionate Jesus whose insides were crushed at the sight of injustice, the Jesus who gave food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, who visited the sick and the imprisoned, who welcomed strangers, and clothed the naked, who proclaimed liberty to the captives, and who gave his life so that others may live, the one who told the rich to sell everything they have and give all the proceeds to the poor, then, my dear friends, we are following the right Jesus.
The WARC calls this Jesus the Galilean One. The One who left heaven to be with us. The One who is not in Jerusalem where we expect him to be. The One who is in Galilee where we don’t want him to be, among the poor and the marginalized are. The One who left his followers only a single commandment: “Love your neighbor.” The One whom the Empire eventually executed.
And those who follow this “Executed God” are persecuted, harassed, and, yes, like him, murdered. And many of his followers in the Philippines are called communists or, worse, terrorists!
The world does not need pre-cooked or instant noodle soup. This is the recipe of the Constantinian Jesus and his followers. Dole-outs. Always with strings attached.
More importantly, the world does not need people like Jacob who used soup to take advantage of his famished brother.
God’s Oikos: We are Family—All of US
More often than not, we define ecumenism as about “us” and “them.” Insiders and outsiders. Saved and unsaved. Christian and not. Now, if God is our parent, as Jesus taught us, then all of us are brothers and sisters. All of us.
Contrary to what Cain said, we are each others’ keepers.
God’s household is God’s project. Who are members of God’s oikos depends on whom God chooses to be part of it. It is, and never will be, our choice. Let us look at four episodes from the biblical narratives that are quite familiar to most of us:
1. 1 Samuel 16 : Jesse and his seven oldest sons under-estimated David. No one, not his father, nor his brothers, not even David, thought that David was worthy to be king. But God chose the least of Jesse’s sons. God’s oikos include family members who are in the margins.
2. The Story of Jonah : Jonah disobeys God because he wanted God to destroy the “evil” empire. But God saves Nineveh. God saves whomever God wants to save. God’s oikos include those we hate and despise.
3. Luke 10: 25-37 : Samaritans were bastards, demon-possessed, and worshipped the wrong God. It is the Samaritan who serves as keeper of his wounded brother. God’s oikos include those we think don’t deserve to be God’s people.
4. Matthew 25: 31-46 : Both blessed and cursed were judged with one standard—being each other’s keepers. God’s oikos include those who do not expect to be part of it yet do exactly what brothers and sisters should do for each other.
The blessed were not blessed because they did what they did for God’s sake. They were blessed because they did what they did for people’s sake. A parent’s greatest joy is for his/her children to care for each other, not to outdo each other in gaining the parent’s favor.
The Jeepney has been described as a Filipino home on wheels.5 There is always space for the unexpected visitor, the complete stranger around our dining tables. There is always space for the unexpected passenger in a jeepney. “Ang siyaman nagiging sampuan.” God’s oikos has space for the most unexpected, even the most unwelcome member because, let me reiterate, God’s oikos is God’s project, not ours.
If God is our parent, then we are brothers and sisters. We are family. Sa pamilya ng Dios, walang anak sa loob at anak sa labas. Lahat anak. We are each other’s keepers. We were during the time of Cain, during the time of Jacob. We are now.
Every moment of our lives, God, our parent, is asking us—where is your sister, where is your brother?
ECUMENICAL RELATIONS IS FUNDAMENTALLY ABOUT BEING EACH OTHER’S KEEPERS.
The Parable of the Stone Soup
A long time ago in a barrio far away came a very old woman. She was probably just passing by because she took the dusty road that bordered the small community. Because it was almost dark, she stopped by the roadside and began to build a fire. She took out an earthen pot from the bag she lugged around and, after filling it with water, set it over the fire. Out of the same bag she brought out a small river stone and a pinch of rock salt and put these in the pot.
An old woman alone by the road is hard to miss. Soon children were upon her. “Lola (Grandma),” they asked, “what are you doing?” “I’m cooking soup,” she answered, “why don’t you join me?” They sure did and after a while there was a huge circle of children gathered around the fire as the old lady narrated stories about elves and fairies and dragons. It was late. It was dark and the children were still out so their parents began looking for them. They eventually found them with the old lady. “Lola,” they asked, “what are you doing?” “I’m cooking soup,” she answered, “why don’t you join me?” They sure did and after a while there was a huge circle of children with their parents gathered around the fire as the old lady continued telling stories of elves and fairies and dragons.
“Lola, “ a mother volunteered, “I still have leftover meat at home. We can put it in the pot.” “We have vegetables we can add to the pot too!” another remarked. And so everyone brought back what they could and put these in the pot. Eventually, the whole community shared not just stories but a hot pot of soup that began with a cold river stone and a pinch of rock salt.6
The world needs soup. But, the world does not need pre-cooked or instant noodle soup. The soup that can meet the world’s hunger, as Mother Mary John Mananzan7 puts it, is the soup we cook together. Each one contributing what each can. Because we are each other’s keepers. That soup could mean food for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, just wages for workers, homes for the homeless, justice for the oppressed, care for the sick and dying, land for the landless, liberation for those in bondage and captivity, solidarity with those whose only hope is God.
Those of us who call ourselves Christian do not have the monopoly on soup.
Cain was wrong, Jacob was wrong. We are each other’s keepers. We are—all of us—brothers and sisters. Kapatid, igsoon, kabsat. Kapatid is from Patid ng Bituka. We are parts of one gut. We, all of us—Christians, Moslems, Jews, Buddhists, and those who are so unlike us—are family. God’s oikos.
Joan Baez’s song was right. It has always been right. No one is an island. No one stands alone. Each one’s joy is joy to me. Each one’s grief is my own. We need one another so I will defend. Each one is my brother, each one is my sister.8 Each one is my friend. Kapatid, igsoon, kabsat.
THERE IS MUCH TO DO.
COME, IT IS TIME FOR US, SISTERS AND BROTHERS, TO COOK…
Revelation Enriquez Velunta
Union Theological Seminary, Philippines
NO MAN IS AN ISLAND (Joan Baez)
No man is an island,
No man stands alone,
Each man's joy is joy to me,
Each man's grief is my own.
We need one another,
So I will defend,
Each man as my brother,
Each man as my friend.
I saw the people gather,
I heard the music start,
The song that they were singing,
Is ringing in my heart.
No man is an island,
Way out in the blue,
We all look to the one above,
For our strength to renew.
When I help my brother,
Then I know that I,
Plant the seed of friendship,
That will never die.
NOTES
1 Statistics available from Anup Shah, Poverty Facts and Stats, GlobalIssues.org, Last updated: Sunday, March 22, 2009
2 From discussions and presentations at the Hong Kong Consultations of the Rerouting Ecumenism in Asia Project of the Christian Conference of Asia, 9-12 November 2006.
3 Presented by Kim Yong Bock at Philippine Christian University, 21 July 2006. The document is available online at http://www.peaceforlife.org/resources/faithresist/2006/06-0715-ecumenical.html.
4 Available at http://www.fatherjohndear.org/sermons_homilies/repent_believe.html)
5 For more on decolonizing readings of the Bible and Jeepney Hermeneutics, please check out the Union Seminary Bulletin, Volumes 1, 3, and 4 (UTS, 2002, 2007), The National Council of Churches in the Philipppines’ journal Tugon Volume 14, Nos. 1 and 2, or visit http://jeepney.blogspot.com.
6 From Anumang Hiram Kung Hindi Masikip ay Maluwang: Iba’t-Ibang Anyo ng Teolohiyang Pumipiglas, Revelation Velunta, Ed. (Union Theological Seminary, 2006), pp. 4-5.
7 Aside from Mother Mary John Mananzan’s ideas, many arguments in this brief essay resonate with insights from John Dominic Crossan and the members of the Jesus Seminar, Mark Kline Taylor, Ched Myers, Daniel Patte, Elizabeth Schussler-Fiorenza, Renate Rose, William Herzog, Laura Donaldson, Elizabeth Dominguez, Melinda Grace Aoanan, and Fr. Carlos Abesamis.
8 Full lyrics at the end of the essay.
Maryhill Mission Lectures, 25 May 2009
"...When Jacob had cooked soup, Esau came in from the field and he was famished; and Esau said to Jacob, 'Please let me have a swallow of that red stuff there, for I am famished.' Therefore his name was called Edom. But Jacob said, 'First sell me your birthright.' Esau said, 'Behold, I am about to die; so of what use then is the birthright to me?' And Jacob said, 'First swear to me"; so he swore to him, and sold his birthright to Jacob. Then Jacob gave Esau bread and lentil soup; and he ate and drank, and rose and went on his way. Thus Esau despised his birthright." (Genesis 25: 29-34)
The World Needs Soup
The world needs soup. Unfortunately, millions of people cannot even have or afford a decent cup of hot soup. Many in this country are so poor they gargle water for breakfast, take hot water for lunch, and force themselves to sleep at night in place of supper. Mas emphatic sa Tagalog: Marami tayong kababayan na mumog ang agahan, nilagang tubig ang tanghalian, at tulog ang hapunan.
Kailangan ng mundo ang sopas. When Esau, in the Genesis text above, came to his brother, he was close to death. And he asked for soup. For billions of dispossessed people today who struggle against death forces everyday, John 10:10’s ”abundant life” is soup. When our sisters and brothers’ homes and livelihood are destroyed by flash floods, our relief operations bring soup. When we offer feeding programs to our malnourished grade school children, we bring them soup. When our churches and church-related institutions welcome the homeless and street-children into our “soup kitchens,” guess what we offer them?
But as Matthew 25: 31-46 and Luke 4: 18-19 remind and challenge us, soup is more than food for the hungry and drink for the thirsty. It is also just wages for workers, homes for the homeless, justice for the oppressed, care for the sick and dying, welcome to the stranger, land for the landless, liberation for those in bondage and captivity, solidarity with those whose only hope is God.
The United States of America has resources to feed 40 billion people. That figure is six times the current population of the world, yet, according to UNICEF 25,000 children—5 years old or younger—die each day due to poverty. UNICEF estimates that it will only take 6 billion dollars annually to make sure that every one on earth receives basic education. It will take 9 billion dollars each year to make sure that everyone gets safe water and sanitation. 12 billion dollars a year would ensure that all women will receive reproductive health services, while 13 billion will ensure that each human being will receive basic health care. Yet, we know that three out of every four people in the world survive on 1 dollar or less than 50 pesos a day. The world—especially that larger part of the world that calls itself Christian—apparently does not prioritize or find important to allocate funds, services or resources to provide the “soup” for food, education, and basic health care.
Consider these figures: The United States spends 8 billion dollars each year on cosmetics. Europe spends 11 billion a year on ice cream. The US and Europe spend 12 billion annually on perfume and 17 billion a year on pet food. Japan spends 35 billion annually on business entertainment. Europeans spend 50 billion a year on cigarettes and 105 billion on alcoholic drinks. And, most unfortunate of all, the world spends 780 billion each year on weapons of mass destruction, on the most effective and efficient implements to kill people.1
And to bring these figures closer to home: Filipinos spend 7 billion pesos a year on whitening soap. Pitong bilyong piso taon-taon ang ginagastos natin para sa sabong pampaputi.
What Ecumenism?!
Over half a century ago, in Prapat, the very first regional ecumenical organization, the East Asia Christian Conference, was organized. At that time many in the West seemed against the conference that brought together ecumenical leaders from Asia and Africa who were united against colonialism and Western hegemony. Prapat become a landmark in Asia’s ecumenical history as it set out to overcome the West’s domination of the ecumenical journey. Prapat made clear the direction that the Asian churches intended to take: to become the subjects, not objects, of ecumenical history. The united declaration was “working together for our common task.”
Unfortunately, the Congress of Asian Theologians’ meeting in Chiangmai in 2004 noted that Asia, almost 50 years after Prapat, remains “dependent on financial support from mother churches in Europe or America, and that the present state of ecumenism and the churches in Asia reflect the fragmentation of these churches and their limited, exclusive theologies. It is ecumenism tending towards stagnation and the protection of the status quo of churches in the Pax Americana. D. T. Niles’ “Christianity as a potted plant” in Asia is, today, actually more of a transplanted forest! Ecumenism in Asia has become an “us” and “them” affair.2
Laura Donaldson, a Cherokee, writing in Semeia 75 convicts us when she asked, “What civilization invented the most brutal system of conquest and exploitation the world has ever known? Christian. Who made slavery the basis for capitalist expansion? Christians. What religion has been the most responsible for the genocide of aboriginal peoples? Christianity. In my view, the Christian church has a much more substantial record of pure evil than any final good.”
The first one thousand years of Christianity was one millennium of war and destruction in the name of Jesus Christ. And those “civilizing missions” have not stopped. Even today, the most oppressive and dehumanizing societies are led by “Christian” centurions who have no qualms maiming and destroying those who are not “one of them.” And we know at least two of these Christian “centurions.” One was in the White House for two terms. The other is still in Malacanang.
The July 2006 Manila Declaration3 of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches says:
Western Christianity has been closely related to empire since Roman days. Since then it has spread throughout the world, and now it is being used to provide ideological legitimization for today’s empire. Globalized Christendom and the ‘crusades’ it embarks upon today are symbiotically intertwined with global capital and the power of the global empire. In its triumphalistic pursuits, it discounts if not condemns all other religious faiths and cultures. The indigenous religions of many communities are destroyed and Islam is vilified.
The convergence of Christian religion with Western modernity has destroyed the religious and cultural life of peoples and their communities throughout the world. The powers and principalities of the global market and empire are being baptized by these theological distortions of ‘Christianity’, which promote religious conflicts and bigotry globally.
