“Judging Cory”
As former president Cory Aquino fights her last battle in life, the nation watches. The role that she has played in shaping the post-Marcos era is taking added significance as the nation anticipates the ending of the Arroyo regime. People who are grateful for her contributions to the nation’s life gathered in churches even as angry protesters gathered in the streets against GMA.
Cory’s place in our history needs to be framed against the backdrop of the unique political circumstance that catapulted her to the highest office. It must also be seen in the light of her personal life as a woman who was bred in the feudal culture of the landed gentry and as a wife of a charismatic opposition politician. Acclaimed president by fiat of people power, she ruled from her court in Malacaňang but with the mind and will of a Corazon Cojoangco Aquino. As a natural-born Cojoanco and a Mrs. Aquino, Cory took upon herself the daunting task of putting together the pieces of a shattered nation.
As president of what amounts to a revolutionary government, Cory Aquino was expected to impose her will on a nation that was suddenly bereft of a strong-man leader. A revolutionary presidency had to be imperious and resolute in following through the objectives of the revolution. It took a nation-wide political upheaval to drive Marcos out of the country, but the storm that was EDSA 1 generated another storm that threatened an even wider swath of destruction. The disenfranchised faction of the elite wanted their privileges back even as the militant poor who bore the brunt of the struggle were pressing to collect the promise of social liberation. On the one end were democrats who were pushing the gates of democracy wide open; on the other end were mutinous officers of a politicized military who had tasted the wine of power and didn’t want to give it up. And then there was the powerful Catholic Church that saw in her an opportunity to regain its moral sway.
These were powerful contending forces over which the revolutionary president must prevail. Cory was not totally unfamiliar with them. After all, she grew up in Central Luzon, the hotbed of peasant uprisings and the heart of the communist insurgency. She had seen how her family managed to preserve and expand its landholdings against restive militant tenants. She was there with her husband throughout his political career and individual struggle against Marcos. Like the proverbial driver who knows all the family secrets, Cory heard it all and bore it all silently in her heart. But she was not a Ninoy Aquino, nor the dominant male patriarch of the Cojoangco clan. Raised to become a devout Catholic, she cast herself in the role of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Mary, the mother of Jesus, is the epitome of non-power. She had an intimation of God’s plan of salvation through her son but she chose to be quiet and kept her son’s suffering in her heart. The “fighting” Mary of the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-54) seems to be an aberration in the piety of Marian devotees that is best ignored. Mary the mother of Jesus is the patron saint of those who suffer from incurable diseases and unchangeable circumstances. Mary is the paragon of the virtue of patient suffering and submission to God’s will.
The way Cory responded to the challenges and waves of crises that hit her regime would make sense given that self-understanding. Governing with an imperious will was totally out of her character. After what happened to her husband, she was beyond fear of the military but she refrained from commanding them like Marcos did. She trusted the few democrats in her cabinet more than those put there by the come-backing elites, but she allowed their democratic and social agenda to be set aside by the contingencies of political survival.
Cory watched and suffered as the dreams of the original EDSA collapsed during her watch. Like Mary, she surrendered to God her fate and the fate of the nation. But she has no regrets. She has been true to her calling to the very end. She is leaving it to God and the Filipino people to judge her.
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Rev. Everett Mendoza, D. Theol.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Divine Providence Revisited
“Revisiting Providence”
Matt. 6:25-34
by Rev. Everett Mendoza, D. Theol.
Introduction: The fundamental task of Christian theology is to give an orderly, consistent, comprehensible and credible account of the Christian faith according to God’s revelation in Jesus Christ as attested by the Scriptures. One of the most contentious theological teachings with complex pastoral implications is about divine providence. In traditional Christian doctrine, it refers to God’s sovereign rule over all things by which God sustains and directs creation as it moves towards its final consummation according to a pre-ordained divine plan. It also means that God causes every single thing to happen in life and in the world. In its basic biblical sense, however, it is about God’s unfailing care for the well-being of every creature.
In its historical development, the weight of interpretation has tilted more heavily on the side of God’s governance than on God’s care. The text from the Gospel of Matthew may serve as a corrective to this historical development and restore the original (biblical) and simple meaning of the teaching about divine providence.
The Text’s Pastoral Thrust
A first reading of the text easily shows its pastoral intent. It is addressed to hearers or readers who are constantly worried about daily survival: “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear” (6:25a). It reveals a particular kind of audience – those who are materially deprived and marginalized in society. It was not for the rich, who would not find the message of any value to their existence. For the poor, believing in God naturally involves material security and the assurance of the constancy of God’s concern for their material well-being. This is not a message for everybody but intended for those who worry about physical survival on a daily basis.
The message is misunderstood and misused when it is appropriated by the exploiting segment of society to soothe the discontent of the exploited poor about their situation. The admonition not to worry is not the same as not to be angry. The more appropriate response to involuntary or enforced poverty is to feel discontented and indignant. Mere worrying or being anxious about the situation is a generalized passive reaction to an objective external threat. It makes people helpless, if not paralyzed from making positive action. Jesus’ counsel is that instead of withdrawing into passivity and helplessness, they should actively seek God’s justice – “But seek [God’s] kingdom and his righteousness!” (6:33a); for in God’s reign of justice, “all these things will be given to you.” (6:33b).
God’s pastoral concern involves not only giving comfort to the troubled ones but also encouraging them to actively find solutions to their problems. Relief from misery, in particular the lack of life’s basic necessities, is not going to come to them delivered on a silver platter but has to be vigorously pursued. Mendicancy is incompatible with the message of God’s coming reign of justice. The poor are mistaken if they think that mere survival through alms given them by the rich is enough to be human. On the contrary, Jesus promised them abundant life. But the promise is also a challenge to obtain it by actively seeking the realization of God’s kingdom of justice.
God Cares for the Needy
Instead of living the day in anxiety over what to eat or wear, the people should live daily in the assurance that their daily needs are matters of great concern to God. They have learned from religion that those whom God favors he showers them with power and wealth. The priests say that those who are sorely lacking in life are like that because they exist outside God’s favored circle. God owns all the riches and powers of the world and distributes them to his favored ones. All their life they have been told that the poor don’t deserve God’s attention.
Jesus spoke of a God who is different from what religions say. He said that God even feeds the birds and clothes the grass (vv. 26-30). And they are more than birds and grass. They are persons created in God’s image. God is very much concerned that people have food and clothes and access to what make a decent human life. That is to say, their daily struggle for food and clothing is not outside of faith but, on the contrary, is God’s very own work in the world. Despite what religions say, the struggle of the poor for a decent life is not less than worship in the temple in the eyes of God. Seeking justice in order to enjoy the necessities of life is also doing the will of God. God is there with people in their daily struggle for life, even closer than those who are worshipping in the temple.
Divine Providence and the Poor
The notion of divine providence that attributes the distribution of wealth and power in society to God’s will is an invention of the dominant and exploiting classes. They justify their despotic rule as resembling God’s sovereign will. Having great wealth understood as divine reward to the so-called Elect is a Calvinistic nonsense derived from the Reformation’s historical alliance with revolting feudal princes and an emerging bourgeoisie. This understanding ascribes to God the very characteristic of the property-owning and privileged classes of the time. It is a reading of the gospel by the wrong social classes.
God’s governance over the whole creation should be seen as a function of God’s care for the needy rather than a justification for the existing order of things. God rules in order to ensure the triumph of God’s reign wherein the hunger for food and justice is fully satisfied. Divine providence means that God will see through the triumph of the cause of justice and freedom for the poor and oppressed.
Matt. 6:25-34
by Rev. Everett Mendoza, D. Theol.
Introduction: The fundamental task of Christian theology is to give an orderly, consistent, comprehensible and credible account of the Christian faith according to God’s revelation in Jesus Christ as attested by the Scriptures. One of the most contentious theological teachings with complex pastoral implications is about divine providence. In traditional Christian doctrine, it refers to God’s sovereign rule over all things by which God sustains and directs creation as it moves towards its final consummation according to a pre-ordained divine plan. It also means that God causes every single thing to happen in life and in the world. In its basic biblical sense, however, it is about God’s unfailing care for the well-being of every creature.
