Faith on the Cross

Another testimony to the faith of Jesus is his cry on the cross. Read Mark 15:33-39. According to Jürgen Moltmann ("The Crucified God," 1974), a political theologian whose "Theology of Hope" (1964) inspired some of the first-generation liberation theologians, the last words of Jesus in the passion stories of Mark and Matthew indicate that Jesus died as a Godforsaken man, a man who deeply felt abandoned by God.
The cry of Jesus on the cross (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”) indicates that he died not only as somebody abandoned by his disciples and friends and rejected by the chief priests. He died also as a Godforsaken man. In his final moments, Jesus did not see any sign of the mercy of the Father. Jesus felt forsaken by God; this was probably the gravest challenge to his faith. This was his last temptation.
Jesus died “with a loud cry” (15:37). This loud cry evokes the cry of a demoniac at the moment when the demon is cast out in Mark’s gospel (1:26, 9:26). This suggests that Jesus experienced demonization while he was on the cross. Indeed he was being demonized as passers-by were insulting and mocking him. And he was also being demonized by his deep feeling of abandonment. Jesus died without receiving any relief from the terrible isolation he felt. An ancient version of the Apostle’s Creed says that Jesus descended “to hell” (ad inferna). His final moments were hellish indeed.
The death of Jesus as a Godforsaken man does not mean that he died in despair or that his faith collapsed in his final moments. Jesus died with the terrible feeling of being abandoned by God, and yet he held on in his trust without the consolation of feeling the presence of the merciful Father, who was hidden and silent. Jesus was able to hold on because his faith had grown so much throughout his life.

The faith of the crucified Jesus was already tried and tested in the temptations and challenges he encountered especially during his public ministry. Thus, after the compassionate Father vindicated and glorified him, Christ can be in solidarity with godforsaken men and women, those who are abandoned by family and friends, those who are abandoned by society, and those who feel abandoned by God.

The cry of Jesus reproduces the first line of Psalm 22, which ends with lines that praise God (vv 22-31). It is highly probable that Jesus knew the whole of Psalm 22. Thus, if he indeed cried out its first line, he most likely was affirming the message of the whole psalm. In preserving his trust despite the intense feeling of being forsaken, Jesus has shown that he is a faithful servant of God, a True Man of Great Faith and the True Believer in the Merciful Father.

The Faith of Jesus

Jesus practised deep faith throughout his life and shared his faith with his disciples with the duty to guard, develop, and share it from generation to generation.
To speak of the faith of Jesus might strike some Christians as strange or surprising. How can we speak of Jesus’ faith if, as the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, he knows the Father fully?

According to some medieval theologians, Jesus was enjoying the beatific vision, the happy and heavenly vision of God, already from the first moment of his conception. In this case, throughout his public ministry and during his trial and execution, were his physical and psychological struggles real or were they only instances of play-acting?

Let us take a look at the testimony of the New Testament. We begin with the story of the healing of the boy with a deaf-mute spirit in Mark 9:16-29. For John Meier ("A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus," vol. 2, 1994), this particular exorcism most probably goes back to the Jesus of history, for there are some remarkable differences between this story and the other exorcism stories.

First, this is the only exorcism in Mark's gospel which refers to the failure of the disciples to perform the requested exorcism. Earlier in this gospel, Jesus already gave the Twelve authority over unclean spirits, and then they themselves performed exorcisms (Mk 6:7,13). Jesus wagered on his disciples, and empowered them to partially actualize God’s Rule even before they seemed ready for it.

The second remarkable aspect is the almost clinical nature of the detailed description of the boy’s affliction. According to Meier, it seems that the boy suffered some form of epilepsy. The third remarkable aspect is the absence of christological titles in the story. Jesus is referred to as “teacher.”

