FORGIVE

That word punctuates the vocabulary of many today who believe that the atrocities during the Marcos dictatorship should just be forgotten.

“Move on!” is the twin partner of the hideous advice for Martial Law victims to suck it up and live with the traumas of the past.

“Forgive” and “Move on” are words used now as a blunt instrument to suppress protests against the burial as national hero of Marcos, the ousted dictator, offender to Martial Law victims, head honcho of global-scale cronyism, ignominious despot, and disgraced liar!

It would be disingenuous to say that Marcos was buried at the Libingan ng mga Bayani merely as former President and soldier, two lofty positions that he dishonored with abuse and corruption.

Libingan is symbolic of honor and highest esteem for those who valiantly and selflessly served country and people ahead of oneself, the definition of heroism.

Marcos’s burial at Libingan is no ordinary event that merely inters a former President and solider. It was meant to make him a hero and thus rehabilitate his place in history by its blatant revisionism.

Marcos doesn’t deserve this honor. It is vainglorious for his family to believe that history would be kind in judging their discredited kin.

But they get help from those (especially Christians) that now demand forgiveness, in the name of healing and reconciliation, from Martial Law victims and the nation as a whole that the dictatorship also victimized.

They take inspiration from many admonitions in the Bible to forgive.

If Christ forgave those who killed him, how can we not do the same to a despicable despot, like Marcos?

Not mentioned in this counsel is the wile and scheme that while we are busy forgiving they will also bury him as a hero!

It is true that Jesus called on his followers to forgive. It is a radical demand with which we cannot trifle.

It would be important to see its application for Christ’s followers amid the chaos of the country we are in.

Forgiveness is to take upon our own account the wrong committed by others against us. We don’t retaliate against an offender. We offer the other cheek, if we get slapped on the other. We don’t return the pain inflicted on us by our enemies.

The biblical admonition to forgive allows for the highest expression of love.

We love others to the point of death in imitation of Christ’s ultimate show of love by accepting the violence of the cross. His death took upon his own account the sins of others.

The admonition to forgive is addressed to us to extend grace to those who have offended us. It’s a call for us to wrestle with the demand of love through forgiveness when we are the victims.

And this is key: the admonition is directed to us. We cannot pontificate on forgiveness by demanding others to forgive and avoid directing the admonition to ourselves.

Even if we have extended forgiveness already, we avoid pouncing on the heads of those who haven’t. To do so would be arrogant, sanctimonious, and judgmental of those whose shoes we don’t walk on.

We should not use the call to forgive as a political instrument to silence the expression of pain, and even of protest, of those that have been victimized and whose grievances have yet to be redressed.

Society cannot moralize on forgiveness and at the same time countenance victimhood without paying a price.

Injustice must be redressed that’s why we have structures like Rule of Law to prevent abuse and impunity.

Without justice and accountability for the victims, our society will not be aright and we will all be losers for it.

Righteousness (or, justice, if you will) is the end goal. Our collective pursuit of that goal is declaration that despots would never ever be welcomed in our midst—much more be treated as hero—to again inflict harm on the country.

To attain righteousness, forgiveness is merely one side of the equation. Righteousness requires not only forgiveness from the victims. Its other pillar is contrition by the offender.

Forgiveness and contrition lead to justice. Without one or the other, healing and restoration will not occur.

Restorative justice requires both elements. Much like in case of marital abuse, healing and restoration will elude a marriage if the abuse remains even if the victim forgives the abuser.

Those who call on the victims to forgive the atrocities of the Marcos dictatorship should equally demand contrition from the offender.

While he is already dead, his family and heirs can do much to amend the wrongs he committed. (By the way, his minions should also be made to account.) They can start by returning his loot and redressing the grievances of the disappeared and tortured during Martial Law.

For our society to flourish, righteousness should reign.

To achieve righteousness, we should call on all sides to do what is required of them: for the victims to forgive, and for the offenders to show contrition and offer reparation for the damages they have caused.

To call on the victims to forgive but allow offenders to go scot free, and even to be buried as hero, is to perpetuate evil and promote impunity and injustice.

When we have achieved both forgiveness and contrition, then we move on.

SICK CHRISTIANITY

Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was shot and killed on August 9, 2014, by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. It set off weeks of protestagainst policing that easily targets black men.

Willie James Jennings, writing in Religion Dispatches in December 2014, after a grand jury decided not to indict the police officer, expressed disgust over Christianity he called “sick” that is at ease with violence in the name of law and order. He said, “Too often, Christians…have given sanctuary to the spirit of fear, commending a form of policing that makes violence a surgeon’s scalpel, imagining our safety in the illusion of its measured use.” He warned that, “Violence knows no measure.”