In its historical development, the weight of interpretation has tilted more heavily on the side of God’s governance than on God’s care. The text from the Gospel of Matthew may serve as a corrective to this historical development and restore the original (biblical) and simple meaning of the teaching about divine providence.
The Text’s Pastoral Thrust
A first reading of the text easily shows its pastoral intent. It is addressed to hearers or readers who are constantly worried about daily survival: “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear” (6:25a). It reveals a particular kind of audience – those who are materially deprived and marginalized in society. It was not for the rich, who would not find the message of any value to their existence. For the poor, believing in God naturally involves material security and the assurance of the constancy of God’s concern for their material well-being. This is not a message for everybody but intended for those who worry about physical survival on a daily basis.
The message is misunderstood and misused when it is appropriated by the exploiting segment of society to soothe the discontent of the exploited poor about their situation. The admonition not to worry is not the same as not to be angry. The more appropriate response to involuntary or enforced poverty is to feel discontented and indignant. Mere worrying or being anxious about the situation is a generalized passive reaction to an objective external threat. It makes people helpless, if not paralyzed from making positive action. Jesus’ counsel is that instead of withdrawing into passivity and helplessness, they should actively seek God’s justice – “But seek [God’s] kingdom and his righteousness!” (6:33a); for in God’s reign of justice, “all these things will be given to you.” (6:33b).
God’s pastoral concern involves not only giving comfort to the troubled ones but also encouraging them to actively find solutions to their problems. Relief from misery, in particular the lack of life’s basic necessities, is not going to come to them delivered on a silver platter but has to be vigorously pursued. Mendicancy is incompatible with the message of God’s coming reign of justice. The poor are mistaken if they think that mere survival through alms given them by the rich is enough to be human. On the contrary, Jesus promised them abundant life. But the promise is also a challenge to obtain it by actively seeking the realization of God’s kingdom of justice.
God Cares for the Needy
Instead of living the day in anxiety over what to eat or wear, the people should live daily in the assurance that their daily needs are matters of great concern to God. They have learned from religion that those whom God favors he showers them with power and wealth. The priests say that those who are sorely lacking in life are like that because they exist outside God’s favored circle. God owns all the riches and powers of the world and distributes them to his favored ones. All their life they have been told that the poor don’t deserve God’s attention.
Jesus spoke of a God who is different from what religions say. He said that God even feeds the birds and clothes the grass (vv. 26-30). And they are more than birds and grass. They are persons created in God’s image. God is very much concerned that people have food and clothes and access to what make a decent human life. That is to say, their daily struggle for food and clothing is not outside of faith but, on the contrary, is God’s very own work in the world. Despite what religions say, the struggle of the poor for a decent life is not less than worship in the temple in the eyes of God. Seeking justice in order to enjoy the necessities of life is also doing the will of God. God is there with people in their daily struggle for life, even closer than those who are worshipping in the temple.
Divine Providence and the Poor
The notion of divine providence that attributes the distribution of wealth and power in society to God’s will is an invention of the dominant and exploiting classes. They justify their despotic rule as resembling God’s sovereign will. Having great wealth understood as divine reward to the so-called Elect is a Calvinistic nonsense derived from the Reformation’s historical alliance with revolting feudal princes and an emerging bourgeoisie. This understanding ascribes to God the very characteristic of the property-owning and privileged classes of the time. It is a reading of the gospel by the wrong social classes.
God’s governance over the whole creation should be seen as a function of God’s care for the needy rather than a justification for the existing order of things. God rules in order to ensure the triumph of God’s reign wherein the hunger for food and justice is fully satisfied. Divine providence means that God will see through the triumph of the cause of justice and freedom for the poor and oppressed.
"Until the Rains Come on the Land": A Bible Study
“Until the Rain Comes on the Land”
I Kings 17: 7-16 (NIV)
Introduction: For some people, hunger is but a word, an image, a subject of discourse, a metaphor, a statistic. But for close to a billion a people on earth, it is an all-encompassing reality that dictates their waking and sleeping and shapes their faith. Nowhere in the Bible is hunger depicted more poignantly than in the story of the widow of Zarephath.
I
The widow, unnamed in the story, lived alone with her little son. Why was she widowed at a young age? Perhaps her husband succumbed to a hunger-related illness since it had been three years since rain last came upon the land. Or, maybe her husband died fighting in the war between Syrian King Benhadad and King Ahab of Israel that had ravaged the region. In coastal city of Sidon it was very hard for a family to survive without a working man.
Then, a hungry man, a prophet from another country named Elijah, came asking for food. She had no bread but a handful of flour and a little oil was left enough for one last meal for herself and her son. The man of God came at the very eve of her and her son’s death, she thought. For, she said, “I am gathering a few sticks to take home and make a meal for myself and my son, that we may eat it – and die.” What difference would it make, she thought, if she gave away their last meal to this stranger? A few hours less of living would even be a blessing for it would put an early end to her mental anguish. Could this thought have crossed the mother’s mind?
Another mother from another time and place – in year 2008 in Magdalena, Laguna – snapped. She poisoned her three small children and then herself. Her disconsolate husband, a part-time construction worker, blamed himself for his failure to provide for his family adequately. But he could not understand what had been going through his wife’s mind all those days when he was away from home trying to make some money to send home. Even when he had a job the money he sent was never enough. And when he had no work, it was his wife who had to worry what to feed the children. Instead of waiting for death to take them away, she ran into death’s embrace together with her children. She couldn’t bear watching her children take what could be their last meal.
II
The horrible reality of hunger whether it is a global phenomenon or suffered by only a few families may be considered the gravest challenge to the most universal of all religious claims: God’s providential care. God creates and sustains creation: “The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it” (Ps. 24:1). God also gives special care to the faithful: “The lions may grow weak and hungry, but those who seek the Lord lack no good thing” (Ps. 34:10). Jesus taught of a God who remembers and takes care of the daily needs of each and every creature (Matt. 6:25-34). But these claims fly in the face of the fact that hunger is a daily reality for many people everywhere since time immemorial.
Accordingly, the Christian faith rises or falls on how it deals with the global problem of hunger especially in the age when humankind has the means to eliminate it. However, the material and social problem of hunger does not become a problem of faith and theology for believers who don’t suffer from it. Having food on the table every single day is, for them, a sign of God’s blessings and favor that never fail to those who are faithful to God. When confronted with the fact that many other families in society do suffer from chronic hunger, the blame can be put to anyone but God. They may look at the situation as a case of sloth or stupidity on the part of the poor, failure or negligence of government to develop the economy, or social inequality and injustice. It is entirely a personal, economic or social problem, never a spiritual problem as though it is too trivial or mundane a thing to reach heaven.
But is it also a problem of faith to the victims and sufferers of hunger? This should be a more promising focus of theological investigation. When the non-hungry pray, “Give us this day or daily bread,” they don’t say it with seriousness as though their lives depend on it. But there is reason to assume that those who live precariously but have access to food on a day-to-day basis would regard daily prayer for food a life-line or as a matter of survival. Being able to survive for yet another day because somehow food can be found the next day would be proof that God answers prayer. Jesus’ advice that people of faith should not worry “about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself” (Matt. 6:34) resonated among them because its truth was verifiable by experience.
But what reason is there for those who are hungry with finality, those who face imminent death by starvation, like the widow of Zarephath to pray for daily bread? There is no other day to pray for. The parsimonious storyteller mentions not a word more to depict her plight in such a dramatic way: “I am gathering a few sticks to take home and make a meal for myself and my son, that we may eat it – and die.” She was (1) gathering firewood (2) to prepare a meal (3) for her and her son to eat (4) and die. There is no prayer said, no weeping, not even a complaint to God.
The gathering of firewood suggests a ritualistic preparation for death. A sense of finality hangs in the air. The ultimate contradiction – life versus death – is revealed as the woman stared at the life-giving dough and saw death staring back to her. How does one eat when it’s going to be the last? What is the existential universe of this woman at this point of her life? How does she remember the past? What does she see in the future? Does she think of God? If so, what questions does she have for God?
If we are able to divine her questions to God, would these be a proper subject of theological ruminations? And what do her thoughts about God say about our faith and the doctrines and teachings that have streamed from the church through the ages? Does her story confirm or deny our basic faith-understanding?
