It’s an unpleasant truth to face: the Philippines is a weak state. It sputters to pursue its role as God’s servant to promote the good and to bring punishment on the wrongdoer (Romans 13:4).
It’s a slight exaggeration, but the picture in the country almost looks like Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes (“the war of all against all”). Criminal justice totters as crime runs rampant. Thugs gun down people in streets. Activists disappear without trace. Bombs explode in city centers and even in tightly-secured places of power. The country’s insurgency is the longest running insurgency in Asia. The violent fractiousness in Mindanao remains despite the signing of a peace agreement in 1996.
And then there is poverty and the sense of hopelessness among the poor. It’s heart-rending to hear about Marianette Amper, the 12-year old (some reports say 11-year old), who allegedly took her own life due to the poverty of her family.
Government statistics says that 25 percent of Filipinos live in poverty. (The situation may be actually bleaker. Some UN data indicate that 46 percent of Filipinos earned less than $2 a day in 2001.)
Assuming the government is right, with 88 million Filipinos the number of the poor in the country comes to 22 million people; these are people who don’t earn enough to afford the daily minimum caloric intake required for a healthy life. There are tens of millions more who barely scrape a living.
The irony is that, in this state of poverty, the Philippines manages to include every year several multi-billionaires (calculated in US dollars) in the ranks of the richest people in Asia. We are a poor country with scandalously uber-rich people. It’s no wonder that half of the Filipinos surveyed a few years ago mentioned leaving the country as their ultimate ambition in life.
Is the state serving only the interest of a few? Is this so because only a privileged few controls the state’s instrumentalities?
In answering these questions, one good gauge would be the unbroken monopolies in various sectors of the economy, such as banking, retail, inter-island shipping, to name a few. Another would be the highly nepotistic political system that ensures that power is kept within the realm of entrenched power brokers.
Politics has failed the country. The oligarchic structures of our society have been most damaging to our progress. The macro economic indicators may look good. But who benefits from any economic growth? A few grow richer and richer while the rest is either doomed to abject poverty and misery or left to seek employment abroad to give their family a chance at a decent existence in their own country.
I don’t mean to provide a treatise on the country’s problems. My intention is to call out the church to respond to the ills that we see in the country. How do we respond to the poverty and social injustices around us?
The lie that we have to avoid is to think that finding the right persons with the right policies and the right character as leaders of the country would solve the problem. We have tried this but have not seen any effective result.
A recent example: Two of those involved in the cash-giving scandal in Malacanang were a Catholic priest serving as governor and a Protestant bishop moonlighting as a Congressman. Given their religious vocations we would expect them to have gone ape when offered the money. But both glossed over the clear moral ambiguities of the cash-giving they participated in. We could not have had government officials with better moral and spiritual credentials than these two. And yet the two now face possible criminal indictments for bribery.
The power, prestige and perks of political power gobble up people. Is this why Jesus said no one can serve God and Mammon? Politics is like the power of the ring in JRR Tolkien’s trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. The ring is not owned. Nobody owns the ring. It rather owns.
Jesus knew this. That’s why he never became embroiled with the politics of first century Palestine, which was worse than what we have now. His kingdom was not of this world. He rose above politics and provided an eternal solution.
The church needs to focus its attention on following its Master rather than relying on the instrumentalities of government and politics to do its job in society. The church has to confront evil in all its shape and form, rectify injustice and fight oppression without fear.
This is not just social gospel talk. The Magna Charta of Jesus’ Kingdom in Luke 4 points to the bigger scope of the Gospel beyond the myopic, truncated, and, yes, Americanized, view of the Gospel as nothing more than a personal relationship with God. The Gospel must transform individuals as well as communities.
If it is to follow the example of its Savior, the church will not find solutions to the problem of the world through the power of the sword but through the glory of the cross. The kingdom’s transforming power is distinctly tied to the exemplified love in the death of Christ. Indeed such is foolish talk to the world, as Paul says, but wise in the eyes of God. Sadly, the church has pursued the way of the world more than the wisdom of God.
The church must not rely on government to help the poor, overcome evil and oppression and fight injustice. The church itself must pursue its own mission to demonstrate that the kingdom it proclaims is near to those who need it most—the poor, the victims, the oppressed, and the sinners. Jesus’ kingdom does not rely on governments to achieve its goals.
The lie that the church has accepted by and large in order to escape responsibility is that all these are the mandate of government. This thinking then provides justification for the church to seek governmental powers and use them to pursue kingdom goals. Who could object to that? It sounds fair, really, but my problem with this approach is that Jesus never modeled it in his life.
The church needs to stop getting enmeshed in politics. It should focus on making the kingdom a reality in its midst. We need to get down to work to spread the kingdom that Jesus introduced in his Nazareth sermon in Luke 4.
Here are some things we could start thinking about. What does the church do about homeless kids that clog our streets? How can it help the plight of the squatter areas that are stone throw away from many mega churches in Manila? What can it do to provide cheap housing for the urban poor? How can it promote the dignity of the helpless and the dispossessed? And there are many more problems to tackle.
The church doesn’t need the government to do all that. In fact, the government doesn’t figure in the mission of the church to pursue love for all as mandated by its Savior.
Christ boldly claimed that His coming marked the beginning of the true year of jubilee. The church needs to prove the truth of that claim to the poor, the hungry and the oppressed of the Philippines.