Fourth, the story makes reference to the faith of Jesus. In this story, the one who believes, the one who has faith is no other than Jesus himself. His powerful deed is based on faith, his faith. The boy was healed through his prayer. The story implies that Jesus acts and heals with the power that comes from faith. Jesus is the True Man of Great Faith.
(An interesting insight from the story concerns the unclean spirit that hindered speech. It was a spirit so painful that it was causing the boy to throw himself into fire. According to some psychologists, being unable to express adequately raw emotions is a major cause of violence to oneself or to others. As William Blake [1757-1827] put it:

“I was angry with my friend: I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe: I told it not, my wrath did grow.” Thus, to prevent people from expressing their feelings is to push them closer to acts of violence. Pastoral agents ought to help plain folks especially the poor to express themselves and assert their rights.)
Another New Testament reference to the faith of Jesus is in the Letter to the Hebrews 12:2, which calls Jesus “the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.” This letter presents Jesus as the first-born in our faith, the first to have lived fully in seeking the will of God. Jesus cannot be described as the pioneer of our faith if he himself did not practise great faith. Now, what is faith?
According to Heb 11:1, “faith is the substance of what we hope for, and the admission of what we do not see.” Now, if Jesus were the pioneer of our faith, and if he were the best model of a man of faith, this implies that there were at least some stages in his life in which he made a personal decision to believe in some things that he himself did not fully see.
We read in Heb 5:7-8: “During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. Although he was a son, he learned obedience from what he suffered.” Jesus learned to trust, to believe, and to obey God. The faith of Jesus was a process of learning to trust. Just as Jesus developed physically, his faith also went through a process of development. As Luke puts it in 2:52, “Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and people.”
The development process that Jesus underwent could have included experiences of conversion, a radical change in his expectations or outlook. For example, why did Jesus submit to John’s baptism “for the forgiveness of sins” (Mk 2:4)? Perhaps it was the example and preaching of John which helped Jesus to recognize the sinfulness of their society, the sinfulness of the guardians of the tradition, and the inability already of the temple system to be a medium for the forgiveness of sins.
John turned his back on his filial duty to become a priest, and he turned his back on the temple system itself, for he did not require those who came to be baptized for forgiveness to go to the temple afterwards to offer the traditional sin-offering of an unblemished female goat or lamb to be sacrificed (Leviticus 4:27-35). Furthermore, John called the Pharisees and Sadducees a “brood of vipers” (Matthew 3:7).
John’s preaching sensitized Jesus to feel the reality of repressed public guilt, which was an effect of sinful social structures. Jesus felt the weight of the public guilt even though, in the Christian view, he himself had no share in the blame for it. His distressing experience of collective guilt might have prompted him to submit to John’s baptism.

John converted Jesus to the belief that God’s Kindom was near and that their society was sinful. Later, Jesus experienced perhaps a second conversion when he decided to pursue his own prophetic ministry in which he, unlike John, emphasized the joy of salvation in a Kindom that was already partially present. Also, Jesus did not reproduce the ascetic life-style of John (see Luke 7:33-34).

The faith of Jesus developed through a process of interaction with various persons from whom he would learn new things. For example, read the story of Jairus’ daughter, who was twelve years old, and the unnamed woman who had a twelve-year hemorrhage in Mk 5:21-43. A feminist christologist, Rita Nakashima Brock ("Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power" [1992] pp.83-84), writes:

"Both females are afflicted with crises associated with the status of women in Greco-Roman and Hebraic society. The adult woman is sick with one of the most polluting signs of female adulthood [see Lev 15:19-30]. The adolescent is on the threshold of a similar curse, puberty. The woman has suffered with bleeding for exactly the same period of time it has taken Jairus’ daughter to reach the official age of puberty and marriageability--twelve years. The woman’s hemorrhage is the affliction of adult women in magnified form; she bleeds endlessly and is perpetually polluting. The authorities, the physicians, have left her poor and sick. They cannot help her disease because the ordinary social structures cannot help her. They are part of her problem....She suffers from her very femaleness. The social structures also interfere with Jesus’ ability to help her because he is a Jewish man. He is not even able to see her. She is invisible to him, lost in the protective maze of his disciples.
"The woman is, nonetheless, determined to be whole. She is able to acknowledge, from the depths of herself, her heart, her desperate need to be healed, to be restored to right relationships. Her heart opens the space for erotic power to surface. She summons the courage to violate a patriarchal social taboo. Though an unclean woman, she touches Jesus in public....In the touching, she is, literally, saved, not just cured in a medical sense, but saved. Her courage in violating a taboo has made her whole."