The Bible is a collection of testimonies about God. The testimonies vary in many ways but underlying all these is an unshakeable faith in the reality and availability of God in human experience. Indeed there are voices, like that of Job and Jeremiah that question some basic assumptions about God but in the end they affirm faith. This affirmation is subjectively experienced as faith, trust, and hope. Consequently, every part of the Scriptures has to be interpreted in a manner that further demonstrates the validity of believing, trusting and hoping in God.
Most probably the sermons and discourses on the story of the widow of Zarephath have been developed from the point of view of the biblical writer/redactor, that is, what he intended to convey to the readers. It’s his theology through Elijah, the main character, that readers learn and that expositors and preachers go on to articulate. The purpose, no doubt, is to demonstrate the constancy of God’s providential care and ultimate control of history. Now, at that very point when she was preparing the meal, was she contemplating on that truth – of the constancy of God’s providential care? Did she keep her faith and trust in God’s benevolence? I doubt it very much because she told Elijah that they were going to have their last meal and then die. Elijah’s intervention, of course, changed the whole picture since it was really meant to demonstrate the writer’s faith in God’s sovereign rule. But her story could have been the story of many other widows who didn’t get Elijah’s visit. They ate their last meal and died.
Two observations are worth noting. One, expositors and theologians have, in the main, remained fixated to the point of view of the biblical writers through the narrative’s main characters. As a supporting cast, the woman’s character cannot stand alone in the story. Her importance may be momentarily highlighted but only in so far as it supports or enhances Elijah’s role. Just as she was marginalized in real life, she is also marginalized in the story about her. This fixation prevents interpreters of Scriptures from really understanding the marginalized sectors in the audience or those whose concerns are not central to the main thrusts of the text. The tendency or habit to interpret the text within the parameters of the theology of the text in effect excludes people whose existence lies outside the theological horizons of the biblical writers. This observation points to the obvious fact that the Scriptures were written for those who were anything but starving widows and orphans.
And two, the Christian faith as interpreted by the church through history gets exposed as bereft of categories to deal with situations similar to the widow character. The church’s doctrines and teachings reflect the concerns of the church, including the worldly concerns of the faithful, but are not fed by questions of the kind that pertain to the widow. For example, faith, trust, hope which are the stuff that constitute Christian piety: they don’t mean a thing in so far as the widow is concerned. Consequently, the gospel or good news to the poor is being addressed to those who don’t really need it, and theological work and its products are all but irrelevant and uninspiring to people who daily face death due to hunger. Absolute hunger pushes a believer to an absolute crisis of faith to which Christian theology has absolutely nothing to offer.
In Christian theology, faith is evoked by the recognition of the offering of God’s grace. But when no grace is being offered how is faith possible? And if there is no faith, is theology possible? In the story of the widow of Zerephaph, the Bible tells of a moment in life when believing and hoping in God does not matter in the absolute sense of the word. This was the moment when she said, “I am gathering a few sticks to take home and make a meal for myself and my son, that we may eat it – and die.” In situations like that, when God withholds his grace (“until the day the Lord gives the rain on the land”), there can be no faith or hope in God.
Hunger as an absolute and terminal reality for a huge segment of humanity renders faith as understood in Christian theology irrelevant. Faith is the very content of theology, the subject and object of theological undertaking. But on the other hand, the reality of absolute hunger raises the possibility and necessity of a radically new kind of faith and a radically new way of doing theology.
III
The story of the widow of Zarephaph may offer a little window for a glimpse of the world of the absolutely hungry. Zarephath was a village located in the city of Sidon, a bustling Phoenician port city that thrived in international trade and in cottage industries. Unlike rural folks living on subsistence farming and so, absolutely dependent on the regular rhythm of seasons, city dwellers can rely on surplus created by commerce and industry. Perhaps, this is the reason why Elijah was sent to this place rather than to the remote countryside where there was nothing to eat due to the prolonged drought that hit the hill regions where the greater part of Israel settled. At this time also, Syria and Israel were locked in war. Although Sidon was not directly in the path of the two warring countries, it was situated within a triangle in the Canaanite region. For whatever reason – the famine or the war – her husband died leaving her a child who was too young to fill his father’s shoes as breadwinner. The family must have seen better times because although it was three years into the drought, there was still little flour and oil left. Elijah might not have been the first hungry person to come to her house, and people in other parts of Canaan might have heard of her generosity.
In this very dire circumstance, an impoverished widow and her little son are trying to survive under the shadows of realities not of her making and far beyond her comprehension – the ways of kings and merchants, and the ways of the gods. She didn’t benefit from the prosperity of the merchants, nor did she have a stake in the geopolitics of Syrian King Benhadad and King Ahab of Israel. And yet, she suffered under the circumstances created by them. It might have occurred in her mind that God also played a part in her situation. Men of God, like Elijah, had been saying that God was withholding rain from falling on the land as a punishment to rulers like Ahab who did evil and turned to other gods. But it was not the royal families but their poor subjects who bore the brunt of divine anger. She was a regular nobody only trying to raise a family. But it looked like kings and merchants and the gods were conspiring to get her husband killed first and now her and her son of hunger. Victims of men and of God.
There is an overwhelming sense of helplessness and inevitability, and bitterness, to the widow’s words as she spoke to Elijah, “I am gathering a few sticks to take home and make a meal for myself and my son, that we may eat it – and die.” She can’t complain or blame anyone not even God for her plight. It’s fate. Little people can’t fight against fate. And there’s nothing that Elijah can do about it because he is of a different world. He is after all part of those powers that rule the universe.
Actually, the widow’s view of the world is not merely a perception of the poor, the victims of hunger, but a reflection of their concrete reality. Fate is but a word for a sense of helplessness to change things and its inevitable ending – hunger, disease, death. For a peasant family, working all day long together with the children is never enough for their daily needs even though their needs are quite few and simple. The earth seems to be not as generous as before, the rains are not enough or sometimes too much and now fail to come in the right time. The merchants and money lenders tell them about the up and down movement of the market that’s why the prices of farm inputs have gone beyond their reach, while the prices of their products are not catching up. Armed men in uniform fire their guns at their houses in pursuit of other armed men then arrest their husbands and sons in the name of the law and upon orders of the general. In its ordinary meaning, fate implies the inevitability of a tragic end. They can’t stop it. They don’t understand. It is fate – life in constant hunger is unchangeable and its consequences, inevitable.
Is faith and theology possible here? If by faith is meant discerning God’s presence and activity in the world and trusting in God’s goodness and hoping for deliverance – the call to believe and hope is like telling people to burp when the stomach is empty. But perhaps, the sense of God’s self-imposed inactivity may be a context for the proclamation of the gospel as good news to the poor in which God-talk as theologians know it would be excluded. Theology’s subject would not be the faith of the church (doctrines) but rather the fate-bound worldview of those who suffer from involuntary hunger. It is not for God’s honor and glory that the gospel is preached to the poor anyway, but that they may have food. It goes without saying that theology should reexamine all its assumptions underlying the Christian faith. And it must develop a new language that is appropriate to a different set of purpose and tasks.
Owing to the very nature of faith’s discourse – theos + logos or God-talk – it is so easy for theology to fall into the mistake of ideologizing concrete historical realities to make them serve a faith commitment. By that is meant a subjective recasting of objective reality to make it serve a theological agenda – to illustrate church teachings, interpret historical facts in the framework of a doctrine of God or motivate people to conduct themselves according to church instructions. The human cause, no matter how noble, ends up being sacrificed to preserve bad practice and defend the authority of the church.
The story of the widow of Zarephath is about a gap in human existence wherein God does not act and people are left to their own devices to fend for themselves. Any kind of God-talk, therefore, is both unnecessary and futile. Here, faith would not be a source of hope because there is no help coming from heaven. In fact, it may only distract them from the doing what needs to be done given the circumstances. The divine lacuna is the time to see the world without God, where those who play God are unmasked and the forces that hold people in fate’s thrall are exposed. History is not anymore a drama depicting the acts of divine actors but the unfolding of lawful and meaningful forces and processes that are susceptible to human direction. The victims of the world must fight their battles to regain life and dignity without expecting any help from heaven. Fate can be overcome by employing human means and effort.