The Christian religion of empire treats others as ‘gentiles’ to be conquered, as the ‘evil empire’ to be destroyed, or as the ‘axis of evil’ to be eradicated from the earth. The empire claims that the ‘goodness’ of the empire must overcome these ‘evils’. Its false messianic spirit is imbued with the demonic.
These false claims destroy the integrity of faiths, and radically erode the identity of Christian faith in Jesus Christ. As the spirit of empire penetrates souls, the power of global empire possesses the bodies of all living beings. Lord of its domain, it builds temples for the global market to serve Profit (Mammon).
The empire uses ‘democracy’ as an umbrella term for the kind of political regime that it would like to see installed all over the world. Bringing democracy to countries that do not yet have it is claimed as the defining purpose of US foreign policy. For the US, democracies abroad are regimes that support or follow its dictates.
IS POVERTY A BLESSING TO ECUMENICAL RELATIONS? NO. IS IT A BANE OR A CURSE? NO. POVERTY IS OUR FAULT. MANY OF US, WHO TAKE PRIDE IN BEING CALLED CHRISTIAN, HAVE EITHER COLLABORATED WITH EMPIRE OR HAVE PRETENDED IT IS NOT OUR RESPONSIBILITY OR HAVE SIMPLY DID NOT CARE.
In the Feeding of the 5000, found in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, Jesus seeing the hungry multitudes, tells his disciples, tells us—who love to call ourselves his disciples—to give them something to eat. And what do the disciples do? They tell Jesus, “Send the crowd away” and “Are we going to spend our own money to feed them?” and “Six months wages worth of bread would not be enough to feed them.” It has been 2000 years. We are still coming up with excuses. In the story, a young child offers what he had, five loaves and two fish, in response to Jesus’ challenge.
Today, the multitudes are still hungry and we are still making up excuses.
Which Jesus
Close your eyes for a moment. Imagine Jesus, the one many of us call our Personal Lord and Savior. If the Jesus we imagine looks like an American or European movie star, white, blond, and with blue eyes, then we’re following the wrong Jesus. If the Jesus we imagine is the same Jesus who told McKinley to take possession of the Philippines, and told Bush to bomb Afghanistan and Iraq, then we’re following the wrong Jesus. If we imagine the same Jesus that Gloria Arroyo prays to before she gives the orders to General Jovito Palparan abduct and harass our priests, nuns, pastors, church workers, and militant grassroots organizers then we’re following the wrong Jesus. If the Jesus we imagine tells us to build huge buildings and air-conditioned chapels in his honor instead of reaching out to the poor and the marginalized among us, then we are following the wrong Jesus. If the Jesus we imagine has prepared a mansion in heaven for us, and wants us to spend eternity with him in an other-worldly place, and has no problems when his followers kill people and cultures in his name, then, definitely, we are following the wrong Jesus.
If the Jesus we imagine has no problem with poverty, does not care to address its root causes and its eradication, and believes that being poor is either God’s will or is a result of indolence or is a test of faith, then we are following the wrong Jesus.
Millions of people worship this Jesus, what the World Alliance of Reformed Churches calls the Constantinian Jesus. Patron. Emperor. King of Kings. Lord of Lords. Master of the Universe. Millions follow this Imperial Jesus. Millions have been killed and massacred in the name of this Jesus.
We are so used to that word "Gospel," that it has lost its original meaning. But in antiquity, when the Roman empire went off and conquered another land in the name of their god Caesar, and killed all the men, raped all the women, and destroyed all the homes, the soldiers would come back parading throughout the land announcing "the Gospel according to Caesar," the Good News of the latest victory of Caesar, that another land has been conquered for their god Caesar, and that Caesar's enemies have been killed.4
When the Gospel of Mark announces the “beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God,” he actually announces the most radical, subversive proclamation during that time—Jesus is Lord, and not Caesar; God’s reign has come, and Rome’s has come to an end. Put in another way, in Greek the empire was called basileia; the emperor, basileus. For almost everyone in the empire, Rome was basileia; Caesar was basileus. I said, almost, because for Christians, God’s reign was basileia; Jesus was basileus.
In Jesus’ alternative or counter-empire, there was only one commandment: love for neighbor, especially the least. In Luke 10:28, Jesus tells a lawyer that love for God and love for neighbor is one commandment. He tells the parable of the Samaritan to make his point.
Paul summarizes all the commandments in Romans 13:9 as love for neighbor. James is more explicit in 2:15-17 when he wrote, “If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, Go in peace… and yet do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?” The message of the Johannine letters is straight-forward: if you say you love God, whom you do not see, but not your brothers and sisters, whom you see, then you are a liar. In Mark 17: 21, Jesus tells a rich young man, “Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor… then come follow me.”
Now, if the Jesus we imagine is the Jesus of the Gospels, the compassionate Jesus whose insides were crushed at the sight of injustice, the Jesus who gave food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, who visited the sick and the imprisoned, who welcomed strangers, and clothed the naked, who proclaimed liberty to the captives, and who gave his life so that others may live, the one who told the rich to sell everything they have and give all the proceeds to the poor, then, my dear friends, we are following the right Jesus.
The WARC calls this Jesus the Galilean One. The One who left heaven to be with us. The One who is not in Jerusalem where we expect him to be. The One who is in Galilee where we don’t want him to be, among the poor and the marginalized are. The One who left his followers only a single commandment: “Love your neighbor.” The One whom the Empire eventually executed.
And those who follow this “Executed God” are persecuted, harassed, and, yes, like him, murdered. And many of his followers in the Philippines are called communists or, worse, terrorists!
The world does not need pre-cooked or instant noodle soup. This is the recipe of the Constantinian Jesus and his followers. Dole-outs. Always with strings attached.
More importantly, the world does not need people like Jacob who used soup to take advantage of his famished brother.
God’s Oikos: We are Family—All of US
More often than not, we define ecumenism as about “us” and “them.” Insiders and outsiders. Saved and unsaved. Christian and not. Now, if God is our parent, as Jesus taught us, then all of us are brothers and sisters. All of us.
Contrary to what Cain said, we are each others’ keepers.
God’s household is God’s project. Who are members of God’s oikos depends on whom God chooses to be part of it. It is, and never will be, our choice. Let us look at four episodes from the biblical narratives that are quite familiar to most of us:
1. 1 Samuel 16 : Jesse and his seven oldest sons under-estimated David. No one, not his father, nor his brothers, not even David, thought that David was worthy to be king. But God chose the least of Jesse’s sons. God’s oikos include family members who are in the margins.
2. The Story of Jonah : Jonah disobeys God because he wanted God to destroy the “evil” empire. But God saves Nineveh. God saves whomever God wants to save. God’s oikos include those we hate and despise.
3. Luke 10: 25-37 : Samaritans were bastards, demon-possessed, and worshipped the wrong God. It is the Samaritan who serves as keeper of his wounded brother. God’s oikos include those we think don’t deserve to be God’s people.
4. Matthew 25: 31-46 : Both blessed and cursed were judged with one standard—being each other’s keepers. God’s oikos include those who do not expect to be part of it yet do exactly what brothers and sisters should do for each other.
The blessed were not blessed because they did what they did for God’s sake. They were blessed because they did what they did for people’s sake. A parent’s greatest joy is for his/her children to care for each other, not to outdo each other in gaining the parent’s favor.
The Jeepney has been described as a Filipino home on wheels.5 There is always space for the unexpected visitor, the complete stranger around our dining tables. There is always space for the unexpected passenger in a jeepney. “Ang siyaman nagiging sampuan.” God’s oikos has space for the most unexpected, even the most unwelcome member because, let me reiterate, God’s oikos is God’s project, not ours.
If God is our parent, then we are brothers and sisters. We are family. Sa pamilya ng Dios, walang anak sa loob at anak sa labas. Lahat anak. We are each other’s keepers. We were during the time of Cain, during the time of Jacob. We are now.
Every moment of our lives, God, our parent, is asking us—where is your sister, where is your brother?
ECUMENICAL RELATIONS IS FUNDAMENTALLY ABOUT BEING EACH OTHER’S KEEPERS.
The Parable of the Stone Soup
A long time ago in a barrio far away came a very old woman. She was probably just passing by because she took the dusty road that bordered the small community. Because it was almost dark, she stopped by the roadside and began to build a fire. She took out an earthen pot from the bag she lugged around and, after filling it with water, set it over the fire. Out of the same bag she brought out a small river stone and a pinch of rock salt and put these in the pot.
An old woman alone by the road is hard to miss. Soon children were upon her. “Lola (Grandma),” they asked, “what are you doing?” “I’m cooking soup,” she answered, “why don’t you join me?” They sure did and after a while there was a huge circle of children gathered around the fire as the old lady narrated stories about elves and fairies and dragons. It was late. It was dark and the children were still out so their parents began looking for them. They eventually found them with the old lady. “Lola,” they asked, “what are you doing?” “I’m cooking soup,” she answered, “why don’t you join me?” They sure did and after a while there was a huge circle of children with their parents gathered around the fire as the old lady continued telling stories of elves and fairies and dragons.
“Lola, “ a mother volunteered, “I still have leftover meat at home. We can put it in the pot.” “We have vegetables we can add to the pot too!” another remarked. And so everyone brought back what they could and put these in the pot. Eventually, the whole community shared not just stories but a hot pot of soup that began with a cold river stone and a pinch of rock salt.6
The world needs soup. But, the world does not need pre-cooked or instant noodle soup. The soup that can meet the world’s hunger, as Mother Mary John Mananzan7 puts it, is the soup we cook together. Each one contributing what each can. Because we are each other’s keepers. That soup could mean food for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, just wages for workers, homes for the homeless, justice for the oppressed, care for the sick and dying, land for the landless, liberation for those in bondage and captivity, solidarity with those whose only hope is God.
Those of us who call ourselves Christian do not have the monopoly on soup.
Cain was wrong, Jacob was wrong. We are each other’s keepers. We are—all of us—brothers and sisters. Kapatid, igsoon, kabsat. Kapatid is from Patid ng Bituka. We are parts of one gut. We, all of us—Christians, Moslems, Jews, Buddhists, and those who are so unlike us—are family. God’s oikos.
Joan Baez’s song was right. It has always been right. No one is an island. No one stands alone. Each one’s joy is joy to me. Each one’s grief is my own. We need one another so I will defend. Each one is my brother, each one is my sister.8 Each one is my friend. Kapatid, igsoon, kabsat.
THERE IS MUCH TO DO.
COME, IT IS TIME FOR US, SISTERS AND BROTHERS, TO COOK…
Revelation Enriquez Velunta
Union Theological Seminary, Philippines
NO MAN IS AN ISLAND (Joan Baez)
No man is an island,
No man stands alone,
Each man's joy is joy to me,
Each man's grief is my own.
We need one another,
So I will defend,
Each man as my brother,
Each man as my friend.
I saw the people gather,
I heard the music start,
The song that they were singing,
Is ringing in my heart.
No man is an island,
Way out in the blue,
We all look to the one above,
For our strength to renew.
When I help my brother,
Then I know that I,
Plant the seed of friendship,
That will never die.
NOTES
1 Statistics available from Anup Shah, Poverty Facts and Stats, GlobalIssues.org, Last updated: Sunday, March 22, 2009
2 From discussions and presentations at the Hong Kong Consultations of the Rerouting Ecumenism in Asia Project of the Christian Conference of Asia, 9-12 November 2006.
3 Presented by Kim Yong Bock at Philippine Christian University, 21 July 2006. The document is available online at http://www.peaceforlife.org/resources/faithresist/2006/06-0715-ecumenical.html.
4 Available at http://www.fatherjohndear.org/sermons_homilies/repent_believe.html)
5 For more on decolonizing readings of the Bible and Jeepney Hermeneutics, please check out the Union Seminary Bulletin, Volumes 1, 3, and 4 (UTS, 2002, 2007), The National Council of Churches in the Philipppines’ journal Tugon Volume 14, Nos. 1 and 2, or visit http://jeepney.blogspot.com.
6 From Anumang Hiram Kung Hindi Masikip ay Maluwang: Iba’t-Ibang Anyo ng Teolohiyang Pumipiglas, Revelation Velunta, Ed. (Union Theological Seminary, 2006), pp. 4-5.
7 Aside from Mother Mary John Mananzan’s ideas, many arguments in this brief essay resonate with insights from John Dominic Crossan and the members of the Jesus Seminar, Mark Kline Taylor, Ched Myers, Daniel Patte, Elizabeth Schussler-Fiorenza, Renate Rose, William Herzog, Laura Donaldson, Elizabeth Dominguez, Melinda Grace Aoanan, and Fr. Carlos Abesamis.
8 Full lyrics at the end of the essay.
Friday, January 16, 2009
In Memoriam
"One of the most compassionate human beings I have had the privilege to know passed away today. He just turned 74 last January 11. Fr. Carl was more than a mentor to us, his students. He was a very dear friend. I believe in Immanuel because of people like him." I wrote these words last January 31, 2008, the day Fr. Carlos Abesamis, SJ, died. Almost a year has passed since then.
On Sunday, February 1, 2009, to celebrate his life and ministry on the occasion of his death anniversary, Willie and Marilen Abesamis, his younger siblings, will host a thanksgiving fellowship to launch the book "Fr. Abe--A Scrapbook." It will be held at the Good Shepherd Convent near Ateneo, 4 p.m.
On Sunday, February 1, 2009, to celebrate his life and ministry on the occasion of his death anniversary, Willie and Marilen Abesamis, his younger siblings, will host a thanksgiving fellowship to launch the book "Fr. Abe--A Scrapbook." It will be held at the Good Shepherd Convent near Ateneo, 4 p.m.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
WHEN DOES THE HEALING START?
