Pasyon, deification, demonization and redemption

BY ANTONIO CONTRERAS       APRIL 18, 2019

WE are a country that is so used to suffering that we have learned to deal with it like a recurring pattern, and it appears that it no longer bothers us. The crosses that we carried became lighter not because we are fools to believe these were mere matchsticks instead of being heavy burdens. Our metaphor for the passion play we call life, or what we call “pasyon,” is not the cross that we bear every day of our lives, but the redemption that we seek by just surviving despite the odds.

But make no mistake, we are simply being nice. We are not a violent society, much as we want to entomb in the pantheons of our metaphors a cursing messiah on a warpath, an image with which we would like to paint our President.

Our history images us as a society very much like what Jesus Christ had to deal with in His time. We have an oversupply of Herods clinging to a power that is not totally theirs, and Pilates who are mere fronts and whose power is simply an extension of someone higher and thus have no choice but to wash their hands of any responsibility. Our Congress is populated by people who assert a kind of power over the budget that is more imagined than real, subject to the veto of a man they can’t override, in the same way that the Jewish Sanhedrin could not assert its power against the Emperor of Rome.

We have always been waiting for someone who would lead us to our redemption. We have had experiences with false prophets who promised us salvation but eventually turned out to be false idols. Some even officiated at our very own crucifixion. We have the images of people who were persecuted for their selfish ambition, but whom we elevated to demigods because we thought they were for the people.

Ninoy Aquino was imaged like John the Baptist whose death was seen as a martyrdom. By his own record as a nonperforming senator whose vocation was focused on making Marcos’ life miserable, Ninoy Aquino is neither a hero nor a saint. His head may have been served on a platter courtesy of the person who ordered his assassination, who his believers allege to have been Ferdinand Marcos playing the role of the biblical Herod and Imelda Marcos that of his power-hungry wife Herodias. It is not surprising if the same disciples of Ninoy would allege that Imee Marcos is the incarnation of their daughter Salome. It is also not surprising if the house of Herod Antipas will be seen in the same light as the House of Marcos. Those who have the tendency to think this way are precisely the same crowd that painted Ninoy’s death as a martyrdom, paving the way for his wife’s eventual ascension as the savior we have been waiting for to rescue us from what they labeled as an evil kleptocracy, like that of John the Baptist heralding the advent of Christ the Messiah.

EDSA was imagined in religious symbolisms. The image of nuns holding rosaries, of seminarians carrying Marian statues, and of Cardinal Sin calling out the crowds to face off with the soldiers of Marcos was apropos to the narrative of Cory being the chosen one by God. The ease with which some loyal Cory supporters even dared to float the idea of canonizing her as a patron saint of democracy is but a logical extension of the manner she was already being celebrated as a modern-day secular saint.

This is actually our tragedy as a people that our sufferings have led us to accept false narratives of sainthood. As if this was not enough, the death of Cory paved the path for the ascension of her equally ill-prepared son to the presidency. And we saw the same hero worship and deployment of metaphors about virtue cast as “tuwid na daan” representing righteousness.

Unfortunately, the hero worship was not enough, and Aquino the son, like Aquino the mother, failed to rescue the people from the crosses that they continued to bear. What was also continued and sustained was the appropriation of righteousness and virtue ethics, and the deployment of the Manichean opposition between the saintly Aquinos and the evil Marcoses as the tabula rasa, the grand ideological narrative of Philippine politics.

Like a passion play, the Marcoses remained to be demonized by the righteous elites. The young who enter Catholic schools are often educated in the light of this black and white opposition where every Marcos was demonized. Instead of focusing on the message of Christ on forgiveness, what was inculcated in the minds of the youth was wrath and vengeance, perfectly typified by the Ateneo student leaders who insisted that Irene Marcos should be banned from setting foot inside their campus as a punishment for her sin of being the daughter of a hated dictator.

And now the masses, once again failed by their leaders in the same way the Sanhedrin failed to protect the Jewish people from Rome, have found another savior in the person of Rodrigo Duterte. But Duterte is not righteous nor religious. He is vulgar, and he cursed God and the Pope. He is even considered a heretic by his critics. And yet the masses love him even as the morally righteous elites demonize him in the same way they demonized the Marcoses.

One is tempted to image Duterte as the new Barabbas, a man of the people rebelling against Rome, and the sanctimonious elites as the new-day Sanhedrin. But if this is the case, it behooves us to ask — Who is our Christ?

And the answer would be that He is living in our hearts and not the politicians we treat as saviors. After all, we are the suffering yet sovereign people whose liberation actually rests in our hands.

https://www.manilatimes.net/pasyon-deification-demonization-and-redemption/541993/