This is good news indeed to the poor, but is this good news the same gospel of Jesus Christ? Actually, it is a question that doesn’t interest the poor. After all, Jesus didn’t require those he healed of their illness to believe in him as the savior from heaven. For the man who got back his sight, all that he knew was that he was blind but now he could see (John 9:25). The questions bombarded him by the experts of the law were too complex for him to understand, much less to give answers. The poor, not the theologians, are the judge as to what is good news or gospel to them.
A theological discourse about a world where God does not act, or when God withholds divine favor begins with the process of removing God from the world and from history – without a sense of guilt or angst as in secular theology (Altizer’s death of God) or in existentialist theology but with a refreshing sense of liberation. This process, call it demystification, involves a re-conversion of acts of God in the world into acts of men. An inactive God cannot be held responsible for poverty and hunger in the world for they are products of human actions and of historical processes. For, unless liberated from the mystification of their mind, they would not come to recognize their freedom and have the confidence to know and confront the historical and social forces responsible for their fate. Fate is also a product of the mystification of the mind in which acts of men have metamorphosed into acts of God.
Unwittingly, liberation theology could have contributed to the reinforcement of the process of mystification. Liberation theologians have long argued that theology only starts at sundown, meaning, it is a reflection on what has taken place during the day (Juan Luis Segundo, A Theology of Liberation). But what started as a very this-worldly and scientific investigation of social and historical realities done during the day is turned into a divine and cosmic drama in the night wherein oppressive social structures reveal themselves as manifestations of sin and demonic sway, and liberation struggles identified as signs of God’s kingdom. The whole world of suffering and struggles is now seen as being bathed in the light of God’s plan of redemption for the whole creation. Despite its good intentions, liberation theology cannot escape from the inevitability of a theological pre-understanding and agenda. On the other hand, a theology where God is removed from the realities of poverty and hunger gives the victims full freedom to apply themselves upon the world in order to reclaim it. Not blaming God for their plight, they don’t wait for divine intervention, either.
There is no denying that theology is there to serve the church, but does it also serve the interest and cause of the poor and hungry? Or does it serve the people first and then the church, or vice versa? Jesus was reported to have said that the poor would be always there and so, can wait for their turn to be served. But in view of the sort of circumstance the poor are in, perhaps it would be more correct to say that the church would always be there while the hungry cannot wait to be served next. Theology must serve the people first and secondly the church. The proper task of theologians would be to de-theologize the people’s perception of their world, of their suffering and their struggle for a new world. It is a moment in history when they must do it alone without God.
Perhaps, when the day’s tasks are done – that is, when liberation and freedom will be have been won – the night is again a time to reflect on how God has led the people to the “promised land”. It would be a time to thank God for letting them achieve victory by their own power and strength. Faith would be a celebration of victory, not an opiate or an escape from misery. Faith, like love, is genuine when it is not mixed up with infantile dependency needs but reestablished by a new relationship based on mutual trust and affection and friendship.
And for those who seek to follow Jesus in the meantime, the question of faith is all about discipleship. In the midst of great human suffering the theological problem is not so much about God’s justice as this: what does it mean to stand before the widow watching her do her last duties in life? When there is nothing to be said and nothing that can be done, what does it mean for followers of Jesus who are not hungry to be there in the presence of other people who live in absolute and terminal hunger? In the story of the widow of Zarephath, Elijah shared her meal, her very last meal, which means sharing her fate. Taking the story as a metaphor, discipleship is none other than the act of sharing the fate of the hungry. In the context of hunger, following Jesus means sharing the people’s fate rather than sharing their faith to the people.
In order to be true to this kind of faith, theology may have to lose the language that it knows, or observe silence until a new language of faith will have been formed (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters from Prison). A new language will have to be learned from the praxis of fate-sharing. Practicing the cardinal virtues – faith, hope and love – would be the mark of Christian discipleship until the time to celebrate the triumph of justice, when “the Lord gives rain on the land.” Faith is practiced as the unwavering conviction that the cause of justice for the poor is worth the believer’s total commitment. Love is to be realized in the day-to-day suffering with and for the victims of injustice. And hope is the experience of joy, confidence and peace in the long journey towards the realization of a vision of vindication and fulfillment.
------------------------------------
Rev. Everett Mendoza, D. Theol.
Silliman Divinity School
17 October 2008
I Kings 17: 7-16 (NIV)
Introduction: For some people, hunger is but a word, an image, a subject of discourse, a metaphor, a statistic. But for close to a billion a people on earth, it is an all-encompassing reality that dictates their waking and sleeping and shapes their faith. Nowhere in the Bible is hunger depicted more poignantly than in the story of the widow of Zarephath.
I
The widow, unnamed in the story, lived alone with her little son. Why was she widowed at a young age? Perhaps her husband succumbed to a hunger-related illness since it had been three years since rain last came upon the land. Or, maybe her husband died fighting in the war between Syrian King Benhadad and King Ahab of Israel that had ravaged the region. In coastal city of Sidon it was very hard for a family to survive without a working man.
Then, a hungry man, a prophet from another country named Elijah, came asking for food. She had no bread but a handful of flour and a little oil was left enough for one last meal for herself and her son. The man of God came at the very eve of her and her son’s death, she thought. For, she said, “I am gathering a few sticks to take home and make a meal for myself and my son, that we may eat it – and die.” What difference would it make, she thought, if she gave away their last meal to this stranger? A few hours less of living would even be a blessing for it would put an early end to her mental anguish. Could this thought have crossed the mother’s mind?
Another mother from another time and place – in year 2008 in Magdalena, Laguna – snapped. She poisoned her three small children and then herself. Her disconsolate husband, a part-time construction worker, blamed himself for his failure to provide for his family adequately. But he could not understand what had been going through his wife’s mind all those days when he was away from home trying to make some money to send home. Even when he had a job the money he sent was never enough. And when he had no work, it was his wife who had to worry what to feed the children. Instead of waiting for death to take them away, she ran into death’s embrace together with her children. She couldn’t bear watching her children take what could be their last meal.
II
The horrible reality of hunger whether it is a global phenomenon or suffered by only a few families may be considered the gravest challenge to the most universal of all religious claims: God’s providential care. God creates and sustains creation: “The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it” (Ps. 24:1). God also gives special care to the faithful: “The lions may grow weak and hungry, but those who seek the Lord lack no good thing” (Ps. 34:10). Jesus taught of a God who remembers and takes care of the daily needs of each and every creature (Matt. 6:25-34). But these claims fly in the face of the fact that hunger is a daily reality for many people everywhere since time immemorial.
Accordingly, the Christian faith rises or falls on how it deals with the global problem of hunger especially in the age when humankind has the means to eliminate it. However, the material and social problem of hunger does not become a problem of faith and theology for believers who don’t suffer from it. Having food on the table every single day is, for them, a sign of God’s blessings and favor that never fail to those who are faithful to God. When confronted with the fact that many other families in society do suffer from chronic hunger, the blame can be put to anyone but God. They may look at the situation as a case of sloth or stupidity on the part of the poor, failure or negligence of government to develop the economy, or social inequality and injustice. It is entirely a personal, economic or social problem, never a spiritual problem as though it is too trivial or mundane a thing to reach heaven.
But is it also a problem of faith to the victims and sufferers of hunger? This should be a more promising focus of theological investigation. When the non-hungry pray, “Give us this day or daily bread,” they don’t say it with seriousness as though their lives depend on it. But there is reason to assume that those who live precariously but have access to food on a day-to-day basis would regard daily prayer for food a life-line or as a matter of survival. Being able to survive for yet another day because somehow food can be found the next day would be proof that God answers prayer. Jesus’ advice that people of faith should not worry “about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself” (Matt. 6:34) resonated among them because its truth was verifiable by experience.
But what reason is there for those who are hungry with finality, those who face imminent death by starvation, like the widow of Zarephath to pray for daily bread? There is no other day to pray for. The parsimonious storyteller mentions not a word more to depict her plight in such a dramatic way: “I am gathering a few sticks to take home and make a meal for myself and my son, that we may eat it – and die.” She was (1) gathering firewood (2) to prepare a meal (3) for her and her son to eat (4) and die. There is no prayer said, no weeping, not even a complaint to God.