(A Responsive Meditation Based on Mark 1. 40-45)
Leader: Millions of people today experience the plight of the leper in the Markan passage every single day. The healthy stay away from them. The healthy have stopped talking with them. The healthy have stopped interacting with them. The healthy stand from afar and watch them die.
People: What is the difference between illness and disease? Disease is physical. Illness is social. We, the un-sick, create and name the illnesses that keep us safely distanced from the sick. We, the un-sick, create the borders that keep the sick away from us. We, the un-sick, have access to the funds and the medicines that can help the sick live longer lives. We, the un-sick, decide who is ill and who is not.
All: Many times, we, the un-sick, create the rules, the fences, the sanctions, the systems that make the sick sicker, the weak weaker, and the dying dead.
Leader: In the Markan passage, we find the story of a leper. A person very much like a person with HIV or AIDS. He is considered unclean. People are told to keep away from him. People are told not to speak to him. People are told not to touch him. Though alive, society considers him dead.
People: What is life without companionship? What is life without conversation? What is life without the warmth of a human touch?
All: God did not create people to be alone. In life, in death, in life beyond death, we are not supposed to be alone.
Leader: To celebrate Immanuel is to celebrate God-with-us. We are not alone. We shall never, ever, be alone. Yet, many among us, the leper of ages gone, the person with HIV or AIDS today, are alone.
People: To celebrate Immanuel is to follow Jesus, Love Incarnate.
All: In the Markan passage, we find the story of a leper. A person very much like a person with HIV or AIDS. He is considered unclean. People are told to keep away from him. People are told not to speak to him. People are told not to touch him. Though alive, society considers him dead.
Leader: Yet Jesus, Love Incarnate, came near him, spoke to him, and touched him. Jesus did what society told him not to do. In the companionship, in the conversation, in the warmth of a human touch, the walls the un-sick created to separate and to isolate the sick were torn down.
People: When does the healing start? Does it start with medicines or with technology? Does it start in hospitals or in churches? Does it start with prayer or with the much-needed deposit or all-important HMO card? When does the healing start?
All: Or does it start when we realize that we are each other's keepers, that we are all God's children and thus sister and brother to each other, and that one's pain is everybody's pain, and that one's struggle is everybody's struggle, and that one's healing is everybody's healing, and that one's resurrection is everybody's resurrection.
Leader: Millions of people today experience the plight of the leper in the Markan passage every single day. The healthy stay away from them. The healthy have stopped talking with them. The healthy have stopped interacting with them. The healthy stand from afar and watch them die.
People: What is the difference between illness and disease? Disease is physical. Illness is social. We, the un-sick, create and name the illnesses that keep us safely distanced from the sick. We, the un-sick, create the borders that keep the sick away from us. We, the un-sick, have access to the funds and the medicines that can help the sick live longer lives. We, the un-sick, decide who is ill and who is not.
All: Many times, we, the un-sick, create the rules, the fences, the sanctions, the systems that make the sick sicker, the weak weaker, and the dying dead.
Leader: In the Markan passage, we find the story of a leper. A person very much like a person with HIV or AIDS. He is considered unclean. People are told to keep away from him. People are told not to speak to him. People are told not to touch him. Though alive, society considers him dead.
People: What is life without companionship? What is life without conversation? What is life without the warmth of a human touch?
All: God did not create people to be alone. In life, in death, in life beyond death, we are not supposed to be alone.
Leader: To celebrate Immanuel is to celebrate God-with-us. We are not alone. We shall never, ever, be alone. Yet, many among us, the leper of ages gone, the person with HIV or AIDS today, are alone.
People: To celebrate Immanuel is to follow Jesus, Love Incarnate.
All: In the Markan passage, we find the story of a leper. A person very much like a person with HIV or AIDS. He is considered unclean. People are told to keep away from him. People are told not to speak to him. People are told not to touch him. Though alive, society considers him dead.
Leader: Yet Jesus, Love Incarnate, came near him, spoke to him, and touched him. Jesus did what society told him not to do. In the companionship, in the conversation, in the warmth of a human touch, the walls the un-sick created to separate and to isolate the sick were torn down.
People: When does the healing start? Does it start with medicines or with technology? Does it start in hospitals or in churches? Does it start with prayer or with the much-needed deposit or all-important HMO card? When does the healing start?
All: Or does it start when we realize that we are each other's keepers, that we are all God's children and thus sister and brother to each other, and that one's pain is everybody's pain, and that one's struggle is everybody's struggle, and that one's healing is everybody's healing, and that one's resurrection is everybody's resurrection.
Monday, October 20, 2008
Para kay Jenifer, kay Onesimus, at ang Marami Pang Katulad Nila
19 October 2008, Misang Alay ng Migrante International
Tumayo po tayo ng sandali at mag-alay ng panalangin para kay Jenifer Beduya. Mag-alay din tayo ng panalangin para kay Eugenia Baja, Jeffrey So, Myrna Vailoces, at Evelyn Milo. At para kina Eduardo at Edison Gonzales, Eduardo Arcilla, Don Don Lanuza, at Cecilia Armia Alcaraz. Ipanalangin rin natin ang kanilang mga ina, mga ama, mga anak at kapatid, mga kabyak, at mga pamilya. Basagin natin ang katahimikan ng langit. Iparinig natin sa Dios ang ating hinagpis, ang ating galit, ang ating sigaw para sa katarungan.
Sa mga Ebanghelyo ni Mateo at ni Lukas ay may kuwento ng isang mayamang sundalo, centurion, na lumapit kay Jesus dahil may sakit ang kanyang alipin. Agad agad na tinupad ni Jesus ang hiling ng sundalo. Ibalik sa dati ang sitwasyon. Ang aliping may sakit ay walang silbi sa may-ari. Ang aliping hindi makalakad ay walang silbi sa amo. Tuwing binabasa ang kuwentong ito lagi na lang bida si Jesus at ang mayamang sundalo. Hindi natin naririnig ang boses ng alipin. Ni hindi natin alam ang kanyang pangalan. Ni hindi natin alam kung bakit siya maysakit, bakit siya hindi makalakad. Ang alam lang natin yung sinabi ng sundalo.
Noon at ngayon, nagpapatuloy ito. Yung sinasabi lang ng mga may-ari, ng mga amo, ng mga mayaman, ng mga nasa poder ang naririnig natin. Tamad daw ang alipin, sakitin ang alipin, nagpatiwakal ang alipin, tumakas ang alipin, magnanakaw ang alipin, walang utang na loob ang alipin.
Ang alipin sa Mateo at Lukas ay bata, malamang dose anyos. Hindi natin alam yun. Malamang ang sakit niya, yung halos hindi na siya makalakad sa hirap, ang dahilan yung may-ari sa kanya. Malamang ginugulpe siya ng amo niya. Malamang pinagsasamantalahan. Malamang inaabuso. Subalit hindi natin siya naririnig—tanging boses lang ni Jesus at ng amo ang maririnig sa kuwento.
Sa Sulat ni San Pablo kay Pilemon mayroon ding isang alipin. Si Onesimus. Hindi rin natin siya naririnig. Tumakas siya sa kanyang amo. Sabi ng napakaraming interpretasyon ng kuwentong ito—tumakas daw si Onesimus at walang utang na loob. Hindi lang daw siya tumakas, nagnakaw pa. Muli, tuwing binabasa ang kuwentong ito, ang bida si Pablo o si Pilemon. Walang kumakampi kay Onesimus.
Kung babasahin natin ang kuwento, ang paglarawan kay Onesimus—gamit, commodity, hindi tao. Sabi ni Pablo, si Onesimus, dati walang silbi, nung naging Kristiyano, nagkaroon ng silbi. Dati, alipin; nung naging Kristiyano, naging super alipin. “Before he was useless; now he is useful. Before he was just a slave, now he is a Christian; now he is a super slave.” Hyper doulon sa Greek.
Marami sa mundo, ang trato sa ating mga Pilipino super slave. Dahil Kristiyano tayo, kaya nating magtiis. Dahil marunong tayong mag-ingles, kaya tayong murahin, dustain, utus-utosan at itratong parang hayop sa wikang naiintindihan natin.
Ang sistema ng edukasyon dito sa Pilipinas ay imperialista. Nagsimula ito nang sabihin ng unang Amerikanong General Superintendent of Education in the Philippines, na, "The Filipino people, taken as a body, are children and childlike, do not know what is best for them ... by the very fact of our superiority of civilization and our greater capacity for industrial activity we are bound to exercise over them a profound social influence." SA araw-araw na ginawa ng Dios, tinuruan ng ating mga paaralan ang ating mga anak na maging alipin ng mundo.
Linggo-linggo tinuruan ang marami sa ating mga simbahan na magtiis, ialay hindi lang ang kanang pisngi kapag sinampal ka sa kaliwa, at tanggapin ang kahirapan dahil kalooban daw ito ng Dios at pupunta naman tayong lahat sa langit.
Sino ba ang makikinabang sa lahat ng mga katuruang ito? Bakit ang api lalong naaapi? Bakit ang mahirap lalong humihirap? Bakit tatlong libo sa ating mga kababayan ang nangingibang-bayan kada araw? Bakit may mga Jenifer, Eugenia, Jeffrey, Evelyn, at Myrna? Bakit hindi nababawasan ang mga Onesimus ng mundo at milyon-milyon sa kanila ay Pilipino?
Hindi si Gloria Arroyo ang sagot sa ating mga hinaing. Hindi rin ang mga amo. Hindi rin ang naghaharing-uri.
Tayo ang sagot sa ating mga panalangin. We are the answer to our prayers. Tayo ang mga pamilyang naghihirap at nahahati dahil sa paglisan ng ating mga mahal sa buhay. Tayo ang mga pamilyang nangungulila. Tayo ang mga inaapi, dinudusta, at hindi pinapakinggan. Magsama-sama tayo. Magkapit-bisig tayo. Makibaka tayo.
Tayo ang sagot sa ating mga panalangin.
Mga datos na galing sa Migrante International:
1. OFW Jenifer Beduya, 23 years old, Sibugay, Zamboanga. Executed on October 14, 2008 ng Jeddah KSA. Tinangka siyang gahasain ng kaibigan na Arabo at mga kasama nito kung kaya napatay niya ito at nasentensiyahan ng kamatayan noong 2006. Nagulat ang pamilya ng mabalitaan na pinugutan na ng ulo si Jenifer. Walang alam ang pamilya sa mangyayari dito dahil pinangakuan naman sila ng DFA na makapag-apela sa korte ng Saudi Arabia. Lumalabas na walang kasamang abogado si Jenifer sa kanyang mga hearing.
2. OFWs Eduardo at Edison Gonzalez, Eduardo Arcilla, Don Don Lanuza. nasentensiyahan ng kamatayan sa Saudi Arabia. Nakahanay na pupugutan ng ulo sa Saudi Arabia.
3. Cecilia Armia Alcaraz, nasentensiyahan ng kamatayan o firing squad sa Taiwan, naghihintay ng apela mula sa gobyerno.
Mga namataya na OFWs sa labas ng bansa na kaduda-duda ang pagmatay ayon sa pamilya at batay na rin sa mga report. Eugenia Baja, DH, Saudi Arabia, namatay noong Feb. 24, 2008 dahil sa hindi pinapakain sa loob ng 35 days, minamaltrato ng employer na naging sanhi ng kamatayan nito. Jefrey So, 11 days lang sa UAE nabalitaan ng pamilya na nagpakamatay daw ito. Myrna Vailoces, August 2008, nagpamatay daw ayon sa police report sa UAE. Evelyn Milo, ayon sa pamilya ay nagpakamatay daw ito. Pero hindi makapaniwala ang pamilya dahil marami itong pangarap sa buhay.
Tumayo po tayo ng sandali at mag-alay ng panalangin para kay Jenifer Beduya. Mag-alay din tayo ng panalangin para kay Eugenia Baja, Jeffrey So, Myrna Vailoces, at Evelyn Milo. At para kina Eduardo at Edison Gonzales, Eduardo Arcilla, Don Don Lanuza, at Cecilia Armia Alcaraz. Ipanalangin rin natin ang kanilang mga ina, mga ama, mga anak at kapatid, mga kabyak, at mga pamilya. Basagin natin ang katahimikan ng langit. Iparinig natin sa Dios ang ating hinagpis, ang ating galit, ang ating sigaw para sa katarungan.
Sa mga Ebanghelyo ni Mateo at ni Lukas ay may kuwento ng isang mayamang sundalo, centurion, na lumapit kay Jesus dahil may sakit ang kanyang alipin. Agad agad na tinupad ni Jesus ang hiling ng sundalo. Ibalik sa dati ang sitwasyon. Ang aliping may sakit ay walang silbi sa may-ari. Ang aliping hindi makalakad ay walang silbi sa amo. Tuwing binabasa ang kuwentong ito lagi na lang bida si Jesus at ang mayamang sundalo. Hindi natin naririnig ang boses ng alipin. Ni hindi natin alam ang kanyang pangalan. Ni hindi natin alam kung bakit siya maysakit, bakit siya hindi makalakad. Ang alam lang natin yung sinabi ng sundalo.
Noon at ngayon, nagpapatuloy ito. Yung sinasabi lang ng mga may-ari, ng mga amo, ng mga mayaman, ng mga nasa poder ang naririnig natin. Tamad daw ang alipin, sakitin ang alipin, nagpatiwakal ang alipin, tumakas ang alipin, magnanakaw ang alipin, walang utang na loob ang alipin.
