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...”

God's Fart, Our Farts

Imperialism exists when a single truth is forced on a plural world. This is why, despite the fact the women hold up half of the sky, majority of men and women believe that men are stronger, more intelligent, more gifted, and closer to God. This is why, to this day, many churches only ordain men as priests. This is also why Christianity has, in the past two thousand years, killed more people in the name of Jesus than all the victims of wars, ethic cleansings, and religious genocide combined.

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.

Our Bible offers us four portraits of a man, whom his followers confess is God-in-the-flesh, who lived, and loved, and labored with the poor, the marginalized, the downtrodden, those whose only hope was God. His enemies, those who protected the status quo and maintained the ideologies of empire, tortured and executed him. He was dead. His message of liberation has been silenced. His enemies have won. So they thought.

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 Asia. Despite our problems, despite our miseries, despite the seeming hopelessness of our situation, we laugh. We laugh at our leaders and their broken promises. We laugh at our churches and the superstitions we confess. We laugh at ourselves, all the time. And this is why, I believe, we have survived all these years.

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 Red Sea, God FARTED the waters and God’s chosen were able to escape towards the Promised Land.

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.

Onward, Christian Soldiers...

Episode One

"In Caesarea there was a man named Cornelius, a centurion of the Italian cohort, as it was called...." Acts 10:1

“This war is the kingdom of God coming… the sunrise of a better day for the Philippines. With Christ in his heart, the New Testament in his pocket, ‘Look up and lift up’ (Badge of Methodist Youth League) on his shirt, and forty rounds of ammunition in his belt, we have sent our first missionary in the family” (Moorehead:155).

INTRODUCTION

I agree with Jane Schaberg who cautions us that Luke is a dangerous piece of literature (275). Together with Acts, these two volumes, I would argue, helps create, rationalize, legitimize, and perpetuate the ideology of Imperial Soldier as model of Christianity. His presentation of the five centurions in Luke-Acts, especially Cornelius, was aimed at convincing his readers that, despite the fact that the Empire executed Jesus, Imperial Officers made the best Christians. Having these officers converted was the first big step toward having a Christian Empire.

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?

(to be continued)

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)

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 Africa, and in many parts of the world, people are being crucified, victims of institutionalized oppression—cultural genocide, poverty, racism, gender injustice, capital punishment, global capitalism, militarization, and marginalization. What does it mean to proclaim a resurrection faith in the midst of all these?

What does it mean then for us, who are among these crucified people, to proclaim Jesus as risen from the dead?

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 Hong Kong.

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.The rich though, like the foolish one in Luke 12: 16-21, live for the future as if the future is in their hands. It was not then. It still is not. James 5:1-6 compared to the Lukan parable, I think, is a more powerful tirade against the rich:

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 Philippines, and in many parts of the world, they, unfortunately, do and it’s worse.

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.

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.

============================
From TUGON (re-launch edition, copyright 2008, NCCP)