The Philippine National Police has recently released the number of killed in the Philippine government’s war on drugs from July 1 until December 1, 2016. The number of deaths has totaled to 5,845. Of this number, 2,004 were killed during police operations, and 3,841 are victims of extrajudicial vigilante-style killing. An average of 39 people are killed EVERY DAY over the last five months in drug-related incidents.

These numbers are staggering and have reached the levels we have seen of deaths during the whole duration of martial law. And they are increasing by the day! If the trend continues, at the same time next year we will see about 20,000 people killed in the government’s war on drugs.

The government has hidden behind the “presumption of regularity” in the performance of duties in the police operations that resulted in 2,004 deaths. This has stopped police investigation except for the most egregious cases, like the Espinosa killing inside Leyte’s sub-provincial jail in Baybay. (Even in this case, the President quickly absolved the police officers involved and even admitted having a hand in keeping them in position despite their previous connections to the drug trade.) The rest of the victims in the incidents where the police are not purportedly involved are filed as “Deaths Under Investigation.” Few, if any, have been arrested or indicted in any DUI cases.

If this is not a situation of impunity in our country, I don’t know what is!

As Jennings would say, it would be a sick Christianity if it remains at ease with violence and killings in the name of war on drugs.

Killing is never a Christian value. Violence in the Old Testament (genocide, infanticide, capital punishment, you name it) is turned over by the gospel of love that Jesus propagated and lived by, modeling what it should be like for followers in his Kingdom. Jesus did not come to destroy the law but to fulfill it, which found its achievement by his sacrifice on the cross. The Messiah who died to offer salvation even for his enemies cannot be at ease with the rate of killings we’re seeing today in our country.

Everyone deserves salvation and enjoys equal value in God’s sight no matter how atrocious their life choices have been. We are all created as image bearers of God and object of his eternal love. Because of Christ, we cannot align with any government that diminishes human life, even in the name of law and order.

To kill is not part of the Christian arsenal in our mission to transform communities. We should be in the forefront of defending everyone’s right to live and be changed by God’s love. We should reject the idea that someone has passed the line of incorrigibility and deserves to die. Remember that with God nothing is impossible! The gospel is not meant to condemn and punish, but to restore and heal.

Sick Christianity would gloss over the tough demands of love and would lamely acquiesce to killings in the name of tough law enforcement to lick society’s drug problem even in the absence of credible evidence that such strategy has ever worked anywhere in the world. And at the rate it is bungling its job so far there is no indication at all that the Philippine Government could be the shining exception to the global record of failure of the war on drugs.

Sick Christianity hides behind a (too) narrow reading of Scriptures that purports to mandate that the only form of political engagement available to Christians is, one, ‘to pray’ for the government, and, two, ‘to submit’ (sometimes misread as ‘to obey’) to authorities, based on two or three proof texts written in eras so unlike ours.

Such a reading totally misses the message of the Gospels and Acts, whose core message is a protest to Caesar’s claim that he is king, because he is not. The good news is that Jesus is the true King!

No one is King today, other than Jesus. Our elected government has not attained perfection and will never do so to be spared from criticism and even protest if they do stray and pursue policies and actions opposed to the values of the Kingdom. God’s instituting of governments is meant to preserve the good and curtail evil for the benefit of the people. God’s imprimatur of governments to be instrument of order and the flourishing of humanity does not provide governments and its officials with immunity from being called out for their failures in governance and weakness in character.

Indeed, we should fervently pray for and wisely submit to government. But these critical activities cannot be made to justify our lack of action in allowing evil to continue.

Every killing bleeds the heart of God. Be it committed in Mendiola, Mamasapano, Hacienda Luisita and the war on drugs. If it bleeds the heart of God, it should also bleed ours. Sick Christianity prevents us from such lament. 

TRAUMA

When we see duct-taped corpses thrown in the streets of our neighborhoods almost on a daily basis, its repulsiveness wears off at some point in our consciousness.

These killings everyday have inured us all to its unpleasantness. “It happens!”

Then off we go to where we can nurse our traumas from this violence in our midst.

EJKs or not, the fact is thousands have been killed over the last four months. Even the number of killings that are not reportedly part of police operations still tallies in the thousands.

Indeed, we are in a state of lawlessness!

How are we supposed to deal with all this?

Apparently, with a new category upon which to hook our suspended outrage: “Death Under Investigation.”

DUI—didn’t this use to refer to Driving Under the Influence?

A clear case of oblique deflection, if I see one, to our fears that our country has not yet really attained Singapore-like zone of safety.

It’s like numbing our brains by drinking our problems away. “Don’t worry, these killings are DUI!” 