Ang alipin sa Mateo at Lukas ay bata, malamang dose anyos. Hindi natin alam yun. Malamang ang sakit niya, yung halos hindi na siya makalakad sa hirap, ang dahilan yung may-ari sa kanya. Malamang ginugulpe siya ng amo niya. Malamang pinagsasamantalahan. Malamang inaabuso. Subalit hindi natin siya naririnig—tanging boses lang ni Jesus at ng amo ang maririnig sa kuwento.
Sa Sulat ni San Pablo kay Pilemon mayroon ding isang alipin. Si Onesimus. Hindi rin natin siya naririnig. Tumakas siya sa kanyang amo. Sabi ng napakaraming interpretasyon ng kuwentong ito—tumakas daw si Onesimus at walang utang na loob. Hindi lang daw siya tumakas, nagnakaw pa. Muli, tuwing binabasa ang kuwentong ito, ang bida si Pablo o si Pilemon. Walang kumakampi kay Onesimus.
Kung babasahin natin ang kuwento, ang paglarawan kay Onesimus—gamit, commodity, hindi tao. Sabi ni Pablo, si Onesimus, dati walang silbi, nung naging Kristiyano, nagkaroon ng silbi. Dati, alipin; nung naging Kristiyano, naging super alipin. “Before he was useless; now he is useful. Before he was just a slave, now he is a Christian; now he is a super slave.” Hyper doulon sa Greek.
Marami sa mundo, ang trato sa ating mga Pilipino super slave. Dahil Kristiyano tayo, kaya nating magtiis. Dahil marunong tayong mag-ingles, kaya tayong murahin, dustain, utus-utosan at itratong parang hayop sa wikang naiintindihan natin.
Ang sistema ng edukasyon dito sa Pilipinas ay imperialista. Nagsimula ito nang sabihin ng unang Amerikanong General Superintendent of Education in the Philippines, na, "The Filipino people, taken as a body, are children and childlike, do not know what is best for them ... by the very fact of our superiority of civilization and our greater capacity for industrial activity we are bound to exercise over them a profound social influence." SA araw-araw na ginawa ng Dios, tinuruan ng ating mga paaralan ang ating mga anak na maging alipin ng mundo.
Linggo-linggo tinuruan ang marami sa ating mga simbahan na magtiis, ialay hindi lang ang kanang pisngi kapag sinampal ka sa kaliwa, at tanggapin ang kahirapan dahil kalooban daw ito ng Dios at pupunta naman tayong lahat sa langit.
Sino ba ang makikinabang sa lahat ng mga katuruang ito? Bakit ang api lalong naaapi? Bakit ang mahirap lalong humihirap? Bakit tatlong libo sa ating mga kababayan ang nangingibang-bayan kada araw? Bakit may mga Jenifer, Eugenia, Jeffrey, Evelyn, at Myrna? Bakit hindi nababawasan ang mga Onesimus ng mundo at milyon-milyon sa kanila ay Pilipino?
Hindi si Gloria Arroyo ang sagot sa ating mga hinaing. Hindi rin ang mga amo. Hindi rin ang naghaharing-uri.
Tayo ang sagot sa ating mga panalangin. We are the answer to our prayers. Tayo ang mga pamilyang naghihirap at nahahati dahil sa paglisan ng ating mga mahal sa buhay. Tayo ang mga pamilyang nangungulila. Tayo ang mga inaapi, dinudusta, at hindi pinapakinggan. Magsama-sama tayo. Magkapit-bisig tayo. Makibaka tayo.
Tayo ang sagot sa ating mga panalangin.
Mga datos na galing sa Migrante International:
1. OFW Jenifer Beduya, 23 years old, Sibugay, Zamboanga. Executed on October 14, 2008 ng Jeddah KSA. Tinangka siyang gahasain ng kaibigan na Arabo at mga kasama nito kung kaya napatay niya ito at nasentensiyahan ng kamatayan noong 2006. Nagulat ang pamilya ng mabalitaan na pinugutan na ng ulo si Jenifer. Walang alam ang pamilya sa mangyayari dito dahil pinangakuan naman sila ng DFA na makapag-apela sa korte ng Saudi Arabia. Lumalabas na walang kasamang abogado si Jenifer sa kanyang mga hearing.
2. OFWs Eduardo at Edison Gonzalez, Eduardo Arcilla, Don Don Lanuza. nasentensiyahan ng kamatayan sa Saudi Arabia. Nakahanay na pupugutan ng ulo sa Saudi Arabia.
3. Cecilia Armia Alcaraz, nasentensiyahan ng kamatayan o firing squad sa Taiwan, naghihintay ng apela mula sa gobyerno.
Mga namataya na OFWs sa labas ng bansa na kaduda-duda ang pagmatay ayon sa pamilya at batay na rin sa mga report. Eugenia Baja, DH, Saudi Arabia, namatay noong Feb. 24, 2008 dahil sa hindi pinapakain sa loob ng 35 days, minamaltrato ng employer na naging sanhi ng kamatayan nito. Jefrey So, 11 days lang sa UAE nabalitaan ng pamilya na nagpakamatay daw ito. Myrna Vailoces, August 2008, nagpamatay daw ayon sa police report sa UAE. Evelyn Milo, ayon sa pamilya ay nagpakamatay daw ito. Pero hindi makapaniwala ang pamilya dahil marami itong pangarap sa buhay.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
MOVEMENT, EXECUTION, CONTINUATION
Biblico-Theological Reflection
Forum on the Economic Meltdown in the Empire and its Impact to the Filipino People
Bantayog ng mga Bayani, Quezon City, 27 September 2008
THE EXECUTED GOD
We do not need the Bible to prove that Jesus lived, that he was murdered by the empire, and that his followers confess that he is alive.
About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man… For he was one who wrought surprising feats and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks… When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing amongst us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love him did not give up their affection for him… And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared. (Flavius Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 18.63, written about 90 C.E.)
Therefore to scotch the rumour, Nero substituted as culprits, and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty, a class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians. Christus, the founder of the name, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate, and the pernicious superstition was checked for the moment, only to break out once more, not merely in Judaea, the home of the disease, but in the capital itself, where all things horrible or shameful in the world collect and find a vogue. (Cornelius Tacitus, Annals 15.44, written about 120 C.E.)
Both accounts, one Jewish, the other Roman, agree on three things. First, there was a movement connected with Jesus. Second, he was executed by Rome to stop the movement. Third, instead of being stopped, the movement continued to spread. THERE REMAIN, THEREFORE, THESE THREE: MOVEMENT, EXECUTION, CONTINUATION. AND THE GREATEST OF THESE IS CONTINUATION… 1
Yes, the greatest is continuation but what has happened since then? Is our Christianity, a continuation of the Jesus movement or an abomination? The early Christians worshipped an executed God. We confess that we do, but do we really?
Laura Donaldson, a Cherokee, reminds us: “What civilization invented the most brutal system of conquest and exploitation the world has ever known? Christian. Who made slavery the basis for capitalist expansion? Christians. What religion has been the most responsible for the genocide of aboriginal peoples? Christianity. In my view, the Christian church has a much more substantial record of pure evil than any final good.”
The first one thousand years of Christianity was one millennium of war and destruction in the name of Jesus Christ. And those “civilizing missions” have not stopped. Even today, the most oppressive and dehumanizing societies are led by “Christian” centurions who have no qualms maiming and destroying those who are not “one of them.” And two of these are in the White House and in Malacanang, George W. Bush and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, respectively.
The Manila Declaration of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches says, “Western Christianity has been closely related to empire since Roman days. Since then it has spread throughout the world, and now it is being used to provide ideological legitimization for today’s empire. Globalized Christendom and the ‘crusades’ it embarks upon today are symbiotically intertwined with global capital and the power of the global empire. In its triumphalistic pursuits, it discounts if not condemns all other religious faiths and cultures. The indigenous religions of many communities are destroyed and Islam is vilified.
The convergence of Christian religion with Western modernity has destroyed the religious and cultural life of peoples and their communities throughout the world. The powers and principalities of the global market and empire are being baptized by these theological distortions of ‘Christianity’, which promote religious conflicts and bigotry globally.
The Christian religion of empire treats others as ‘gentiles’ to be conquered, as the ‘evil empire’ to be destroyed, or as the ‘axis of evil’ to be eradicated from the earth. The empire claims that the ‘goodness’ of the empire must overcome these ‘evils’. Its false messianic spirit is imbued with the demonic.
These false claims destroy the integrity of faiths, and radically erode the identity of Christian faith in Jesus Christ. As the spirit of empire penetrates souls, the power of global empire possesses the bodies of all living beings. Lord of its domain, it builds temples for the global market to serve Profit (Mammon).
The empire uses ‘democracy’ as an umbrella term for the kind of political regime that it would like to see installed all over the world. Bringing democracy to countries that do not yet have it is claimed as the defining purpose of US foreign policy. For the US, democracies abroad are regimes that support or follow its dictates.”
Today, as the world feels the impact of the empire’s meltdown, two things are clear. First, the empire will strike back, as it always does, to save and protect itself, and the poor will feel its wrath, as they always do. Second, as people who take pride in calling ourselves Christians, we need to repent and turn back from our wicked ways, because most of us have been following the wrong Jesus and many among us have been preaching the wrong sermons.
JESUS IS LORD
Close your eyes for a moment. Imagine Jesus, the one many of us call our Personal Lord and Savior. If the Jesus we imagine looks like an American or European movie star, white, blond, and with blue eyes, then we’re following the wrong Jesus. If the Jesus we imagine is the same Jesus who told McKinley to take possession of the Philippines, and told Bush to bomb Afghanistan and Iraq, then we’re following the wrong Jesus. If we imagine the same Jesus that Gloria Arroyo prays to before she gives the orders to abduct and harass our pastors and church workers, like Berlin Guerrero and Melchor Abesamis, then we’re following the wrong Jesus. If the Jesus we imagine tells us to build huge buildings and air-conditioned chapels in his honor instead of reaching out to the poor and the marginalized among us, then we are following the wrong Jesus. If the Jesus we imagine has prepared a mansion in heaven for us, and wants us to spend eternity with him in an other-worldly place, and has no problems when his followers kill people and cultures in his name, then, definitely, we are following the wrong Jesus.
We are so used to that word "Gospel," that it has lost its original meaning. But in antiquity, when the Roman empire went off and conquered another land in the name of their god Caesar, and killed all the men, raped all the women, and destroyed all the homes, the soldiers would come back parading throughout the land announcing "the Gospel according to Caesar," the Good News of the latest victory of Caesar, that another land has been conquered for their god Caesar, and that Caesar's enemies have been killed.2
When the Gospel of Mark announces the “beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God,” he actually announces the most radical, subversive proclamation during that time—Jesus is Lord, and not Caesar; God’s reign has come, and Rome’s has come to an end. Put in another way, in Greek the empire was called basileia; the emperor, basileus. For almost everyone in the empire, Rome was basileia; Caesar was basileus. I said, almost, because for Christians, God’s reign was basileia; Jesus was basileus.
In Jesus’ alternative or counter-empire, there was only one commandment: love for neighbor, especially the least. In Luke 10:28, Jesus tells a lawyer that love for God and love for neighbor is one commandment. He tells the parable of the Samaritan to make his point. Matthew 25:31-46 is a “surprising” parable because both the blessed and cursed were surprised. They were judged based on what they did, as far as the sheep were concerned, and what they did not do, as far as the goats were concerned, for others, for people in need. (They were not judged on what they did or what they did not do for God.)
Paul summarizes all the commandments in Romans 13:9 as love for neighbor. James is more explicit in 2:15-17 when he wrote, “If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, Go in peace… and yet do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?” The message of the Johannine letters is straight-forward: if you say you love God, whom you do not see, but not your brothers and sisters, whom you see, then you are a liar. In Mark 17: 21, Jesus tells a rich young man, “Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor… then come follow me.”
THE STORIES JESUS TOLD
Jesus was executed by the empire because of the life he lived and the stories he told. Parables are subversive speech. They are the opposite of myths. Parables are not earthly stories about heavenly things, but earthy stories about heavy things.
I grew up hearing sermons on stewardship based on Luke 21: 1-4, the widow’s offering: “…for others have contributed out of their abundance but she, out of her poverty has put in all that she had to live on.” I grew up disgusted with any system, religious or otherwise, that robbed people of even the barest that they had. More than praising the widow, I believe Jesus was actually denouncing the temple’s system of dispossessing the already dispossessed. I think the incident at the temple was his way of declaring, “Enough!” Yet, our churches and our programs live-off the backs of the poor.
The Laborers in the Vineyard3 offer us a portrait of an oikodespotes, a despot, an elitist oppressor who, in order to possess, to ensure a timely harvest, offers a denarius--subsistence level pay--to workers; workers who'll take anything just to get by today. Jesus told this parable to unmask the divide-and-conquer rule of the landed, yet we love to preach this parable by celebrating the despot and demonizing the lowly workers.
The Tenants in the Vineyard4 initially possess the land after claiming it violently from its absentee landlord. But "...what then will the owner of the vineyard do?" What do we do with this text? We celebrate the landlord and justify his use of violence to get his property back. We never preach from the perspective of the tenants.
In the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus5, Jesus uses Abraham as paradigm of the blessed rich to shock his listeners: Father Abraham should have received the rich man into his bosom but he does not; he receives Lazarus—poor Lazarus who dies and doesn't even get to be buried. The elite, possessed by possessions, have for so long used Abraham as justification for their oppression. We seldom preach on this text because its message is clear. God is on the side of the poor.