After Jesus kept looking for the one who touched him, the healed woman, despite her fear, showed herself and acknowledged what she did. Thus, she reaffirmed that she believed that her action, her violation of a patriarchal taboo, was the right thing to do. Jesus responded: “Daughter, your faith has healed you.” He disregarded the fact that he was rendered “unclean” by the touch of an “unclean” woman.
The encounter with the courageous woman taught Jesus a lesson. Afterwards, he could fully appreciate what ails Jairus’ daughter: she was dying because she had begun menstruating and she could not accept the following consequences: she was considered “unclean” and should not be touched, and she knew that her childhood had ended and she could soon be given in marriage perhaps to somebody she did not even know. She was dying, as she was losing respect for her body and her very self. Perhaps she became catatonic in her trauma. Jesus brought her back to life when he touched her (“he took her by the hand”) and helped her to stand up, to be free from shame and self-rejection, and to feel at home with her body.

The deep faith of Jesus developed through a process that not only involved close interaction with the unwashed and the “unclean” but also involved struggles against temptation. According to Heb 4:15: “We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are--yet was without sin.” Again, Heb 2:18 says: “Because Jesus himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.”
The deep faith of Jesus was formed in the midst of struggle, the struggle against temptation, and the struggle to respond to the challenges of his times. Thus, when we are tempted, when we are struggling, when we are suffering, Christ can truly help us for he understands fully what it means to struggle, to suffer, and to be tempted.

Plus 2 Years of Quality Education?

The National Book Development Board can help the Department of Education in prescribing the guidelines in preparing the minimum learning competencies and other specifications for the public school textbooks to be used for the additional 2 years of the basic education cycle announced by Pres. Noynoy Aquino and Sec. Armin Luistro, FSC.
If one additional year would mean restoring Grade 7 to elementary education, then I personally propose that the DepEd with the NBDB begin by looking at the learning competencies targeted by reputable private schools that do have Grade 7.
I do hope that the effort that the DepEd will exert to formulate the curiculum and to mobilize the resources for the additional 2 years will be at least equally matched by the effort to ensure that "every child is a reader by Grade 3" and to raise the mean percentage score of the National Achievement Test (NAT) of prospective graduates of Grade 6 to at least 75%.
As of now, many public school children beyond Grade 3 still cannot read and understand a simple paragraph. The NAT mean percentage score, which was 55% when the NAT started in 2002, has improved through the years to 66.33% in 2009, but this is still below the minimum for what can qualify for "mastery" of the targeted learning competencies which is 75%.
Without ensuring the delivery of quality education especially in the current 6 years of elementary education, the additional 2 years would likely result in the lengthening and reinforcement of mediocrity which would mean a great deal of waste of public resources and taxes.

Bureaucratic Reform Opportunity

With his high trust ratings, Pres. Noynoy Aquino has the political capital to pursue the streamlining and reform of the bureaucracy at least of the Executive branch of government. If he will seize the opportunity, the clear and ultimate target of bureaucratic reform should be the significant and sustainable reduction of rural and urban poverty in the short and medium terms. Thus, any reform should raise efficiency in, and free more resources for, the delivery of basic services in primary health care, disease prevention, basic education, and agricultural and entrepreneurship development.
Bureaucratic reform should preserve also the capability of the State to practice its core competencies: ensure peace and order, administer justice, set monetary policy, ensure territorial integrity and security, practice diplomacy and pursue beneficial international relations.
Outside of its core competencies and poverty-reduction programs, State activities should be tantamount to “steering” and not “rowing,” or the creation of an enabling and regulatory environment for the private sector to do the “rowing” in providing goods and services to the public especially where the private sector is more efficient in doing so.
Any bureaucratic reform should respect the right of government workers to protection against unemployment. Any reform that cannot avoid job losses should be implemented in a humane way.
In my view, these are the characteristics of agencies and units that bureaucratic reform should prioritize: (a) agencies and units that contribute little to poverty reduction, (b) units that do not belong to the core competencies of the State, (c) units that do more “rowing” than “steering,” and (d) units that do not require an act of Congress for its reform, abolition, or merger with another unit.

