The Gardener gave the following address at the July 1, 2014 Seminar Session
(8 a.m. to 12 noon) at the NCCP Building, Edsa, Quezon City
Brothers and Sisters in the National Council of Churches of Korea, and Brothers and sisters all in the National Council of Churches of the Philippines:
PART 1
You must agree with me that the topic you assigned me this morning to discuss – “From Knowing the Root of the Problem to Doing God’s Mission in the Philippines” – is quite a mouthful.
If you agree, please join me now in prayer for just a little bit that we be given grace to really listen to each other and feed one another with words of life and joy for our common journey.
I should like to start in part at the second portion of our topic, “Doing God’s Mission in the Philippines.” What is that mission? What would it mean to be a Christian in the Philippines or anywhere else, essentially speaking?
Centuries ago, Christian thinkers talked of “faith seeking understanding”; Filipino activists in their time affirmed as well “faith seeking action.” In this they were mindful of Jesus’ unequivocal line as to who could enter the Kingdom of Heaven: “not he who says to me Lord, Lord! But he who does the will of my father who is in heaven…”
Recognizing that there are different ways of carrying out the same mission in God’s Kingdom, our activists aimed to rise to a heightened awareness that their peculiar task was that of renewing the temporal order in the Light of the Word and the Spirit of grace: yes, the temporal order, the material conditions of existence, the concrete circumstances incarnating the Word – the messy world of economics, politics, and culture. Their faith would be one that sought to transform life or it was no faith at all; it was one that sought good works, or it was dead at start.
The major living faiths are all one in identifying the most profound essence of religion and that is the love of God above all and of neighbor as oneself. Either you love God, yourself, your neighbor and all of creation or you love no one, nothing.
But if love is the essence of religion, it is important to ask: What is the test of love? In other words, how do we know that we truly love our neighbor – that was and ever is the question. Do we think we truly love our neighbor only when we feel ecstatic in her or his presence? No, the real test of love is how much we are willing to sacrifice, even to get hurt for the person we love.
A friend of yours can go up to your house one evening and say, “Friend, if you love me, can you pray for me?” I am sure you won’t hesitate to answer, “Of course, friend, how many Our Fathers do you want?”
Or a friend could go up to your house one evening and say, “Friend, if you love me, could you give me some advice? You see, I have a big problem. My wife left me.” Again, you’ll probably not hesitate to answer: “Surely, please sit down, let me make some coffee and you can benefit from my wisdom the whole night through.”
But if a friend goes up to your house one evening and say: “Friend, if you love me, can you give me ten thousand pesos?” The chances are this might be the beginning of the end of love. For your friend is asking for money and money hurts.
The Good Samaritan
Jesus really knew how to test human nature, for when someone asked him “what is the test of love,” he answered, as usual, in the form of a story, describing the test in terms of money.
So, there was this lawyer who wanted to be clever and asked Jesus: “What is the test of love? How should I Iove my neighbor?” In biblical terms, “who is my neighbor?”
We know the story-answer of Jesus but let us look at it again. A traveller was attacked by robbers, and as he lay dying on the wayside, a priest passed by. You won’t disagree with me when I say that the priest must have felt pity for the victim. Whose heart though as hard as stone would not break on seeing a man half-dead? And so, out of pity, the priest may have prayed for the victim although the Bible does not clearly so state. Or he may have even given the victim precious advice, like stooping down and saying, “Be careful next time.” But after that, he just went to the other side of the road and passed on.
Next a Levite came. Like the priest before him, this religious person also passed on – as if he had not seen the victim at all: “dedma” we say in the most current Tagalog.
Then came the Samaritan – an outcast in the society of Jesus’ time. The Bible does not state whether he prayed for the victim or gave him advice. What is emphasized is that he attended to the physical and material needs of his neighbor, brought him to the inn, stayed with him for one night, and the next morning gave some money to the innkeeper and said: “Please take care of this man for I have to go; but if there should be more expenses, I shall pay.”
So now, the lawyer had asked, “What is the test of love?” And Jesus’ answer was/is dramatically clear: “If there should be more expenses, I shall pay.”
The answer to a spiritual question is in material terms– in terms of action against hunger, and sick people and misery. He does not say anything against the devotional aspects of religion for these could be a big help in cultivating feelings of love in our heart but he certainly focuses action in terms of our material condition. Look at the life of Jesus, how he got in trouble with the “institutional church” of his time, as he focused on going around doing good to manifest to people the true nature of his heavenly father (“Abba”) and to spread around the kingdom of heaven (“Basileia tou theou”).