"How do we get ourselves out of debt?" people ask. A good King might do it or even a Christian president or a Christian senate. The parable of the Unmerciful Servant6 reminds us of the hopelessness of looking for deliverance in kings (or presidents). Rulers are part of the system that created them. The parable proposes that neither messianic hope nor popular kingship can resolve the people's dilemma. To reshape their world, to assert their claim as God's heirs, the people must look elsewhere.
The Talents7 offer a portrait of the whistle blower; the one who, sickened by the system, cries, "Enough!" It offers us a glimpse of the dispossessed who live in the outer darkness, far from the centers of power and light, struggling to survive from day to day, "weeping and gnashing teeth." Yet, when we preach on this text, we take the side of the two who were “faithful” to the oppressive system of their master, instead of the third who said, “No.”
The Friend at Midnight8 paints a different kind of portrait. Village peasants offer hospitality to visitors and sojourners and are engaged in little acts that challenge the efforts of their oppressors to dehumanize them. Rather than cave in to the desire to hoard and accumulate, as the rich then and now do, peasants, then and now, continue to cooperate and to provide hospitality. Their shameless social order of small redistribution of food and resources foreshadows a different order of human relations.9 This is one of Jesus’ most powerful parables but we almost never preach on this.
We have much to repent for. I echo the Manila Declaration’s call: We ask all churches whose missions and peoples have historically been involved in empire building to seriously scrutinize—in partnership with the victims of their imperial past—their structure, teaching, hermeneutics, liturgy, music, funding agencies and policies as well as their political allegiances, in order to repent and reshape their life in all aspects in the spirit of the anti-imperial biblical heritage.
Whether we read the Bible or Josephus or Tacitus, one thing is crystal clear: Jesus lived and preached an alternative empire—a life of open healing and shared eating, of radical itinerancy, of empowered egalitarianism, of human contact without discrimination and without hierarchies, and of preferential option for the poor. And Jesus was executed by the Roman Empire because of this. A life totally dedicated to the liberation of the poor and the powerless is a very dangerous life. Those of us who follow Jesus actually worship an executed God.
THERE REMAIN, THEREFORE, THESE THREE: MOVEMENT, EXECUTION, CONTINUATION. AND THE GREATEST OF THESE IS CONTINUATION.
ARE WE READY TO CONTINUE?
NOTES
1 John Dominic Crossan, The Essential Jesus. Many arguments in this BTR are based on the works of Crossan and members of the Jesus Seminar, Ched Myers, William Herzog, and Carlos Abesamis.
2 http://www.fatherjohndear.org/sermons_homilies/repent_believe.html)
3 This section draws heavily from the work of Herzog. Matthew 20:1-16
4 Mark 12:1-12
5 Luke 16:19-31
6 Matthew 18:23-35
7 Matthew 25:14-30; Luke 19:11-27
8 Luke 11:5-8
9 Paul in Ephesians 3:28 advice the church in Ephesus to work hard not to save for themselves but “...so as to have something to share...”
Forum on the Economic Meltdown in the Empire and its Impact to the Filipino People
Bantayog ng mga Bayani, Quezon City, 27 September 2008
THE EXECUTED GOD
We do not need the Bible to prove that Jesus lived, that he was murdered by the empire, and that his followers confess that he is alive.
About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man… For he was one who wrought surprising feats and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks… When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing amongst us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love him did not give up their affection for him… And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared. (Flavius Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 18.63, written about 90 C.E.)
Therefore to scotch the rumour, Nero substituted as culprits, and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty, a class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians. Christus, the founder of the name, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate, and the pernicious superstition was checked for the moment, only to break out once more, not merely in Judaea, the home of the disease, but in the capital itself, where all things horrible or shameful in the world collect and find a vogue. (Cornelius Tacitus, Annals 15.44, written about 120 C.E.)
Both accounts, one Jewish, the other Roman, agree on three things. First, there was a movement connected with Jesus. Second, he was executed by Rome to stop the movement. Third, instead of being stopped, the movement continued to spread. THERE REMAIN, THEREFORE, THESE THREE: MOVEMENT, EXECUTION, CONTINUATION. AND THE GREATEST OF THESE IS CONTINUATION… 1
Yes, the greatest is continuation but what has happened since then? Is our Christianity, a continuation of the Jesus movement or an abomination? The early Christians worshipped an executed God. We confess that we do, but do we really?
Laura Donaldson, a Cherokee, reminds us: “What civilization invented the most brutal system of conquest and exploitation the world has ever known? Christian. Who made slavery the basis for capitalist expansion? Christians. What religion has been the most responsible for the genocide of aboriginal peoples? Christianity. In my view, the Christian church has a much more substantial record of pure evil than any final good.”
The first one thousand years of Christianity was one millennium of war and destruction in the name of Jesus Christ. And those “civilizing missions” have not stopped. Even today, the most oppressive and dehumanizing societies are led by “Christian” centurions who have no qualms maiming and destroying those who are not “one of them.” And two of these are in the White House and in Malacanang, George W. Bush and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, respectively.
The Manila Declaration of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches says, “Western Christianity has been closely related to empire since Roman days. Since then it has spread throughout the world, and now it is being used to provide ideological legitimization for today’s empire. Globalized Christendom and the ‘crusades’ it embarks upon today are symbiotically intertwined with global capital and the power of the global empire. In its triumphalistic pursuits, it discounts if not condemns all other religious faiths and cultures. The indigenous religions of many communities are destroyed and Islam is vilified.
The convergence of Christian religion with Western modernity has destroyed the religious and cultural life of peoples and their communities throughout the world. The powers and principalities of the global market and empire are being baptized by these theological distortions of ‘Christianity’, which promote religious conflicts and bigotry globally.
The Christian religion of empire treats others as ‘gentiles’ to be conquered, as the ‘evil empire’ to be destroyed, or as the ‘axis of evil’ to be eradicated from the earth. The empire claims that the ‘goodness’ of the empire must overcome these ‘evils’. Its false messianic spirit is imbued with the demonic.
These false claims destroy the integrity of faiths, and radically erode the identity of Christian faith in Jesus Christ. As the spirit of empire penetrates souls, the power of global empire possesses the bodies of all living beings. Lord of its domain, it builds temples for the global market to serve Profit (Mammon).
The empire uses ‘democracy’ as an umbrella term for the kind of political regime that it would like to see installed all over the world. Bringing democracy to countries that do not yet have it is claimed as the defining purpose of US foreign policy. For the US, democracies abroad are regimes that support or follow its dictates.”
Today, as the world feels the impact of the empire’s meltdown, two things are clear. First, the empire will strike back, as it always does, to save and protect itself, and the poor will feel its wrath, as they always do. Second, as people who take pride in calling ourselves Christians, we need to repent and turn back from our wicked ways, because most of us have been following the wrong Jesus and many among us have been preaching the wrong sermons.
JESUS IS LORD
Close your eyes for a moment. Imagine Jesus, the one many of us call our Personal Lord and Savior. If the Jesus we imagine looks like an American or European movie star, white, blond, and with blue eyes, then we’re following the wrong Jesus. If the Jesus we imagine is the same Jesus who told McKinley to take possession of the Philippines, and told Bush to bomb Afghanistan and Iraq, then we’re following the wrong Jesus. If we imagine the same Jesus that Gloria Arroyo prays to before she gives the orders to abduct and harass our pastors and church workers, like Berlin Guerrero and Melchor Abesamis, then we’re following the wrong Jesus. If the Jesus we imagine tells us to build huge buildings and air-conditioned chapels in his honor instead of reaching out to the poor and the marginalized among us, then we are following the wrong Jesus. If the Jesus we imagine has prepared a mansion in heaven for us, and wants us to spend eternity with him in an other-worldly place, and has no problems when his followers kill people and cultures in his name, then, definitely, we are following the wrong Jesus.
We are so used to that word "Gospel," that it has lost its original meaning. But in antiquity, when the Roman empire went off and conquered another land in the name of their god Caesar, and killed all the men, raped all the women, and destroyed all the homes, the soldiers would come back parading throughout the land announcing "the Gospel according to Caesar," the Good News of the latest victory of Caesar, that another land has been conquered for their god Caesar, and that Caesar's enemies have been killed.2
When the Gospel of Mark announces the “beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God,” he actually announces the most radical, subversive proclamation during that time—Jesus is Lord, and not Caesar; God’s reign has come, and Rome’s has come to an end. Put in another way, in Greek the empire was called basileia; the emperor, basileus. For almost everyone in the empire, Rome was basileia; Caesar was basileus. I said, almost, because for Christians, God’s reign was basileia; Jesus was basileus.
In Jesus’ alternative or counter-empire, there was only one commandment: love for neighbor, especially the least. In Luke 10:28, Jesus tells a lawyer that love for God and love for neighbor is one commandment. He tells the parable of the Samaritan to make his point. Matthew 25:31-46 is a “surprising” parable because both the blessed and cursed were surprised. They were judged based on what they did, as far as the sheep were concerned, and what they did not do, as far as the goats were concerned, for others, for people in need. (They were not judged on what they did or what they did not do for God.)
Paul summarizes all the commandments in Romans 13:9 as love for neighbor. James is more explicit in 2:15-17 when he wrote, “If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, Go in peace… and yet do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?” The message of the Johannine letters is straight-forward: if you say you love God, whom you do not see, but not your brothers and sisters, whom you see, then you are a liar. In Mark 17: 21, Jesus tells a rich young man, “Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor… then come follow me.”
THE STORIES JESUS TOLD
Jesus was executed by the empire because of the life he lived and the stories he told. Parables are subversive speech. They are the opposite of myths. Parables are not earthly stories about heavenly things, but earthy stories about heavy things.
I grew up hearing sermons on stewardship based on Luke 21: 1-4, the widow’s offering: “…for others have contributed out of their abundance but she, out of her poverty has put in all that she had to live on.” I grew up disgusted with any system, religious or otherwise, that robbed people of even the barest that they had. More than praising the widow, I believe Jesus was actually denouncing the temple’s system of dispossessing the already dispossessed. I think the incident at the temple was his way of declaring, “Enough!” Yet, our churches and our programs live-off the backs of the poor.
The Laborers in the Vineyard3 offer us a portrait of an oikodespotes, a despot, an elitist oppressor who, in order to possess, to ensure a timely harvest, offers a denarius--subsistence level pay--to workers; workers who'll take anything just to get by today. Jesus told this parable to unmask the divide-and-conquer rule of the landed, yet we love to preach this parable by celebrating the despot and demonizing the lowly workers.
The Tenants in the Vineyard4 initially possess the land after claiming it violently from its absentee landlord. But "...what then will the owner of the vineyard do?" What do we do with this text? We celebrate the landlord and justify his use of violence to get his property back. We never preach from the perspective of the tenants.
In the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus5, Jesus uses Abraham as paradigm of the blessed rich to shock his listeners: Father Abraham should have received the rich man into his bosom but he does not; he receives Lazarus—poor Lazarus who dies and doesn't even get to be buried. The elite, possessed by possessions, have for so long used Abraham as justification for their oppression. We seldom preach on this text because its message is clear. God is on the side of the poor.
"How do we get ourselves out of debt?" people ask. A good King might do it or even a Christian president or a Christian senate. The parable of the Unmerciful Servant6 reminds us of the hopelessness of looking for deliverance in kings (or presidents). Rulers are part of the system that created them. The parable proposes that neither messianic hope nor popular kingship can resolve the people's dilemma. To reshape their world, to assert their claim as God's heirs, the people must look elsewhere.
The Talents7 offer a portrait of the whistle blower; the one who, sickened by the system, cries, "Enough!" It offers us a glimpse of the dispossessed who live in the outer darkness, far from the centers of power and light, struggling to survive from day to day, "weeping and gnashing teeth." Yet, when we preach on this text, we take the side of the two who were “faithful” to the oppressive system of their master, instead of the third who said, “No.”
The Friend at Midnight8 paints a different kind of portrait. Village peasants offer hospitality to visitors and sojourners and are engaged in little acts that challenge the efforts of their oppressors to dehumanize them. Rather than cave in to the desire to hoard and accumulate, as the rich then and now do, peasants, then and now, continue to cooperate and to provide hospitality. Their shameless social order of small redistribution of food and resources foreshadows a different order of human relations.9 This is one of Jesus’ most powerful parables but we almost never preach on this.
We have much to repent for. I echo the Manila Declaration’s call: We ask all churches whose missions and peoples have historically been involved in empire building to seriously scrutinize—in partnership with the victims of their imperial past—their structure, teaching, hermeneutics, liturgy, music, funding agencies and policies as well as their political allegiances, in order to repent and reshape their life in all aspects in the spirit of the anti-imperial biblical heritage.
Whether we read the Bible or Josephus or Tacitus, one thing is crystal clear: Jesus lived and preached an alternative empire—a life of open healing and shared eating, of radical itinerancy, of empowered egalitarianism, of human contact without discrimination and without hierarchies, and of preferential option for the poor. And Jesus was executed by the Roman Empire because of this. A life totally dedicated to the liberation of the poor and the powerless is a very dangerous life. Those of us who follow Jesus actually worship an executed God.
THERE REMAIN, THEREFORE, THESE THREE: MOVEMENT, EXECUTION, CONTINUATION. AND THE GREATEST OF THESE IS CONTINUATION.
ARE WE READY TO CONTINUE?
NOTES
1 John Dominic Crossan, The Essential Jesus. Many arguments in this BTR are based on the works of Crossan and members of the Jesus Seminar, Ched Myers, William Herzog, and Carlos Abesamis.