The gathering of firewood suggests a ritualistic preparation for death. A sense of finality hangs in the air. The ultimate contradiction – life versus death – is revealed as the woman stared at the life-giving dough and saw death staring back to her. How does one eat when it’s going to be the last? What is the existential universe of this woman at this point of her life? How does she remember the past? What does she see in the future? Does she think of God? If so, what questions does she have for God?
If we are able to divine her questions to God, would these be a proper subject of theological ruminations? And what do her thoughts about God say about our faith and the doctrines and teachings that have streamed from the church through the ages? Does her story confirm or deny our basic faith-understanding?
The Bible is a collection of testimonies about God. The testimonies vary in many ways but underlying all these is an unshakeable faith in the reality and availability of God in human experience. Indeed there are voices, like that of Job and Jeremiah that question some basic assumptions about God but in the end they affirm faith. This affirmation is subjectively experienced as faith, trust, and hope. Consequently, every part of the Scriptures has to be interpreted in a manner that further demonstrates the validity of believing, trusting and hoping in God.
Most probably the sermons and discourses on the story of the widow of Zarephath have been developed from the point of view of the biblical writer/redactor, that is, what he intended to convey to the readers. It’s his theology through Elijah, the main character, that readers learn and that expositors and preachers go on to articulate. The purpose, no doubt, is to demonstrate the constancy of God’s providential care and ultimate control of history. Now, at that very point when she was preparing the meal, was she contemplating on that truth – of the constancy of God’s providential care? Did she keep her faith and trust in God’s benevolence? I doubt it very much because she told Elijah that they were going to have their last meal and then die. Elijah’s intervention, of course, changed the whole picture since it was really meant to demonstrate the writer’s faith in God’s sovereign rule. But her story could have been the story of many other widows who didn’t get Elijah’s visit. They ate their last meal and died.
Two observations are worth noting. One, expositors and theologians have, in the main, remained fixated to the point of view of the biblical writers through the narrative’s main characters. As a supporting cast, the woman’s character cannot stand alone in the story. Her importance may be momentarily highlighted but only in so far as it supports or enhances Elijah’s role. Just as she was marginalized in real life, she is also marginalized in the story about her. This fixation prevents interpreters of Scriptures from really understanding the marginalized sectors in the audience or those whose concerns are not central to the main thrusts of the text. The tendency or habit to interpret the text within the parameters of the theology of the text in effect excludes people whose existence lies outside the theological horizons of the biblical writers. This observation points to the obvious fact that the Scriptures were written for those who were anything but starving widows and orphans.
And two, the Christian faith as interpreted by the church through history gets exposed as bereft of categories to deal with situations similar to the widow character. The church’s doctrines and teachings reflect the concerns of the church, including the worldly concerns of the faithful, but are not fed by questions of the kind that pertain to the widow. For example, faith, trust, hope which are the stuff that constitute Christian piety: they don’t mean a thing in so far as the widow is concerned. Consequently, the gospel or good news to the poor is being addressed to those who don’t really need it, and theological work and its products are all but irrelevant and uninspiring to people who daily face death due to hunger. Absolute hunger pushes a believer to an absolute crisis of faith to which Christian theology has absolutely nothing to offer.
In Christian theology, faith is evoked by the recognition of the offering of God’s grace. But when no grace is being offered how is faith possible? And if there is no faith, is theology possible? In the story of the widow of Zerephaph, the Bible tells of a moment in life when believing and hoping in God does not matter in the absolute sense of the word. This was the moment when she said, “I am gathering a few sticks to take home and make a meal for myself and my son, that we may eat it – and die.” In situations like that, when God withholds his grace (“until the day the Lord gives the rain on the land”), there can be no faith or hope in God.
Hunger as an absolute and terminal reality for a huge segment of humanity renders faith as understood in Christian theology irrelevant. Faith is the very content of theology, the subject and object of theological undertaking. But on the other hand, the reality of absolute hunger raises the possibility and necessity of a radically new kind of faith and a radically new way of doing theology.
III
The story of the widow of Zarephaph may offer a little window for a glimpse of the world of the absolutely hungry. Zarephath was a village located in the city of Sidon, a bustling Phoenician port city that thrived in international trade and in cottage industries. Unlike rural folks living on subsistence farming and so, absolutely dependent on the regular rhythm of seasons, city dwellers can rely on surplus created by commerce and industry. Perhaps, this is the reason why Elijah was sent to this place rather than to the remote countryside where there was nothing to eat due to the prolonged drought that hit the hill regions where the greater part of Israel settled. At this time also, Syria and Israel were locked in war. Although Sidon was not directly in the path of the two warring countries, it was situated within a triangle in the Canaanite region. For whatever reason – the famine or the war – her husband died leaving her a child who was too young to fill his father’s shoes as breadwinner. The family must have seen better times because although it was three years into the drought, there was still little flour and oil left. Elijah might not have been the first hungry person to come to her house, and people in other parts of Canaan might have heard of her generosity.
In this very dire circumstance, an impoverished widow and her little son are trying to survive under the shadows of realities not of her making and far beyond her comprehension – the ways of kings and merchants, and the ways of the gods. She didn’t benefit from the prosperity of the merchants, nor did she have a stake in the geopolitics of Syrian King Benhadad and King Ahab of Israel. And yet, she suffered under the circumstances created by them. It might have occurred in her mind that God also played a part in her situation. Men of God, like Elijah, had been saying that God was withholding rain from falling on the land as a punishment to rulers like Ahab who did evil and turned to other gods. But it was not the royal families but their poor subjects who bore the brunt of divine anger. She was a regular nobody only trying to raise a family. But it looked like kings and merchants and the gods were conspiring to get her husband killed first and now her and her son of hunger. Victims of men and of God.
There is an overwhelming sense of helplessness and inevitability, and bitterness, to the widow’s words as she spoke to Elijah, “I am gathering a few sticks to take home and make a meal for myself and my son, that we may eat it – and die.” She can’t complain or blame anyone not even God for her plight. It’s fate. Little people can’t fight against fate. And there’s nothing that Elijah can do about it because he is of a different world. He is after all part of those powers that rule the universe.
Actually, the widow’s view of the world is not merely a perception of the poor, the victims of hunger, but a reflection of their concrete reality. Fate is but a word for a sense of helplessness to change things and its inevitable ending – hunger, disease, death. For a peasant family, working all day long together with the children is never enough for their daily needs even though their needs are quite few and simple. The earth seems to be not as generous as before, the rains are not enough or sometimes too much and now fail to come in the right time. The merchants and money lenders tell them about the up and down movement of the market that’s why the prices of farm inputs have gone beyond their reach, while the prices of their products are not catching up. Armed men in uniform fire their guns at their houses in pursuit of other armed men then arrest their husbands and sons in the name of the law and upon orders of the general. In its ordinary meaning, fate implies the inevitability of a tragic end. They can’t stop it. They don’t understand. It is fate – life in constant hunger is unchangeable and its consequences, inevitable.
Is faith and theology possible here? If by faith is meant discerning God’s presence and activity in the world and trusting in God’s goodness and hoping for deliverance – the call to believe and hope is like telling people to burp when the stomach is empty. But perhaps, the sense of God’s self-imposed inactivity may be a context for the proclamation of the gospel as good news to the poor in which God-talk as theologians know it would be excluded. Theology’s subject would not be the faith of the church (doctrines) but rather the fate-bound worldview of those who suffer from involuntary hunger. It is not for God’s honor and glory that the gospel is preached to the poor anyway, but that they may have food. It goes without saying that theology should reexamine all its assumptions underlying the Christian faith. And it must develop a new language that is appropriate to a different set of purpose and tasks.
Owing to the very nature of faith’s discourse – theos + logos or God-talk – it is so easy for theology to fall into the mistake of ideologizing concrete historical realities to make them serve a faith commitment. By that is meant a subjective recasting of objective reality to make it serve a theological agenda – to illustrate church teachings, interpret historical facts in the framework of a doctrine of God or motivate people to conduct themselves according to church instructions. The human cause, no matter how noble, ends up being sacrificed to preserve bad practice and defend the authority of the church.