Antonio Calipjo Go, "Sick Books Crusader"

Antonio Calipjo Go has belatedly admitted to the public that he neither has written a textbook nor has finished college.  Years ago, some reputable educators and journalists asked about his specific expertise, but he always gave an evasive answer.  After his overdue admission, he offers the public a sob story as to the reason for his inability to finish college nearly forty years ago: family poverty and the premature death of his father.  Should we shed tears for such a palusot?

In his expensive paid advertisements in which he tried to show the allegedly many errors in English, Filipino, Science and Social Studies textbooks used in public and private schools, Calipjo Go wanted us to believe that he had a monopoly of textbook expertise in several learning areas.  He angrily rejects the findings of several experts, such as those from the University of Sto. Tomas Department of Science, who have carefully examined and disputed the "errors" he found in textbooks he targeted.

Calipjo Go appears to be a publicity-hungry and self-anointed super-expert whose commentaries are combinations of shameless self-glorification and the ravings and rantings of a lonely aging man who has not outgrown his unhappy youth.  Imagine his arrogance in declaring in a piece he wrote for the Philippine Daily Inquirer (PDI): "I am the only person who actually tried to do something about the problem of error-riddled textbooks."

Calipjo Go likes to imagine himself persecuted by established academic institutions and recognized experts who disagree with his findings.  The PDI likes to lionize him especially after he put out several expensive advertisements.  Also, the PDI does not apply strict journalistic standards in verifying before publishing his allegations and stories.

In his 21 June 2010 commentary at the PDI, Calipjo Go attacked the book, "Biology," developed for secondary school students by the University of the Philippines National Institute of Science and Mathematics Education Development (UP NISMED).

Below is a reproduction of the response of UP NISMED to Go:

We read with interest (and not a small amount of frustration) Mr. Antonio Calipjo Go’s commentary on “Biology,” a textbook written by UP NISMED for high school students. He thinks the book is full of “idiocies and inanities, fallacies and errors.” He has a big axe to grind. Allow us to counter this unwarranted hatchet job.

Mr. Go thinks the title of the book is unimaginative. (We think it’s concise.) But he takes issue with the graphic spiny anteater, preferring the term echidna, which does not evoke any vivid image of the animal. He wants monotremes in place of the descriptive egg-laying mammals. He would rather we used marsupials, instead of the suggestive pouched mammals. The study of biology is at times made unnecessarily difficult by the use of words that sound foreign to learners. As UP NISMED appreciates this difficulty, it has put more value on the use of terms that help clarify concepts and are easily understood by the students. But we learned our lesson. Next time we will use terms that impede imagination.

Mr. Go thinks 358 pages are not enough to tackle a “very complex subject.” He prefers the much longer book by Prentice-Hall which he says has 923 pages. (We wonder whether it is possible to teach all the content written in such a book in a single academic year.) To be sure, Mr. Go knows that DepEd prescribes a limited number of pages per textbook. Yet, despite this limitation, all the learning competencies for Second Year Biology have been covered in the book.

Mr. Go thinks that the question, When did humans evolve?, is stupid. In fact, he cannot think of a question more stupid than this. To explain his point, he says that evolution is a very slow process of change occurring over a very long period of time. Apparently, Mr. Go wants to restrict the use of ‘When?’ to mean ‘At what time?’ He thinks it is wrong to use ‘When?’ to mean ‘Over what period?’ Using his rule, no one would be able to ask: When did the dinosaurs rule the Earth? When did the last Ice Age occur? When were the Himalayas formed?

Mr. Go thinks that the caption, Tools used during early times. Are these tools familiar to you? Where are they currently used?, is also stupid. However, he does not explain why. Perhaps he thinks that the writer was expecting the readers to be familiar with the tools or that the tools were being used at present. Just the opposite, the intention is to underscore the readers’ unfamiliarity with the tools and the fact that they are not used anymore. This is to emphasize the level of technology in olden times, that tools at the time were little more than stones with sharp edges and pointed tips.