2 http://www.fatherjohndear.org/sermons_homilies/repent_believe.html)
3 This section draws heavily from the work of Herzog. Matthew 20:1-16
4 Mark 12:1-12
5 Luke 16:19-31
6 Matthew 18:23-35
7 Matthew 25:14-30; Luke 19:11-27
8 Luke 11:5-8
9 Paul in Ephesians 3:28 advice the church in Ephesus to work hard not to save for themselves but “...so as to have something to share...”
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
God's Fart, Our Farts
Those of us who read our Bibles and pray everyday, know that God is a God of surprises. Each person, each plant, each snowflake, each butterfly, each pebble is different from the rest. Our Bible has 66 books that offer us 66 different ways of articulating faith and faith experiences.
But God has the last laugh. God always has the last laugh. God raised Jesus up from the grave. And he is loose. Laughing because death has no hold on him. Not anymore.
Filipinos, according to research, are among the happiest people in
Filipinos have the last laugh. Maybe it’s a gift from God. The Spaniards taught us the pasyon to domesticate our broken spirits, but we used the pasyon to ignite revolution. The Spaniards used bamboo poles to punish and to drive Indios to and from the fields, but we used bamboo poles to create a dance of celebration, and called it tinikling. The Americans banned the singing of the Philippine National Anthem and the unfurling of the Philippine Flag and sentenced those who disobeyed to prison; we used the American’s principle of separation of State and Church to bring both the anthem and the flag into our worship life. The American’s built the jeep as a weapon of mass destruction. We turned it into a vehicle of Filipino culture—and called it jeepney. We always have the last laugh.
For over 100 years, we have been forced to speak, to think, to believe, to worship, to sing, to make love, to pray, to be… in English. Constantino, in his “The Mis-Education of the Filipinos,” said, “For a sprinkling of English, we sold our souls.” Frantz Fanon and Paulo Freire said that the worst kind of colonialism is when the colonizer has possessed the colonized’s soul.
We need an exorcism and, as I have been arguing for a few minutes now, laughter plays a critical role in our collective decolonization.
English is the imperial language. It is the language of our theologies, our liturgies, our books of discipline, our confessions. English is the master’s tool. We all know this. We also know that one of the best ways to dismantle the master’s house is to use the master’s tools. Any student of peasant revolt theory and the different schools of tradition on resistance, from passive to active non-violence, to armed revolt, know that the colonized has over four centuries of tradition to draw from. I will offer one simple model. In postcolonial studies, this is called THE SCRIPT AND THE SUB-SCRIPT, more specifically, mis-pronunciation as deconstruction.
In the Pentateuch, Moses requested to see God’s face, but God said, those who see God’s face will die, so God allowed Moses to experience God’s back FART. When the Israelites were fleeing from Pharaoh and was trapped between the Egyptians and the
In the letters of Paul, we are challenged to celebrate the church as the body of Christ. The body is composed of many FARTS and each FART is as important as the other. No FART can say to another FART that it is more needed or more important. Each one of us therefore, has a FART to claim, to share, to be proud of.
As a laughing people, we worship a God who laughs. Let us go continue doing so…. Let us always affirm what God has done and what God is doing, and commit to what we can do, as communities and as individuals, celebrate God’s FART and the unity of our FARTS.
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
Onward, Christian Soldiers...
Episode One
INTRODUCTION
Presupposing that imperialism—aside from its many tentacles—is primarily a textual project, I will selectively engage the Lukan narratives with questions I have adopted from Musa Dube (129): (1) Does the text have an explicit stance for or against the political imperialism of its time?; (2) Does the text encourage travel to distant and inhabited lands and how does it justify itself?; (3) How does the text construct difference: Is there dialogue and liberating interdependence, or is there condemnation and replacement of all that is foreign? Is the celebration of difference authentic or mere tokenism?; and (4) Does the text employ representations (gender, divine, etc.) to construct relationships of subordination and domination?
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
That's why we call it "Peace Time"?
"Thirty thousand Americans killed a million Filipinos. We have pacified the islanders and buried them; destroyed their fields, burned their villages; furnished heartbreak by exile to scores of disagreeable patriots; subjugated the remaining 10 million by benevolent assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket....And so, by these providences of God--and the phrase is the government's not mine--we are a world power. And this is supposedly the mission of our race, trustee under God, of the civilization of the world." - (Mark Twain) |
Thursday, July 17, 2008
We Worship an Executed God
I have found it disconcerting to celebrate Easter Sunday apart from the horrors of the crucifixion. But many people find nothing problematic about this. The crucifix has become a fashion accessory for a lot of folks. They can do their Easter egg hunts, enjoy their Easter sunrise services, and preach a risen, triumphant Lord without any thought that the God we proclaim as risen was actually murdered on Calvary . Jesus did not die. The empire killed Jesus. He was executed. He was a victim of state-sanctioned terrorism. We who call ourselves Christian actually worship an executed God.
Everyday in our beloved country, in Asia, in Latin America, in
What does it mean then for us, who are among these crucified people, to proclaim Jesus as risen from the dead?
Monday, July 14, 2008
The Parable of Juan and Maria's One-Peso Loan
Juan and Maria deposit their hard-earned peso in a bank. Government propaganda have convinced them how helpful banks are and being poor farm-folk, they have identified with bank commercials that go, "Ayokong maging dukha!" (I do not want to be poor!). The bank pays them 5% a year. That's 5 centavos less final tax of 20% so they net 4 centavos. The economy being what it is drives the couple to ask a one peso loan from the same bank. Again, government sponsored info commercials that went, "Isip entreprenyur!" (Think entrepreneur!) helped. Their peso deposit serves as collateral. The bank charges them 30% on the loan. In effect, on the peso they deposited and actually loaned, the bank earned 25 centavos. From another perspective, Juan and Maria paid the bank 25 centavos for allowing them to use their own money!
It's no wonder banks and lending institutions are among the most profitable businesses in the country today. (Don’t get me going on the oil cartels that bleed our economy dry.). But let's go back to that one-peso loan of Maria and Juan.
The couple earns a peso so they go back to the bank to pay their loan. 30 centavos is used to pay for the interest. 70 is left for the principal. They still owe the bank 30 so they get another peso loan. 30 centavos of that is used to pay for the balance of the first loan. They leave the bank with 70. If this cycle continues, Juan and Maria will be perpetually making new loans just to pay their maturing loans. But what if tragedy strikes, in the form of pestilence, typhoons, sickness, or worse, death? They cannot pay their loan and the bank forfeits their collateral. Without collateral, loans require higher interests. The cycle continues at a much painful level: Maria and Juan take new loans just to meet the interest on their maturing loans. This happens every day: at the level of the 5/6 operators, at the local banks, in the IMF and the World Bank. Most people do not know that private banks actually run the economies of many countries. Think
Leviticus 25 is probably one of the best pieces of Israelite legislation ever written. Most scholars believe that it was never actually implemented. Nevertheless, the celebration of the Sabbatical year, and more importantly, the Jubilee meant restoration when all slaves were set free, all lands returned to their rightful stewards (God being owner of the land), all debts canceled.1
The issue of Jesus' parable of the estate manager in Luke 16:1-9 is the cancellation or at least the reduction of debt. The machinations of the steward led to a lowering of debt. It was a temporary respite for the debtors but still a foretaste of a time when all debts will be canceled.
When someone is up to one's neck in debt; someone else is wallowing in surplus. When someone is up to one's neck in debt, getting through today is the most important thing; to that someone who is wallowing in surplus, today does not matter, tomorrow's gains do.
The past is very important to those whose only hope is God. It is something we can look back to. It is the past where most of us draw strength for today. If we survived yesterday, we, hopefully, can survive today. Tomorrow is in God's hands. It is therefore fascinating to note that Filipinos call God "Bathala" which, some have argued, literally translates "God WILL take care."
James 4:15 echoes the same faith: "...you ought to say, 'If the Lord WILLS, we shall live and we shall do this and that.'" Tomorrow is in God's hands.
Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure for the last days. Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out; and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on earth in luxury and in pleasure; you have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. You have condemned, you have killed the innocent; they cannot resist you.
“Scattered across the countryside one may observe certain wild animals, male and female, dark, livid and burnt by the sun, attached to the earth which they dig and turn over with invincible stubbornness. However, they have something like an articulated voice and when they stand up they reveal a human face. Indeed, they are human beings...Thanks to them the other human beings need not sow, labour and harvest in order to live. That is why they ought not to lack the bread which they have sown.”2
They ought not to lack the bread which they have sown, but in the
Notes
1 John Dominic Crossan in his lecture on method (as part of the Jesus Seminar Workshop held at the Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza, New Orleans, 23 November 1996) believes that Jesus' message of God's reign has for its context the Israelite peasantry's thirst for justice; justice as demanded by God in the Sabbatical year and the Jubilee.
2 Jean la Bruyere, French moralist of the late seventeenth century (cited in J.D. Crossan's The Essential Jesus (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), v.
Friday, July 04, 2008
Tabernacles and Jeepneys
Biblical interpretation has privileged the centers of power within, behind, and in front of the text. Biblical studies in the Philippines have been a stronghold of colonial scholarship for over a century, especially among Protestant churches. Indigenous denominations refuse to become autonomous and continue to depend on their mother institutions in the United States or elsewhere in the First World. Church buildings and institutions are named after benevolent foreign church leaders and missionaries. Seminaries continue to have more foreign teachers (who are paid in dollars by foreign boards) than Filipinos (who are paid in pesos and, usually, significantly below the living wage). Libraries are filled with books written by European and American scholars and continue to receive donations of old books from the First World. Traditional historical-critical methods remain the key reading paradigm. Establishing what the Bible meant in the past is the first step towards discerning what it means today. Ways of interpreting the Bible that do not follow this so-called fundamental paradigm are labeled eisegesis (reading into the text) or reader-response. Filipino Protestants know more about Bible history and American history than their own history; and they read the Bible the way their colonial masters did and still do, because they have been socialized for generations that this is the correct way. Filipino social scientists call this collective condition of the Filipino psyche a colonial mentality. Historian Renato Constantino traces it to the systematic mis-education of Filipinos. Theologian Eleazar Fernandez argues that the Philippines can still be called a “mental colony” of the United States of America. Biblical studies in the Philippines today exemplify his claim.
But side by side with this “reading-the-Bible-the-way-our-masters-do” is a wealth of Filipino literature, practices, and reading strategies that engage the Bible in unexpected ways. Two quick examples. Take a regular Bible Study session among women. Let them role-play a passage in the Bible. Let’s say, Luke 10:38-42, Jesus visits Martha and Mary. In my experience, most women WILL NOT follow the Biblical script. They will change the story.
Take a nursery Sunday School class. Tell the story of Jonah. Most adults will identify with the plight of Jonah, including the nursery teacher. But children have no problem reading the text from the perspective of the fish, the vine, and the worm—who, by the way, obey God.
I call these interpretations models of jeepney hermeneutics, reading that go against “authorial intent.” The jeepney is the most popular mode of public transportation in the Philippines. It is an excellent example of the Filipinization of an American icon, the military jeep. It is also, as I will argue, one very powerful metaphor for Filipinos’ engagement with another icon, the Bible, offering a range of strategies to decolonize biblical studies.
The U.S. Army, back in 1940, required an all-terrain reconnaissance, go-anywhere, vehicle that seated three and had a mount for a 30-caliber machine gun. Filipinos have turned this military vehicle into a sort of mini-bus that can accommodate about twenty people. There are those who look at a jeepney and call it Frankenstein’s monster. There are others who see it as a “Filipino home on wheels,” complete with an altar. The military jeep was, and still is, a sort of imperializing text. A jeepney resists this text. The inventors of the jeep never imagined that this weapon of mass destruction can be transformed into a public transport vehicle. The jeepney is an “unexpected reading” of a jeep.
Interpretation, by definition, is always perspectival and particular. In other words, everything—including the supposedly objective historical-critical method—is reader-response. This interpretation of biblical passages as imperializing texts presupposes the reality of an empire as a backdrop to the construction of the narrative. Many Filipinos employ a similar assumption when engaging Filipino resistance literature: for example, Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, Francisco Baltazar’s Florante at Laura, and Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart. This interpretation does not equate the biblical narratives with historical facts. What it does is argue that the narrative is constructed and framed by a particular historical setting.1 Anticolonialist Frantz Fanon and educator Paolo Freire show that dynamics leading to literary production exist not only between the colonizer and the colonized, but also between various interest groups of the colonized, some of which try to gain power to define national cultural identity, as well as to compete for the attention of their collective oppressor. The interpretation below argues that Matthew is not rejecting Roman imperialism, but seeking its favor, or at least condoning it.
This interpretation also presupposes resistance, as reflected in what activist Salud Algabre and historian Reynaldo Ileto call “little traditions.” Algabre and Ileto memorialize all those resistance fighters who have been victimized by the violence of institutionalized forgetting, a fate most of the unnamed children in Matthew share.
New Testament scholar Musa Dube posits the following questions in order to measure whether Matthew is an imperializing text: Does the text offer an explicit stance for or against Roman imperialism? Does the narrative encourage travel to distant and inhabited lands, and how does it justify such travel? How does the narrative present those who are different from the main characters? Is there dialogue and liberating interdependence between the main characters and “others”? Or is there condemnation and replacement of all that is foreign and other? Is the celebration of difference authentic or mere tokenism? Does the text present relationships of subordination and domination? How does it represent them?