The story of the widow of Zarephath is about a gap in human existence wherein God does not act and people are left to their own devices to fend for themselves. Any kind of God-talk, therefore, is both unnecessary and futile. Here, faith would not be a source of hope because there is no help coming from heaven. In fact, it may only distract them from the doing what needs to be done given the circumstances. The divine lacuna is the time to see the world without God, where those who play God are unmasked and the forces that hold people in fate’s thrall are exposed. History is not anymore a drama depicting the acts of divine actors but the unfolding of lawful and meaningful forces and processes that are susceptible to human direction. The victims of the world must fight their battles to regain life and dignity without expecting any help from heaven. Fate can be overcome by employing human means and effort.
This is good news indeed to the poor, but is this good news the same gospel of Jesus Christ? Actually, it is a question that doesn’t interest the poor. After all, Jesus didn’t require those he healed of their illness to believe in him as the savior from heaven. For the man who got back his sight, all that he knew was that he was blind but now he could see (John 9:25). The questions bombarded him by the experts of the law were too complex for him to understand, much less to give answers. The poor, not the theologians, are the judge as to what is good news or gospel to them.
A theological discourse about a world where God does not act, or when God withholds divine favor begins with the process of removing God from the world and from history – without a sense of guilt or angst as in secular theology (Altizer’s death of God) or in existentialist theology but with a refreshing sense of liberation. This process, call it demystification, involves a re-conversion of acts of God in the world into acts of men. An inactive God cannot be held responsible for poverty and hunger in the world for they are products of human actions and of historical processes. For, unless liberated from the mystification of their mind, they would not come to recognize their freedom and have the confidence to know and confront the historical and social forces responsible for their fate. Fate is also a product of the mystification of the mind in which acts of men have metamorphosed into acts of God.
Unwittingly, liberation theology could have contributed to the reinforcement of the process of mystification. Liberation theologians have long argued that theology only starts at sundown, meaning, it is a reflection on what has taken place during the day (Juan Luis Segundo, A Theology of Liberation). But what started as a very this-worldly and scientific investigation of social and historical realities done during the day is turned into a divine and cosmic drama in the night wherein oppressive social structures reveal themselves as manifestations of sin and demonic sway, and liberation struggles identified as signs of God’s kingdom. The whole world of suffering and struggles is now seen as being bathed in the light of God’s plan of redemption for the whole creation. Despite its good intentions, liberation theology cannot escape from the inevitability of a theological pre-understanding and agenda. On the other hand, a theology where God is removed from the realities of poverty and hunger gives the victims full freedom to apply themselves upon the world in order to reclaim it. Not blaming God for their plight, they don’t wait for divine intervention, either.
There is no denying that theology is there to serve the church, but does it also serve the interest and cause of the poor and hungry? Or does it serve the people first and then the church, or vice versa? Jesus was reported to have said that the poor would be always there and so, can wait for their turn to be served. But in view of the sort of circumstance the poor are in, perhaps it would be more correct to say that the church would always be there while the hungry cannot wait to be served next. Theology must serve the people first and secondly the church. The proper task of theologians would be to de-theologize the people’s perception of their world, of their suffering and their struggle for a new world. It is a moment in history when they must do it alone without God.
Perhaps, when the day’s tasks are done – that is, when liberation and freedom will be have been won – the night is again a time to reflect on how God has led the people to the “promised land”. It would be a time to thank God for letting them achieve victory by their own power and strength. Faith would be a celebration of victory, not an opiate or an escape from misery. Faith, like love, is genuine when it is not mixed up with infantile dependency needs but reestablished by a new relationship based on mutual trust and affection and friendship.
And for those who seek to follow Jesus in the meantime, the question of faith is all about discipleship. In the midst of great human suffering the theological problem is not so much about God’s justice as this: what does it mean to stand before the widow watching her do her last duties in life? When there is nothing to be said and nothing that can be done, what does it mean for followers of Jesus who are not hungry to be there in the presence of other people who live in absolute and terminal hunger? In the story of the widow of Zarephath, Elijah shared her meal, her very last meal, which means sharing her fate. Taking the story as a metaphor, discipleship is none other than the act of sharing the fate of the hungry. In the context of hunger, following Jesus means sharing the people’s fate rather than sharing their faith to the people.
In order to be true to this kind of faith, theology may have to lose the language that it knows, or observe silence until a new language of faith will have been formed (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters from Prison). A new language will have to be learned from the praxis of fate-sharing. Practicing the cardinal virtues – faith, hope and love – would be the mark of Christian discipleship until the time to celebrate the triumph of justice, when “the Lord gives rain on the land.” Faith is practiced as the unwavering conviction that the cause of justice for the poor is worth the believer’s total commitment. Love is to be realized in the day-to-day suffering with and for the victims of injustice. And hope is the experience of joy, confidence and peace in the long journey towards the realization of a vision of vindication and fulfillment.
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Rev. Everett Mendoza, D. Theol.
Silliman Divinity School
17 October 2008
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Parable of the Sower: A Poor Farmer’s View
A farmer went out to sow his seeds. As he was scattering the seeds, some feel through the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choke the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop – a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. Matthew 13:4-8.
The story is so familiar and common place that the disciples didn’t expect anything spectacular about it. For many pastors, including myself, the Parable of the Sower has long been over interpreted and overused such that no new meaning could possibly be squeezed out of it. Fewer passages in the Bible can be as unpromising as this one, not because it’s unimportant but because we have heard sermons on this again and again.
A marginal farmer who has not heard the parable before would ponder on the story as a story of his life. He would say the farmer in Jesus’ story was lucky that although some portions of his land were rocky and thorny a bigger portion was of good soil. That’s why he still had a good harvest – a hundred-, sixty- or thirty-fold. But in his experience, good lands are already owned by big landowners and cultivated with mechanized tools and with sufficient farm inputs. On the other, small farmers like him are left with the rocky and hilly portions and very thin topsoil. Every rainy day, the meager soil gets less and less as it is swept by the rushing floodwaters. That’s why they are getting poorer and their children even poorer than than parents.
I’m normally sensitive to social justice issues but I never ever thought of this parable as material for a social justice sermon. It sounds like this parable of Jesus is insensitive to the plight of poor farmers. It seems to be adding insult to injury – the rich farmer who controls the best portions of land is an example of Christian faithfulness, while the poor farmer who has to work hard on marginalized land is an example of a bad steward. No wonder the rich landowner has plenty of reasons to thank God for, while the marginal farmer can only thank God for keeping his family alive for yet another day of hunger and hard toil. I learned that their average yield for rice land is only about 25-30 cavans of palay per hectare, which is way below the needs of a family. And by the time of harvest a good part of that goes to the usurer. The merchant who advances the money gets to buy the harvest at two-thirds the market price. Cash is very hard to come by in the household of small farmers.
So when some agribusiness company owned by big-time capitalists like Herminio Teves come to offer them cash in exchange for planting tuba-tuba and balanghoy instead of corn and mongo beans, they jumped at the opportunity. For the farmers, land is life but it’s a very hard life and does not promise liberation from poverty. I learned that they were offered P160 daily wage and a promise of profit-sharing once the company makes money from bio-fuel production. The pay is not much for a family but it’s more than what they could expect from a day’s labor. It turned out that for P160 one has to plant a specified number of stems which will actually require four grown-up men to finish in three days. It’s like a good-news-bad-news thing – ang good news: adunay sweldo nga P160; ang bad news, dunay quota sa trabahoon nga maabot sa upat ka tawo nga magtrabaho balig tulo ka adlaw. So, a farmer has to involve his wife and children – the entire household for P160 in several days of work.
Against the backdrop of Jesus’ parable, it would seem that the bio-fuel company would make a better steward of the land because it can make the land produce a hundred-fold of harvest compared to what a poor farmer, who has no access to capital and agricultural inputs, can. Does God favor those who, having owned the best portions of the land, are able to produce more?
Most of the pastors in my informal clergy formation classes also do farming in order to support their families. In all of my professional life as a minister of the church, I never worried about making a living because I got regular salary at Silliman and I had a wife who did the worrying about meeting the family’s needs. So, it’s been easy for me to understand Jesus’ saying that one cannot serve both God and mammon. I could devote my time and energy to studying and interpreting the word of God. But in the case of our farmer-pastors, every week of the month they must serve God and also serve mammon. Or, they have to serve mammon in order to be able to serve God.