Mr. Go asks if it is correct to teach, at the basic level, that Bone consists of living cells found in cavities and are surrounded by a hard, nonliving substance. Or, that Xylem cells are usually dead cells with thickened walls while phloem consists of living cells. He asks, “How can cells or substances be considered dead or nonliving when they are embedded deep within a living organism, and without which that organism cannot, in fact, live or survive?” Apparently, Mr. Go’s single criterion for considering a cell as living is the fact that it is embedded within a living organism. This is absolutely wrong. UP NISMED’s definitions for bone and xylem are not incorrect.

We request readers who come across commentaries such as this to be wary and critical. Do your own research and find out if what is being claimed as erroneous truly is erroneous, or merely the misinterpretation of someone who may not be competent in the field that he or she is criticizing. The greater “moral battle” is that which must be waged against those who masquerade as experts and peddle misinformation in the guise of professing love for country.

Truly, a little learning is a dangerous thing.

Past Presidents Help

Below are excerpts from inaugural addresses of some past Philippine presidents. Perhaps they can help incoming Pres. Noynoy Aquino, his advisers, and conscientious citizens in forging a consensus on the vision and policies our nation needs. The excerpts are taken from "...So Help Us God: The Presidents of the Philippines and Their Inaugural Addresses" by J. Eduardo Malaya and Jonathan Malaya (Manila: Anvil, 2004).
"Democracy becomes meaningless if it fails to satisfy the primary needs of the common man, if it cannot give him freedom from fear and freedom from want. His happiness and security are the only foundations on which a strong republic can be built. His happiness and security will be foremost among ths goals of my administration.
"We must develop the national economy so that it may better satisfy the material needs of our people. The benefits of any economic or industrial program shall be channeled first to our common people, so that their living standards shall be raised." (Ramon Magsaysay, 30 December 1953)
"The Government will continue its low-cost housing projects and its land redistribution and resettlement program. We shall exert greater effort so that more of our people will eventually acquire homes and lands that they can call their own. Home- and land-owning citizens possess not only a sense of stability and contentment but also the practical patriotism to live for, and if necessary, die for home and country. For upon the face of the patriot must have shone first the firelight of home." (Carlos P. Garcia, 30 December 1957)
"We assume leadership at a time when our nation is in the throes of a moral degeneration unprecedented in our national history. Never within the span of human memory has graft permeated every level of government. The solution of this problem shall call for the exercise of the tremendous persuasive power of the presidency. I shall consider it, therefore, my duty to set a personal example in honesty and uprightness. We must prove that ours is not a nation of hopeless grafters but a race of good and decent men and women." (Diosdado Macapagal, 30 December 1961)
"We must discard complacency without embracing panic; rely on our efforts alone without rejecting the support of others. Let not the future observe that being virile in body we multiplied in number, without increasing in spirit. I do not demand of you more than I shall demand of myself and of government. So seek not from government what you cannot find in yourself.
"In the solution of our problems, the government will lead. But the first duty that confronts us all is how to continue to grow in this nation now a new heart, a new spirit that springs out of the belief that while our dangers be many, and our resources few, there is no problem that cannot be surmounted given but the will and courage. Let every man be his own master, but let him first, and above all, be his own charge." (Ferdinand Marcos, 2nd inaugural, 30 December 1969)
"I would like to appeal to everyone to work for national reconciliation, which is what Ninoy came back home for. I would like to repeat that I am very magnanimous in victory. So I call on all those countrymen of ours who are not yet with us to join us at the earliest possible time so that together we can rebuild our beautiful country." (Corazon Aquino, 25 February 1986)
"Our people spoke of their faith that we Filipinos can be greater than the sum of all the problems that confront us; that we can climb higher than any summit we have already scaled.
"We cannot but interpret the vote as a summons for us to unite and face the future together. The people are not looking for scapegoats, but for the basic things to get done--and get done quickly." (Fidel V. Ramos, 30 June 1992)
"Ngayon pa lamang, ang mga kamag-anak ko ay nilalapitan na ng kung sinu-sino. Kung anu-anong deal at kickback ang ipinapangako.
"Binabalaan ko sila. Walang kaibigan, walang kumpare, walang kamag-anak o anak na maaaring magsamantala sa ngayon. At ngayon pa lamang sinasabi ko sa inyo, nag-aaksaya lamang kayo ng panahon. Huwag ninyo akong subukan." (Joseph Estrada, 30 June 1998)