Using these questions to analyze Matthew and its effects upon its readers, Dube concludes that the author’s stance toward the imperial powers presents imperial rule and its agents as holy and acceptable. Matthew’s Jesus is politically un-subversive and encourages travel to distant and inhabited lands. Matthew’s positive presentation of the Empire and the decision to take the word to the nations (Matt. 28:16-20) is born within and as a result of stiff competition for power over the crowds (Israel) and the favor of the Empire. Matthew’s mission to the nations embodies imperialistic values and strategies. Matthew does not seek relationships of liberating interdependence among nations, cultures, and genders. Rather, this Gospel upholds the superiority of some races and relegates other races to inferiority. Matthew represents gender relationships as relationships of subordination and domination by featuring the Canaanite woman (15:21-28) and the centurion (8:5-13) in contrasting stories, which foreshadows the mission to the nations. Matthew’s presentation of Pilate, his wife, and the Roman soldiers at the trial, death, and resurrection of Jesus shows a clear-cut pro-empire position (27:1–28:15).
The Tabernacle motif, though implicit, plays a critical role in the Matthean narrative. The Tent of Meeting or Tabernacle symbolized, literally, God’s presence among God’s people (Exodus 35-40). In the 40-year sojourn of the Israelites in the wilderness, God was always with them via the Tabernacle, a pillar of cloud by day, a pillar of fire by night. In other words, where the Tabernacle was, there was God. Matthew begins and ends with Immanuel, God-with-us (1.23, 28:20). Thus, the Gospel effectively sets the boundaries of its own “tabernacle.” Matthew creates a world of insiders and outsiders relative to this “tabernacle.”
And right at the middle of this “tent” is the greatest symbol of faith in the gospel—the centurion.
The encounter between the centurion and Jesus, according to Dube, particularly highlights Matthew’s stance toward the Empire. Both men are presented as having authority to effect things simply by the power of their words (Matt. 8:8-9). The comparison of Jesus’ authority with that of the centurion’s has the effect of sanctifying the imperial power. Jesus pronounces the centurion’s faith greater than the faith of everyone in Israel (Matt. 8:10), a statement that contrasts the imperial agent with the colonized and exalts his righteousness above theirs. The passage casts imperial officials as holier and predicts that they, and other groups, will have more power (in the kingdom of God). Such characterization not only disguises what imperial agents represent—institutions of exploitation and oppression—but also pronounces imperialism holy and acceptable. A quick survey of the history of the interpretation of Matthew and centuries of Western colonization—euphemistically called “civilizing missions”—in Asia, Africa, and Latin America shows that most interpreters followed the Gospel’s imperial rhetoric.
In Matthew’s “tabernacle,” God’s presence is most evident in a military officer, in an imperial agent. The first one thousand years of Christianity was one millennium of war and destruction in the name of Jesus Christ. And those “civilizing missions” have not stopped. Even today, the most oppressive and dehumanizing societies are led by “Christian” centurions who have no qualms maiming and destroying those who are not “one of them.” And two of these are in the White House and in Malacanang, George W. Bush and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, respectively.
The centurion is to Matthew as the 30-caliber machine gun mount is to the military jeep. To read Matthew inside a jeepney is to celebrate the fact that the first thing Filipinos did in their transformation of the military jeep was to rid it of that machine gun mount. To read Matthew inside a jeepney is to remove our gaze from the centurion—and, yes, even Jesus, who mimics the centurion—and focus it on someone else. I suggest focusing our attention on the servant (pais in Greek) of 8:5-13.
The pais, whether translated son, daughter, girl, boy, servant, slave, or sex slave, is a child. He or she serves to remind flesh and blood readers that the reality of empire—in varying forms and degrees—is experienced by children and by those who are treated as children. Political sociologist Ashis Nandy draws attention to the way the colonized are viewed as children by the colonizers.2
Fred Atkinson, the first American General Superintendent of Education in the Philippines, inaugurated more than a century of racist public education in the islands when he remarked that “the Filipino people, taken as a body, are children and childlike, do not know what is best for them. . . . By the very fact of our superiority of civilization and our greater capacity for industrial activity we are bound to exercise over them a profound social influence.”3
The pais reminds flesh and blood readers that children’s oppression—of varying forms and degrees—is written in the text because, despite the rhetoric that God’s reign is for children (Matt. 19:14), no child is ever named—except Jesus—or is given a voice in the gospel—except Herodias’s daughter, who says what her mother tells her to say. Like the Canaanite woman’s daughter (15:21-28) and the pais, Herodias’s daughter serves only as a medium through which competing discourses present their claims. The girl falls prey to manipulation by her mother and by Herod. We don’t even get to hear the cries of the children who are massacred in 2:18, only their mothers’ cries. Children are the primary victims of Matthew’s “culture of silence.”
Look at how the pais is described in Greek: ho pais mou, “the servant who is mine.” That child’s body is under somebody else’s control—whether it’s his father, his owner, or, as I have argued elsewhere, his pedophile. The centurion’s act on the pais’s behalf emphasizes the latter’s marginalization. As far as Matthew is concerned, the pais cannot speak or seek his own healing. Yet, because that child is “paralyzed,” albeit momentarily, he also paralyzes his owner, who must seek help from Jesus. The child also interrupts the goings and the comings of the centurion’s soldiers, since the centurion is not with them to give them orders (Matt. 8:9). Thus, with his paralysis, the child also interrupts the imperial expansion.
Throughout the Gospel, characters come and go, borders are crossed: magi from the East come seeking the king of the Jews (2:1-12); Joseph and his family flee into Egypt (2:13-15); Herod sends his death squads to Bethlehem to murder children (2:16-18); Joseph and his family go to Nazareth, from Egypt (2:19-23); Jesus goes to John the baptizer and is led by the Spirit into the wilderness (3:1–4:11); Jesus leaves Nazareth and makes his home in Capernaum (4:12); the centurion comes to Jesus and the latter is convinced of the imperial authority that effects goings and comings, travel to distant lands, and control at a distance (8:5-13). The disciples are systematically prepared for their commissioning (10:1-42); the Canaanite woman comes to Jesus (15:21-28); the heavy-laden come to Jesus (11:28). Jesus eventually sends out his disciples (28:16-20). Everyone in the story moves, except the pais in Matthew 8:5-13. Yes, even for a brief moment, the pais revels in the space her paralysis brings. For about eight short verses in the very long 28 chapters of the Gospel of Matthew, the pais is free of the centurion.
The colonized is free of her colonizer.
The majority of Filipinos remain colonized subjects, a part of a mental colony. Migrant Filipina domestic workers, numbering over 7 million, are the global servants of late capitalism. Tens of millions find themselves squatters in their own homeland. Those who have opted for “the Promise Land”—the United States—find themselves treated as second-class citizens. Yet, despite all this colonization, they have always resisted. The jeepney is the best-known symbol of resistance and decolonization for Filipinos. Now, because of the Gospel, they have another symbol, the pais—paralyzed outside the “tabernacle”—who disrupts imperial progress, even if only briefly, in the Gospel of Matthew.
Notes:
1. The Gospel of Matthew is a narrative discourse constructed against the backdrop of Roman imperial occupation. In other words, it is a story of people in this imperialistic situation.
2. See Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory (New York: 1998), 32.
3. Quoted in Daniel B. Schirmer and Stephen Rosskamm Philippines Reader: A History of Colonialism, Neocolonialism, Resistance (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 12.
Works consulted:
Abesamis, Carlos. A Third Look at Jesus. Quezon City: Claretian Publications, 1999.
Carter, Warren. Matthew and the Margins. New York: Orbis, 2000.
Constantino, Renato. Neocolonial Identity and Counter-consciousness : Essays on Cultural Decolonization (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1978).
De La Torre, Edicio. "The Philippines: A Situationer." Those Who Would Give Light Must Endure Burning. Bautista and Amirtham, eds. Quezon City: NCCP, 1987.
Dube, Musa. Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible. St. Louis, Missouri: Chalice Press, 2000.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: 1968.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Myra Bergman Ramos, trans. New York: Herder and Herder, 1972.
Fernandez, Eleazar. Toward a Theology of Struggle. New York: Orbis, 1994.
Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 32.
Levine, Amy-Jill. The Social and Ethnic Dimensions of Matthean Social History (Lewiston: Mellen, 1988).
Ileto, Reynaldo. Pasyon and Revolution. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University, 1979.
Patte, Daniel. The Gospel According to Matthew. Philadelphia:Fortress, 1987.
Powell, Mark Allan Powell. Chasing the Eastern Star. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2001.
Schirmer, Daniel."The Conception and Gestation of a Neocolony." The Journal of Contemporary Asia, Vol 5. No. 1, 1975, 43-44.
Velunta, Revelation. "The Ho Pais Mou of Matthew 8:5-13: Contesting the Interpretations in the Name of Present-Day Paides." Bulletin for Contextual Theology, School of Theology, University of Natal. Vol 7.2. June 2000, pp.25-32.
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From TUGON (re-launch edition, copyright 2008, NCCP)
But side by side with this “reading-the-Bible-the-way-our-masters-do” is a wealth of Filipino literature, practices, and reading strategies that engage the Bible in unexpected ways. Two quick examples. Take a regular Bible Study session among women. Let them role-play a passage in the Bible. Let’s say, Luke 10:38-42, Jesus visits Martha and Mary. In my experience, most women WILL NOT follow the Biblical script. They will change the story.
Take a nursery Sunday School class. Tell the story of Jonah. Most adults will identify with the plight of Jonah, including the nursery teacher. But children have no problem reading the text from the perspective of the fish, the vine, and the worm—who, by the way, obey God.
I call these interpretations models of jeepney hermeneutics, reading that go against “authorial intent.” The jeepney is the most popular mode of public transportation in the Philippines. It is an excellent example of the Filipinization of an American icon, the military jeep. It is also, as I will argue, one very powerful metaphor for Filipinos’ engagement with another icon, the Bible, offering a range of strategies to decolonize biblical studies.
The U.S. Army, back in 1940, required an all-terrain reconnaissance, go-anywhere, vehicle that seated three and had a mount for a 30-caliber machine gun. Filipinos have turned this military vehicle into a sort of mini-bus that can accommodate about twenty people. There are those who look at a jeepney and call it Frankenstein’s monster. There are others who see it as a “Filipino home on wheels,” complete with an altar. The military jeep was, and still is, a sort of imperializing text. A jeepney resists this text. The inventors of the jeep never imagined that this weapon of mass destruction can be transformed into a public transport vehicle. The jeepney is an “unexpected reading” of a jeep.
Interpretation, by definition, is always perspectival and particular. In other words, everything—including the supposedly objective historical-critical method—is reader-response. This interpretation of biblical passages as imperializing texts presupposes the reality of an empire as a backdrop to the construction of the narrative. Many Filipinos employ a similar assumption when engaging Filipino resistance literature: for example, Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, Francisco Baltazar’s Florante at Laura, and Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart. This interpretation does not equate the biblical narratives with historical facts. What it does is argue that the narrative is constructed and framed by a particular historical setting.1 Anticolonialist Frantz Fanon and educator Paolo Freire show that dynamics leading to literary production exist not only between the colonizer and the colonized, but also between various interest groups of the colonized, some of which try to gain power to define national cultural identity, as well as to compete for the attention of their collective oppressor. The interpretation below argues that Matthew is not rejecting Roman imperialism, but seeking its favor, or at least condoning it.
This interpretation also presupposes resistance, as reflected in what activist Salud Algabre and historian Reynaldo Ileto call “little traditions.” Algabre and Ileto memorialize all those resistance fighters who have been victimized by the violence of institutionalized forgetting, a fate most of the unnamed children in Matthew share.
New Testament scholar Musa Dube posits the following questions in order to measure whether Matthew is an imperializing text: Does the text offer an explicit stance for or against Roman imperialism? Does the narrative encourage travel to distant and inhabited lands, and how does it justify such travel? How does the narrative present those who are different from the main characters? Is there dialogue and liberating interdependence between the main characters and “others”? Or is there condemnation and replacement of all that is foreign and other? Is the celebration of difference authentic or mere tokenism? Does the text present relationships of subordination and domination? How does it represent them?
Using these questions to analyze Matthew and its effects upon its readers, Dube concludes that the author’s stance toward the imperial powers presents imperial rule and its agents as holy and acceptable. Matthew’s Jesus is politically un-subversive and encourages travel to distant and inhabited lands. Matthew’s positive presentation of the Empire and the decision to take the word to the nations (Matt. 28:16-20) is born within and as a result of stiff competition for power over the crowds (Israel) and the favor of the Empire. Matthew’s mission to the nations embodies imperialistic values and strategies. Matthew does not seek relationships of liberating interdependence among nations, cultures, and genders. Rather, this Gospel upholds the superiority of some races and relegates other races to inferiority. Matthew represents gender relationships as relationships of subordination and domination by featuring the Canaanite woman (15:21-28) and the centurion (8:5-13) in contrasting stories, which foreshadows the mission to the nations. Matthew’s presentation of Pilate, his wife, and the Roman soldiers at the trial, death, and resurrection of Jesus shows a clear-cut pro-empire position (27:1–28:15).
The Tabernacle motif, though implicit, plays a critical role in the Matthean narrative. The Tent of Meeting or Tabernacle symbolized, literally, God’s presence among God’s people (Exodus 35-40). In the 40-year sojourn of the Israelites in the wilderness, God was always with them via the Tabernacle, a pillar of cloud by day, a pillar of fire by night. In other words, where the Tabernacle was, there was God. Matthew begins and ends with Immanuel, God-with-us (1.23, 28:20). Thus, the Gospel effectively sets the boundaries of its own “tabernacle.” Matthew creates a world of insiders and outsiders relative to this “tabernacle.”
And right at the middle of this “tent” is the greatest symbol of faith in the gospel—the centurion.
