The gentle Christ

There are traditional depictions of Jesus in local culture. Jesus Nazareno is the Christ carrying his cross. The carrozas of Lent include icons of him behind the whipping post or as a half naked king of ridicule sitting on a throne contemplating humanity, his and ours. Then there is the Christ’s dead body before his burial. It is often encased in glass. Always the face shows his gentleness.

The local culture has a disaffinity for an angry judgmental Christ. This is understandable considering we had been a colonized culture now worshiping the God of the colonizer. And who can deny how we suffered through those times? We relate to Christ’s Passion the way we do because of that suffering. We share something with and of the suffering Savior.

And so we think of him as a man bringing light into the dark world, a man walking through hills and boondocks speaking to his people and showing them the way out of their suffering. This image appeals to us for what must be historical reasons. Our past is marked by much suffering since the time of the revolution although not all of us of the current generation remember it that way. We should.

It will be to our loss if we do not remember well the Katipunan revolt, the Philippine-American War, the Second World War and the period of martial law. All these have been dark periods of our history, times of devastation after which we had to work at recovery and salvation. And it might be said we found for ourselves a Savior because we needed to.

We searched for Him who would save us. And if it turned out he was the Savior also of our colonizers we did not mind. It only made perfect sense. It was not in our nature to blame our suffering on them who lorded over us. Our suffering was fate resulting from the inevitable human condition, or so most of us believed. They were only occurrences coming in due course because of wars we did not fully understand. The wars were always bigger than us, staged by men more powerful who came from far away. They were not native by any means.

But we could at least pray to  a God. And he was a God who did not represent an historical break from our past, gods being as they are, eternal. And he has been here with us for hundreds of years. And the culture itself has transformed him into a God more to its liking. He is the God of our collective imagining, a gentle and loving God.

And so it is only right that he is a God who suffers as we do. We love him best this way, looking at us after he had been whipped, falling on one knee as he carries his cross, sitting like a fallen deluded king on a fool’s throne, and finally, as a dead body on a bed of flowers.

And yet, even this way, he is not for us a defeated man. We love him this way for things which are not in the icons themselves. We love him for the hope he gives us, the promise of waking from our suffering into a better world.

And so we have the image of the risen Christ. It is not as popular as the others. And one may well understand why given our current condition. Do we think of salvation only as a fact that comes after death?

It is high time we signaled a quality change of faith. The gentle Christ did not mean for us to think this way. By working for a better world for all of us including the poor we find redemption in much the same manner Christ showed us by  his sacrifice on the cross and by rising again not in Heaven but back into this world. It will be healthy for us to think of our religion in the spirit of the resurrection. The religion itself rises up from where it was into a better world as Jesus did.