The Enlightened & the Meek

It is rewarding to read and reflect on the award-winning novel, "Ilustrado," which won a Palanca and the Man Asian Literary Prize as an unpublished manuscript in 2008. Published in New York this year, its soft-bound Philippine edition (ISBN 978-0-374-94103-1) is already a best-seller in the local bookstores. The novel is a complex and difficult work written with much cleverness by Miguel Syjuco, a young overseas Filipino writer who was born and raised in Manila and lives in Montreal, Canada.

Miguel is an Ateneo alumnus whose parents, ex-TESDA chief Augusto 'Boboy' and Cong. Judy Syjuco, have taken turns in getting elected as Member of the House of Representatives for the 2nd district of Iloilo province since 1998.
"Ilustrado" hints at the hope for inner peace for members of the Philippine ruling and intellectual elite who want to be enlightened bearers of light but are tormented by a mixture of private failures and their “shared guilt” for the arrogance, narcissism, hedonism, and mediocrity that have turned the country into an anarchy of clans and classes.

The novel achieves what one minor character comments: it speaks truth to power without boring the readers but making them laugh periodically and hopefully at themselves. This is achieved through a rich and sometimes dizzying combination of classic and contemporary literary styles and forms such as jokes, blog comments, email, and fragments of songs, poems, essays, interviews, short stories, and biographies.
Like all brilliant works, this novel contains a few minor mistakes (besides the wrong spelling of Juan Luna’s 1884 masterpiece, the Spoliarium, which Syjuco acknowledged during a book launch organized by the National Book Development Board last April 14).

In one section, the protagonist appropriately or provocatively named Miguel Syjuco switches on the cable tv and does channel surfing like the way the novel shifts from one literary form to another. After changing channels 14 times, “a Portuguese nun discusses the beatitudes, quoting from the Gospel of St. John. Blessed are the meek, she says.” He changes channel 6 more times.

“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth” can be found in the Gospel of Matthew (5:5) and in no other Gospel. For many of his believers and non-believers, the beatitudes of Jesus are absurd or unrealistic teachings, as these seem to glorify weakness, poverty, and misfortune. Like what the apostle Paul would say about the Crucified Christ, the beatitudes represent, for many, either a scandal or folly in practice.
Among the evils that another protagonist, Syjuco’s mentor Crispin Salvador, wants to expose is “the sin of omission” of members of the elite who, in their despair over the persistent eruptive state of the nation, “shuttered their homes, huddled inside, read scripture, and waited” for God to act. Similarly in Philippine fiction writing, there is “an underlying cultural faith in deus ex machina: God coming from the sky to make things right or more wrong.”
We should curse the meekness that means mere submissiveness or passivity, denies persons their right to protest injustice, and stems really from cowardice.
Another kind of meekness, however, is noble. It stems from wisdom and courage such as what Jesus of Nazareth showed, for though he went around in Galilee speaking powerful and wise words to both the lowly and the mighty, he was known to be “meek and humble in heart” even as he publicly denounced the hypocrisy of persons in authority who did not practice what they preached (Matthew 11:29; 23:3).
If Jesus' meekness was weakness and submissiveness, the authorities would not have bothered to have him arrested and killed in a shameful manner.
Every educated or intelligent citizen who wants to see radical change in society will come closer to pure enlightenment and inner peace when he examines himself humbly, honestly and regularly, and does this at least as often as he corrects others for their unethical behavior. “First take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye” (Matthew 7:5).