The encounter between the centurion and Jesus, according to Dube, particularly highlights Matthew’s stance toward the Empire. Both men are presented as having authority to effect things simply by the power of their words (Matt. 8:8-9). The comparison of Jesus’ authority with that of the centurion’s has the effect of sanctifying the imperial power. Jesus pronounces the centurion’s faith greater than the faith of everyone in Israel (Matt. 8:10), a statement that contrasts the imperial agent with the colonized and exalts his righteousness above theirs. The passage casts imperial officials as holier and predicts that they, and other groups, will have more power (in the kingdom of God). Such characterization not only disguises what imperial agents represent—institutions of exploitation and oppression—but also pronounces imperialism holy and acceptable. A quick survey of the history of the interpretation of Matthew and centuries of Western colonization—euphemistically called “civilizing missions”—in Asia, Africa, and Latin America shows that most interpreters followed the Gospel’s imperial rhetoric.
In Matthew’s “tabernacle,” God’s presence is most evident in a military officer, in an imperial agent. The first one thousand years of Christianity was one millennium of war and destruction in the name of Jesus Christ. And those “civilizing missions” have not stopped. Even today, the most oppressive and dehumanizing societies are led by “Christian” centurions who have no qualms maiming and destroying those who are not “one of them.” And two of these are in the White House and in Malacanang, George W. Bush and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, respectively.
The centurion is to Matthew as the 30-caliber machine gun mount is to the military jeep. To read Matthew inside a jeepney is to celebrate the fact that the first thing Filipinos did in their transformation of the military jeep was to rid it of that machine gun mount. To read Matthew inside a jeepney is to remove our gaze from the centurion—and, yes, even Jesus, who mimics the centurion—and focus it on someone else. I suggest focusing our attention on the servant (pais in Greek) of 8:5-13.
The pais, whether translated son, daughter, girl, boy, servant, slave, or sex slave, is a child. He or she serves to remind flesh and blood readers that the reality of empire—in varying forms and degrees—is experienced by children and by those who are treated as children. Political sociologist Ashis Nandy draws attention to the way the colonized are viewed as children by the colonizers.2
Fred Atkinson, the first American General Superintendent of Education in the Philippines, inaugurated more than a century of racist public education in the islands when he remarked that “the Filipino people, taken as a body, are children and childlike, do not know what is best for them. . . . By the very fact of our superiority of civilization and our greater capacity for industrial activity we are bound to exercise over them a profound social influence.”3
The pais reminds flesh and blood readers that children’s oppression—of varying forms and degrees—is written in the text because, despite the rhetoric that God’s reign is for children (Matt. 19:14), no child is ever named—except Jesus—or is given a voice in the gospel—except Herodias’s daughter, who says what her mother tells her to say. Like the Canaanite woman’s daughter (15:21-28) and the pais, Herodias’s daughter serves only as a medium through which competing discourses present their claims. The girl falls prey to manipulation by her mother and by Herod. We don’t even get to hear the cries of the children who are massacred in 2:18, only their mothers’ cries. Children are the primary victims of Matthew’s “culture of silence.”
Look at how the pais is described in Greek: ho pais mou, “the servant who is mine.” That child’s body is under somebody else’s control—whether it’s his father, his owner, or, as I have argued elsewhere, his pedophile. The centurion’s act on the pais’s behalf emphasizes the latter’s marginalization. As far as Matthew is concerned, the pais cannot speak or seek his own healing. Yet, because that child is “paralyzed,” albeit momentarily, he also paralyzes his owner, who must seek help from Jesus. The child also interrupts the goings and the comings of the centurion’s soldiers, since the centurion is not with them to give them orders (Matt. 8:9). Thus, with his paralysis, the child also interrupts the imperial expansion.
Throughout the Gospel, characters come and go, borders are crossed: magi from the East come seeking the king of the Jews (2:1-12); Joseph and his family flee into Egypt (2:13-15); Herod sends his death squads to Bethlehem to murder children (2:16-18); Joseph and his family go to Nazareth, from Egypt (2:19-23); Jesus goes to John the baptizer and is led by the Spirit into the wilderness (3:1–4:11); Jesus leaves Nazareth and makes his home in Capernaum (4:12); the centurion comes to Jesus and the latter is convinced of the imperial authority that effects goings and comings, travel to distant lands, and control at a distance (8:5-13). The disciples are systematically prepared for their commissioning (10:1-42); the Canaanite woman comes to Jesus (15:21-28); the heavy-laden come to Jesus (11:28). Jesus eventually sends out his disciples (28:16-20). Everyone in the story moves, except the pais in Matthew 8:5-13. Yes, even for a brief moment, the pais revels in the space her paralysis brings. For about eight short verses in the very long 28 chapters of the Gospel of Matthew, the pais is free of the centurion.
The colonized is free of her colonizer.
The majority of Filipinos remain colonized subjects, a part of a mental colony. Migrant Filipina domestic workers, numbering over 7 million, are the global servants of late capitalism. Tens of millions find themselves squatters in their own homeland. Those who have opted for “the Promise Land”—the United States—find themselves treated as second-class citizens. Yet, despite all this colonization, they have always resisted. The jeepney is the best-known symbol of resistance and decolonization for Filipinos. Now, because of the Gospel, they have another symbol, the pais—paralyzed outside the “tabernacle”—who disrupts imperial progress, even if only briefly, in the Gospel of Matthew.
Notes:
1. The Gospel of Matthew is a narrative discourse constructed against the backdrop of Roman imperial occupation. In other words, it is a story of people in this imperialistic situation.
2. See Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory (New York: 1998), 32.
3. Quoted in Daniel B. Schirmer and Stephen Rosskamm Philippines Reader: A History of Colonialism, Neocolonialism, Resistance (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 12.
Works consulted:
Abesamis, Carlos. A Third Look at Jesus. Quezon City: Claretian Publications, 1999.
Carter, Warren. Matthew and the Margins. New York: Orbis, 2000.
Constantino, Renato. Neocolonial Identity and Counter-consciousness : Essays on Cultural Decolonization (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1978).
De La Torre, Edicio. "The Philippines: A Situationer." Those Who Would Give Light Must Endure Burning. Bautista and Amirtham, eds. Quezon City: NCCP, 1987.
Dube, Musa. Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible. St. Louis, Missouri: Chalice Press, 2000.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: 1968.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Myra Bergman Ramos, trans. New York: Herder and Herder, 1972.
Fernandez, Eleazar. Toward a Theology of Struggle. New York: Orbis, 1994.
Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 32.
Levine, Amy-Jill. The Social and Ethnic Dimensions of Matthean Social History (Lewiston: Mellen, 1988).
Ileto, Reynaldo. Pasyon and Revolution. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University, 1979.
Patte, Daniel. The Gospel According to Matthew. Philadelphia:Fortress, 1987.
Powell, Mark Allan Powell. Chasing the Eastern Star. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2001.
Schirmer, Daniel."The Conception and Gestation of a Neocolony." The Journal of Contemporary Asia, Vol 5. No. 1, 1975, 43-44.
Velunta, Revelation. "The Ho Pais Mou of Matthew 8:5-13: Contesting the Interpretations in the Name of Present-Day Paides." Bulletin for Contextual Theology, School of Theology, University of Natal. Vol 7.2. June 2000, pp.25-32.
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From TUGON (re-launch edition, copyright 2008, NCCP)
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Texts of Terror
If crying is the first prophetic utterance (as lifted up by Chung Hyun Kyung's statement during her controversial opening address, and spirit-invoking dance, at the 7th Assembly of the WCC), then TEXTS OF TERROR's poignant, gut-wrenching portraits of women as victims offer us a hearing of those "cries."
In Texts of Terror1, Phyllis Trible sets out to tell sad stories as she "hears" them. Indeed, she offers us tales of terror. She comments: "Belonging to the sacred scriptures of synagogue and church, these narratives yield four portraits of suffering in ancient Israel: Hagar, the slave used, abused, and rejected; Tamar, the princess raped, murdered, and dismembered; and the daughter of Jephthah, a virgin slain and sacrificed. Choice and chance inspire my telling these particular tales: hearing a black woman describe herself as a daughter of Hagar outside the covenant; seeing an abused woman on the streets of New York with a sign, 'My name is Tamar'; reading news reports of the dismembered body of a woman found in a trash can; attending worship services in memory of nameless women; and wrestling with the silence, absence, and opposition of God. All these experiences and others have led me to a land of terror from whose bourn no traveler returns unscarred" (p.1,2)
We are invited to a journey that is solitary, painful and intense. In joining this venture, we, the readers, assume its risks; we are challenged to hear not just the cries within the text but also those in front of it.
Hagar's story conjures images of oppression in three very familiar forms: race, class, and sex. As symbol of the oppressed woman of color, Hagar becomes many things to many people. "She is the faithful domestic helper exploited, the black woman used by the white male and abused by the white female of the ruling class, the migrant worker without legal recourse, the pregnant young woman alone, the expelled wife, the divorced woman with child, the shopping bag lady carrying bread and water, the homeless woman, the indigent relying upon handouts from the power structures, the welfare mother, and the self-effacing female whose own identity shrinks in service to others( (pp.27,28).2
The tragic story of Tamar occurs within the circle of male power of a supposedly God-ordained monarchy, David's, a system that was supposed to protect her (a time that was supposed to be better than when "leaders were lacking in Israel"). Sibblings Absalom and Tamar were a handsome pair in the land but now the sister dwells desolate. The narrator has more to say on the subject though, switching from Absalom to his offspring. "There were born to Absalom three sons and one daughter; her name was Tamar." Strikingly, the anonymity of all the sons highlights the name of the lone female child. In her Absalom has created a living memorial for his sister. A further note enhances the poignancy of his act. Tamar, the daughter of Absalom, "became a woman beautiful to behold." From aunt to niece have passed name and beauty so that rape and desolation have not the final words in the story of Tamar (p.55).3
The story of the unnamed woman in Judges 19 reminds us that violence and vengeance are not just characteristics of a distant, pre-Christian past; they infect the community of the so called elect to this day. Woman as object is still captured, betrayed, raped, tortured, murdered, dismembered, and scattered. To take to heart this ancient story, to listen to the cries of the unnamed woman, then, is to confess its present reality, to admit that today the only form of resistance left countless of unnamed women is their cry. Do we hear them? Usually it is the one who has ears who takes forever to hear.
Trible adds that the story is alive and all is not well: " Beyond confession we must take counsel to say, 'Never again.' Yet this counsel is itself ineffectual unless we direct our hearts to that most uncompromising of all biblical commands, speaking the words not to others but to ourselves: Repent. Repent"(p.87).
The fourth tale is equally disturbing: Jephthah is praised; his daughter forgotten. Unfaith becomes faith. Thus has scripture and tradition violated the ancient story (108). So to this day, heroes of faith are male; wives and children live under the shadows of husbands and fathers; and the world on the whole finds identity in its connection to male power. And yet that story endures to this day for us to recover and appropriate; the story endures, like the other three tragic stories, because of women's cries.
The postscipt reports an extraordinary development. Whereas the female who has never known a man is typically numbered among the unremembered, in the case of the daughter of Jephthah the usual does not happen. "Although he had not known a man, nevertheless she became a tradition in Israel." In a dramatic way this sentence alters, though it does not eliminate, the finality of Jepthah's faithless vow. The alteration comes through the faithfulness of the women of Israel, as the next line explains. "From year to year the daughters of Israel went to mourn for the daughter of Jepthah the Gileadite, four days in the year." The unnamed virgin child becomes a tradition in Israel because the women with whom she chose to spend her last days have not let her pass into oblivion. They have established a testimony: activities of mourning reiterated yearly in a special place. This they have done in remembrance of her. The narrative postcript then shifts the focus of the story from vow to victim, from death to life, from oblivion to remembrance. Remarkably, this saga of faithlessness and sacrifice mitigates, though it does not dispel, its own tragedy through the mourning of women (p.106-107).
Four stories. Four tragic tales from the ancient past. Yet four stories that ring true to this day. If these stories and the images they conjure fail to drive us to tears, to righteous indignation, and then to collective action, then there is very little hope left.
1 Texts of Terror:Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Philadelphia:Fortress Press, 1984), 128pp.
2 These images remind me of the over seven million Filipino migrant workers, most of whom are women. Only two million of them are recognized by the government as legal, the rest are illegal. Most of them are stripped of their passports the moment they get to their destinations. Many of them are forced into prostitution. Many bear the pain of leaving families behind to seek greener pastures, only to find a worse situation abroad. Flor Contemplacion and Sarah Balabagan are just two of these women. I am also reminded of our ancestors who were called "injuns,""niggers," and "brainless brown monkeys" by the white colonizers. In the beginning, only the white folk were called Filipinos. Then there was my mother, the most selfless woman I've known. From childhood, being the eldest in a brood of ten, to adulthood she served and served and served family and church, church and family. She didn’t even get the chance to experience the respite her children’s graduation promised. She died at 49.
3 This narrative strikes a sensitive chord for me. I know of so many mothers whose lives of hardship, of sacrifice is empowered by the dream that their daughters and sons, one day, would experience something better. And, again, I remember my mother. My parents dreamt of having four children, two girls and two boys, Alpha, Omega, Genesis and Revelation. My parents were very poor but very bright. It was actually stupid to dream of becoming pastors then. They did. God gave them Genesis, Revelation and then Alpha. Alpha's birth was very difficult. It triggered my mother's congenital heart condition. There were also complications. Having to leave the hospital early (due to financial difficulties) aggravated her condition. Omega was to remain a dream, the sister, my partner, who never was. Nanay never got to meet Omega, Genesis' daughter--so named in memory of a sister, a mother's dream for her children.
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