Final Test
And just to be sure no one misunderstands this focus on faith needing action or love being tested in the material conditions of existence, Jesus made a cinemascopic presentation of humanity’s final exam – the last judgment day.
On that day, Christ the King will gather all people: some he will place on his right and others on his left. The biblical text is known to all. Addressing the right, he says: “Come, take possession of the Kingdom…” The interesting part is that Christ the King, like a good judge, will give the reasons for his judgments. He will say why some people are coming to his Kingdom, and why others are not. He will give six reasons and these must be the principal reasons; or why would he mention them and not the others.
He will not say: “Come, because in your lifetime on Earth you prayed so many times a day and you went to Liturgy twice on Sundays,” although, as already said, it is quite important to pray as Christ prayed. Nor will he say: “Come to heaven, because in your lifetime you became Miss Universe or the President of the Philippines or the Cardinal Archbishop of Manila,” although clearly it may not be bad to become Miss Universe or Philippine President or Cardinal Archbishop of Manila.
Rather, he will say: “Come, because I was hungry and you fed me, thirsty and you gave me drink, naked and you clothed me, sick and you visited me, imprisoned and you came to me, a stranger and you took me in.”
If feeding the hungry is the principal reason for going to heaven, the principal form of sanctification, we must now ask – how do you feed hungry persons? Your answer can take many forms like fighting for agrarian reforms and food security, working for better credit facilities and production technologies, helping out in marketing arrangements and in proper social welfare dispensations and fighting what they call corruption as this takes away much of what could have gone toward financing the solution of feeding millions of hungry people.
Clothing the naked is a principal reason for going to heaven, a principal form of sanctification. Question: with what do we clothe a naked person? Obviously with textile, and how much does textile cost? So, again we see that this business of sanctification is truly a worldly business, impinging on finance and economics and other disciplines and activities affecting the material conditions of human existence.
Conversely, Christ the King gives six reasons why other people are not coming in to his Kingdom: “Depart from me, for I was hungry and you did not feed me, thirsty and you did not give me drink, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and you did not visit me, imprisoned and you did not come to me, a stranger and you did not take me in.”
Christ the King as judge is very consistent, indeed: if feeding the hungry is in itself a justifying-sanctifying act, conversely, not feeding the hungry when one can, must be unjust, for only the unjust will miss out on his Kingdom. True Christianity is admittedly demanding and positive. We are condemned not so much for what we do but for what we failed to do.
Thus, there just may be a lot of discussion on last judgment day. For a few might dare to say, “Lord, I was a Bishop or a great preacher in my lifetime…” And the Lord will answer, “Amen, I say to you, I know you not! In your lifetime the most urgent problem causing mass hunger was social injustice – feudal landlordism and capitalist usury. This was definitely a moral question. But you the moral leader chose to be silent in cowardice. You were more concerned with the contributions of the exploiters and with maintaining their friendship. I was hungry because of that unjust system, and you did not feed me…”
And there will be a lot of surprises on that final exam day with individuals asking when they did or did not give food to the hungry and drink to the thirsty. And Christ the King is quite clear: “What you did or did not do even to the least of my brethren, you did or did not do to me.”
What we do to the people or against them, we also do to Christ or against him.
So we in the Lay Society of St. Arnold Janssen, for instance, have taken it upon ourselves to promote the full integration of faith with secular behaviour and build a good society where responsible citizenship is the norm, good governance prevails, poverty is eradicated, and the environment is protected. This is what we mean by Faith Transforming Life: it is mere Christianity, as one great author put it, more often anonymous than explicit, but always evidencing the authenticity of love in one’s heart. Love is at the very core of our being.
We therefore freely choose to act it out – like the Good Samaritan, like the people who got it right for last judgment day.
With that I shall now confess that I cannot resist the temptation to immediately quote from a very popular or even probably very controversial man who recently wrote the following:
As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved … no solution will be found for the world’s problems or, for that matter, to any problems. [For]Inequality is the root of social ills.” (Pope Francis in Evangelii Gaudium, 202)
“We can no longer trust in the unseen forces and the invisible hand of the market.
Growth in justice requires more than economic growth, while presupposing such growth: it requires decisions, programmes, mechanisms and processes specifically geared to [three:] a better distribution of income, the creation of sources of employment and an integral promotion of the poor which goes beyond a simple welfare mentality.” (ibid. 204)
So, there in a nutshell is our topic.
But how does one go to the root of the problem? What problem?
Allow me to take you now to what the 1960s often termed “social analysis”. This refers to studying a society’s economy, before anything else; then the politics that economy engenders; and next, the cultural assumptions reflecting that society’s material foundations and power relations. (Go to Part II)