A reflection from these rural pastors on the parable reveals how they view themselves in relation to the more regular professional pastors. Some pastors, they say, are assigned to “good soil” – churches that have ample resources, educated, active and generous members and thoughtful of their pastor’s material needs. The choice churches are reserved for young and bright graduates of Silliman Divinity School.
But pastors like them who have not had formal education in seminaries are assigned to parishes that are like rocky and thorny land. In society, marginal lands are their portion. It’s the same when it comes to church assignment. This is the way things are in the UCCP. Not that they are complaining. I’m amazed that they don’t see any injustice here, maybe because they are used to the fact that life is not fair everywhere, not in society, neither in the church. They are simply stating the fact that parish assignments are like the parable of the sower – some pastors land in very favorable circumstances while others must thank the Lord simply for the privilege of sowing the gospel in stony and thorny soil. They believe that in the end God will demand of them what they have done to make productive their portion of rock-hard and thorny piece of earth. Their work won’t yield thirty-fold, fifty or even a hundred. But they hope that God would understand why their ministry has failed to bear fruit more than the ministry of pastors in Silliman Church or Dumaguete City Church.
This was what I heard from them … and I didn’t say a word. I had a mouthful to say to myself but nothing for them that would make sense and encourage them. On the bus going home, I kept asking myself what keeps them going and what makes Jesus’ Parable of the Sower meaningful to them. Why do they have a great love for the ministry of the church? Why do they submit to the teachings of the Bible like children, wholeheartedly and without complaint? Why aren’t they drawn to the lure of sects and cults that promise power and glory rather than stick with the UCCP?
Where can I find answers? From my own experience of 30 years in the ministry? From my research and years as theology professor at Silliman? From my associations with bishops and leaders of the church? From the Scriptures, from the parables of Jesus?
Maybe one of the reasons I keep going back to Mabinay is that I’m still looking for answers. Maybe their example of toil and sacrifices, often unrewarded, is what keeps me from giving up on the church. Perhaps, they are helping me to understand why Jesus chose his fate. Maybe they are teaching me how to read Jesus’ parables and what it means to follow him.
From my association with rural pastors, I’ve gained a little more understanding of Jesus and why he was rejected by the religious and civil authorities. Jesus learned the truths about the kingdom of God not from the experts – the scribes and the Pharisees – but from the poor farmers and fisherfolks of Galilee. Jesus taught us how to pray… “Our father…” “Give us this day or daily bread” – only the hungry poor pray for daily bread. “Forgive us our debts” – only those who are enslaved by indebtedness pray for release from debts. “Lead us not into temptation” – only those who have been tempted and stumbled, the sinners, pray for spiritual victory. Jesus also said that the kingdom of God is for those who are like children, and that prostitutes have better chances of entering the kingdom than the priests and teachers of the law.
Did Jesus hate the rich and the learned? It’s not that he hated this kind of people. It’s just that people can’t see the truths of God from the vantage point of those who enjoy the best that society can offer. Those who don’t know the pain of the abused, the loneliness of the grief-sufferer, the shame of the violated, or the humiliation of the poor are in no position to tell others who God is. Blessed are the poor, the hungry, the sorrowful, the persecuted, the grief-stricken, those who thirst for justice – for they shall find God!
Conclusion: In our advocacy of the poor in the countryside, we are sometimes chided by smart people for romanticizing the poor. This is a lot of crap. Let them spend a couple of nights in the home of a poor peasant family in the mountains of Negros and ask them in the morning what they mean by romanticizing the poor. On the contrary an encounter with the poor will expose us who we really are – our weakness in the face of hardship, our pretensions to intellectual superiority, the hollowness of our spirituality. And beyond that – a sense that we are all bundled up together in life, and a realization of God’s graciousness – a true conversion experience.
And we shall be called blessed as well. Amen.
The story is so familiar and common place that the disciples didn’t expect anything spectacular about it. For many pastors, including myself, the Parable of the Sower has long been over interpreted and overused such that no new meaning could possibly be squeezed out of it. Fewer passages in the Bible can be as unpromising as this one, not because it’s unimportant but because we have heard sermons on this again and again.
A marginal farmer who has not heard the parable before would ponder on the story as a story of his life. He would say the farmer in Jesus’ story was lucky that although some portions of his land were rocky and thorny a bigger portion was of good soil. That’s why he still had a good harvest – a hundred-, sixty- or thirty-fold. But in his experience, good lands are already owned by big landowners and cultivated with mechanized tools and with sufficient farm inputs. On the other, small farmers like him are left with the rocky and hilly portions and very thin topsoil. Every rainy day, the meager soil gets less and less as it is swept by the rushing floodwaters. That’s why they are getting poorer and their children even poorer than than parents.
I’m normally sensitive to social justice issues but I never ever thought of this parable as material for a social justice sermon. It sounds like this parable of Jesus is insensitive to the plight of poor farmers. It seems to be adding insult to injury – the rich farmer who controls the best portions of land is an example of Christian faithfulness, while the poor farmer who has to work hard on marginalized land is an example of a bad steward. No wonder the rich landowner has plenty of reasons to thank God for, while the marginal farmer can only thank God for keeping his family alive for yet another day of hunger and hard toil. I learned that their average yield for rice land is only about 25-30 cavans of palay per hectare, which is way below the needs of a family. And by the time of harvest a good part of that goes to the usurer. The merchant who advances the money gets to buy the harvest at two-thirds the market price. Cash is very hard to come by in the household of small farmers.
So when some agribusiness company owned by big-time capitalists like Herminio Teves come to offer them cash in exchange for planting tuba-tuba and balanghoy instead of corn and mongo beans, they jumped at the opportunity. For the farmers, land is life but it’s a very hard life and does not promise liberation from poverty. I learned that they were offered P160 daily wage and a promise of profit-sharing once the company makes money from bio-fuel production. The pay is not much for a family but it’s more than what they could expect from a day’s labor. It turned out that for P160 one has to plant a specified number of stems which will actually require four grown-up men to finish in three days. It’s like a good-news-bad-news thing – ang good news: adunay sweldo nga P160; ang bad news, dunay quota sa trabahoon nga maabot sa upat ka tawo nga magtrabaho balig tulo ka adlaw. So, a farmer has to involve his wife and children – the entire household for P160 in several days of work.
Against the backdrop of Jesus’ parable, it would seem that the bio-fuel company would make a better steward of the land because it can make the land produce a hundred-fold of harvest compared to what a poor farmer, who has no access to capital and agricultural inputs, can. Does God favor those who, having owned the best portions of the land, are able to produce more?
Most of the pastors in my informal clergy formation classes also do farming in order to support their families. In all of my professional life as a minister of the church, I never worried about making a living because I got regular salary at Silliman and I had a wife who did the worrying about meeting the family’s needs. So, it’s been easy for me to understand Jesus’ saying that one cannot serve both God and mammon. I could devote my time and energy to studying and interpreting the word of God. But in the case of our farmer-pastors, every week of the month they must serve God and also serve mammon. Or, they have to serve mammon in order to be able to serve God.
A reflection from these rural pastors on the parable reveals how they view themselves in relation to the more regular professional pastors. Some pastors, they say, are assigned to “good soil” – churches that have ample resources, educated, active and generous members and thoughtful of their pastor’s material needs. The choice churches are reserved for young and bright graduates of Silliman Divinity School.
But pastors like them who have not had formal education in seminaries are assigned to parishes that are like rocky and thorny land. In society, marginal lands are their portion. It’s the same when it comes to church assignment. This is the way things are in the UCCP. Not that they are complaining. I’m amazed that they don’t see any injustice here, maybe because they are used to the fact that life is not fair everywhere, not in society, neither in the church. They are simply stating the fact that parish assignments are like the parable of the sower – some pastors land in very favorable circumstances while others must thank the Lord simply for the privilege of sowing the gospel in stony and thorny soil. They believe that in the end God will demand of them what they have done to make productive their portion of rock-hard and thorny piece of earth. Their work won’t yield thirty-fold, fifty or even a hundred. But they hope that God would understand why their ministry has failed to bear fruit more than the ministry of pastors in Silliman Church or Dumaguete City Church.
This was what I heard from them … and I didn’t say a word. I had a mouthful to say to myself but nothing for them that would make sense and encourage them. On the bus going home, I kept asking myself what keeps them going and what makes Jesus’ Parable of the Sower meaningful to them. Why do they have a great love for the ministry of the church? Why do they submit to the teachings of the Bible like children, wholeheartedly and without complaint? Why aren’t they drawn to the lure of sects and cults that promise power and glory rather than stick with the UCCP?
Where can I find answers? From my own experience of 30 years in the ministry? From my research and years as theology professor at Silliman? From my associations with bishops and leaders of the church? From the Scriptures, from the parables of Jesus?
Maybe one of the reasons I keep going back to Mabinay is that I’m still looking for answers. Maybe their example of toil and sacrifices, often unrewarded, is what keeps me from giving up on the church. Perhaps, they are helping me to understand why Jesus chose his fate. Maybe they are teaching me how to read Jesus’ parables and what it means to follow him.
From my association with rural pastors, I’ve gained a little more understanding of Jesus and why he was rejected by the religious and civil authorities. Jesus learned the truths about the kingdom of God not from the experts – the scribes and the Pharisees – but from the poor farmers and fisherfolks of Galilee. Jesus taught us how to pray… “Our father…” “Give us this day or daily bread” – only the hungry poor pray for daily bread. “Forgive us our debts” – only those who are enslaved by indebtedness pray for release from debts. “Lead us not into temptation” – only those who have been tempted and stumbled, the sinners, pray for spiritual victory. Jesus also said that the kingdom of God is for those who are like children, and that prostitutes have better chances of entering the kingdom than the priests and teachers of the law.
Did Jesus hate the rich and the learned? It’s not that he hated this kind of people. It’s just that people can’t see the truths of God from the vantage point of those who enjoy the best that society can offer. Those who don’t know the pain of the abused, the loneliness of the grief-sufferer, the shame of the violated, or the humiliation of the poor are in no position to tell others who God is. Blessed are the poor, the hungry, the sorrowful, the persecuted, the grief-stricken, those who thirst for justice – for they shall find God!
Conclusion: In our advocacy of the poor in the countryside, we are sometimes chided by smart people for romanticizing the poor. This is a lot of crap. Let them spend a couple of nights in the home of a poor peasant family in the mountains of Negros and ask them in the morning what they mean by romanticizing the poor. On the contrary an encounter with the poor will expose us who we really are – our weakness in the face of hardship, our pretensions to intellectual superiority, the hollowness of our spirituality. And beyond that – a sense that we are all bundled up together in life, and a realization of God’s graciousness – a true conversion experience.
And we shall be called blessed as well. Amen.
The SONA
The SONA! That’s the only thing worth talking about from this corner today. It’s the last and final SONA of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo under what may be called the “Cory” Constitution. It is a fitting appellation since, if you recall, it was crafted not by delegates elected by the people but by men and women appointed by President Cory Aquino after EDSA 1. I find this bit of history pertinent today in that the Cory Constitution may be replaced with a GMA Constitution should her machinations to stay in power succeed.
But that’s not the point today. It’s about this last and final SONA of a president who will have sat in power for 3 years more than what is prescribed in the Constitution. The nation heard a supposedly farewell speech simmering with anger and spite against her enemies and detractors behind a composed face. But on national TV, the emotion showed perhaps intentionally and for a political purpose. However, gauged from reactions coming from both sides, it seems that none of them has seen the deeper psychological and political significance of her performance.
Finally, I believe, frustration and a sense of vulnerability have made a crack on her defenses. When a person who is under pressure loses his cool and becomes verbally abusive it means that he is losing control of the situation and fears getting overwhelmed. Reality has finally caught up with a president whose vast and peerless powers are feeding on an ambition that knows no bounds. This kind of behavior is really a reenactment of an infantile drive for omnipotence that should have been bound and buried deep in the unconscious once upon a time when she was a child. In some cases, however, some people never outgrow this infantile longing. Gloria Arroyo’s childhood in Malacaňang when her father was president, the special circumstances of her ascension to the presidency and her unprecedented success in bending the institutions of government to her favor could have been the context that has led to this kind of madness.
Perhaps, it is this infantile voice from her subconscious that told her not to bid farewell as Cory Aquino and Fidel Ramos did in their last SONAs. At the same time, she may now be bowing to the imperatives of reality and of her physical survival and that of her family. I have no doubt that Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is suffering from a tremendous inner conflict between her infantile longing for power, her instincts to survive and the political realities pressing down on her. That she has not cracked up yet is testimony to the stuff that she is made of.
What are the realities that she is facing? First, she cannot rely on a military that has no ideological bonding with her presidency. The feeling runs through the military establishment from top to bottom that she is merely buying the loyalty of the generals. In other words, there’s no way she can command the entire military to break the constitution or follow her unlawful orders. Second, church hierarchies have always been political opportunists – they would abandon a weakened leader especially one that has not shown moral ascendancy. Third, there is a revitalized traditional political opposition that is revving up for the upcoming election. Fourth, the business community is split down the middle and could easily unite against her. Fourth, an angry civil society has the potential of rallying the middle forces against her. Fifth, a large chunk of the masses are hungry, homeless and without work. And sixth, she won’t be able to get U.S. President Barrack Obama to support a naked power grab, not with a volatile Mindanao situation.
She wants it, but she simply can’t. The political opposition should focus now on winning the presidential and local elections next year. Still, civil society won’t have its moment in their goal to achieve political and economic reforms. In the meantime, the revolution of the dispossessed will go on, feeding on the continuing backwardness of society, a worsening human rights situation and riding on the rising aspirations of the rural and urban poor youth.
Good day everyone!
But that’s not the point today. It’s about this last and final SONA of a president who will have sat in power for 3 years more than what is prescribed in the Constitution. The nation heard a supposedly farewell speech simmering with anger and spite against her enemies and detractors behind a composed face. But on national TV, the emotion showed perhaps intentionally and for a political purpose. However, gauged from reactions coming from both sides, it seems that none of them has seen the deeper psychological and political significance of her performance.
Finally, I believe, frustration and a sense of vulnerability have made a crack on her defenses. When a person who is under pressure loses his cool and becomes verbally abusive it means that he is losing control of the situation and fears getting overwhelmed. Reality has finally caught up with a president whose vast and peerless powers are feeding on an ambition that knows no bounds. This kind of behavior is really a reenactment of an infantile drive for omnipotence that should have been bound and buried deep in the unconscious once upon a time when she was a child. In some cases, however, some people never outgrow this infantile longing. Gloria Arroyo’s childhood in Malacaňang when her father was president, the special circumstances of her ascension to the presidency and her unprecedented success in bending the institutions of government to her favor could have been the context that has led to this kind of madness.
Perhaps, it is this infantile voice from her subconscious that told her not to bid farewell as Cory Aquino and Fidel Ramos did in their last SONAs. At the same time, she may now be bowing to the imperatives of reality and of her physical survival and that of her family. I have no doubt that Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is suffering from a tremendous inner conflict between her infantile longing for power, her instincts to survive and the political realities pressing down on her. That she has not cracked up yet is testimony to the stuff that she is made of.
What are the realities that she is facing? First, she cannot rely on a military that has no ideological bonding with her presidency. The feeling runs through the military establishment from top to bottom that she is merely buying the loyalty of the generals. In other words, there’s no way she can command the entire military to break the constitution or follow her unlawful orders. Second, church hierarchies have always been political opportunists – they would abandon a weakened leader especially one that has not shown moral ascendancy. Third, there is a revitalized traditional political opposition that is revving up for the upcoming election. Fourth, the business community is split down the middle and could easily unite against her. Fourth, an angry civil society has the potential of rallying the middle forces against her. Fifth, a large chunk of the masses are hungry, homeless and without work. And sixth, she won’t be able to get U.S. President Barrack Obama to support a naked power grab, not with a volatile Mindanao situation.
She wants it, but she simply can’t. The political opposition should focus now on winning the presidential and local elections next year. Still, civil society won’t have its moment in their goal to achieve political and economic reforms. In the meantime, the revolution of the dispossessed will go on, feeding on the continuing backwardness of society, a worsening human rights situation and riding on the rising aspirations of the rural and urban poor youth.
Good day everyone!
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