In our justice system the police would generally wait first for complainants to materialize before doing anything about the crime.

The reality is most aggrieved parties and survivors of the victims in these killings don’t approach the police for various reasons, including the fear that the precinct itself had something to do with the murder. To expect them to go to the police is like asking the rape victim to go back to her rapist for protection. And that would just turn out really well!

“Death Under Investigation” is another way of saying that the crime will never be solved. The police know a murder has been committed but they have no idea how to solve it yet.

This state of affairs is nothing less than a state-sanctioned national trauma. There will be no closure to these killings and we just have to deal with it!

The President has threatened that if things don’t go his way, expect 20 to 30 thousand more killed as a result.

Not sure whether he means the government will do the extra killings, or the killing spree will continue by whoever is committing them now. I’m trying to kick into my creative imagination mode to figure this one out.

The only way I can divine the President’s logic is this: he is threatening that if the killings don’t stop (presumably what he wants), the killings will go on. Brilliant!

Meanwhile, off we go to where we can nurse our traumas from this violence in our midst.

NOW

I still remember when I began to daydream. I was adolescent and starting to get bored with my humdrum high school life. I recall unashamedly that I enjoyed levitating my mind to project myself as somebody I fancied—normally the hero or the prince charming of the drama I would play in my head. (Of course, I wouldn’t give up the lead role in my own mental production.)

Recalling this got me thinking how important it is to be fully rooted in the present.

We humans live in segments of space and time. Life is temporal with past, present and future. If we are to learn contentment and to experience joy we need to fully live in the present. We cannot change the past. It is there—an unchangeable reality. The past is not going to happen again. We cannot linger there. We can only gain wisdom from the lessons it teaches.

Among the three facets of time, the future is the most temporal of all. Unlike the past, from our perspective (not God’s) the future is not even a reality. Living in the future is worse than living in the past. It is with respect to the future that the devil’s deception is most strongly directed against us. He wants to snuff contentment in our life and rob us of our joy. And there is no better way of doing that than by pushing us to live in our dreams. He doesn’t want us to relish life that God has given us now. He makes us focus on the future, which leaves our hearts discontented and makes us long to escape the present.

Many of us are camping in our dreams and so miss the blessings of the present. We have succumbed to excessive ambition and drive to succeed and have made the present a springboard to some future dream instead of a stage for enjoying what God has given us. In so doing we allow the present to fly quickly by and thereby miss much of life with our spouse, children, friends, work and, more importantly, God. We are so focused on where we want to end up that we gloss over where we are. The irony is that we never get to where we want to be because there is always somewhere else to go.

I submit that it is in the present where God meets us. It is now that the Holy Spirit is working in our hearts to transform us. It is only in the present where we can experience the joy, peace and love that God offers. God is eternity. The nearest that we could sample eternity in this life is to consider the present. God is in the eternal present. There is no past or future in Him. He deals with us today, not yesterday, not tomorrow. To the extent that we escape the present by either living in the past or, worse, escaping to the future, we will live a shallow and unfulfilled life. There’s nothing wrong with planning for the future, but we must stay rooted in the present. Being faithful and grateful here and now is what it means to forget what is behind and strain toward the goal to which God has called us heavenward.

We know that we’re living in the future when we worry too much about it. Jesus said let tomorrow worry about itself. He said this while pointing to the birds and the flowers. Clearly, as busy as Jesus was he spent time enjoying their beauty. We need to do the same.

Go and smell the followers and watch the birds. And don’t forget to bring your loved ones along. Time flies.

THE GLORIOUS MARGINS

It's an unpleasant truth to face: the Philippines is a weak state. In fact, the head of a local foreign business chamber, whom I was in conversation recently, has a more brutal outlook. He is convinced that our country is a failed state! It is easy to think that foreigners have nothing but disdain in a culture that they don’t understand. But I must say that hearing this foreigner, who has been a long-time Philippine resident, I am not sure that I could disagree with him.

Failure of Politics
It’s a slight exaggeration, I must admit, but there are glimpses of the country that at times look like Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes (“the war of all against all”). We see this everyday. Criminal justice totters as crime runs rampant. Corruption is endemic both in the public and private sectors. The country’s insurgency runs longest in Asia. Mindanao remains in violent fractiousness despite decades of efforts at peace.

And then there is poverty and the sense of hopelessness among the poor. Government statistics says that twenty-five 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. It could only be worse today.) But the irony is that we manage every year to include several multi-billionaires (in US dollars terms) in the ranks of richest people in Asia. We are a poor country with scandalously uber-rich people.

The Philippine ship sputters in fulfilling its role as God’s servant to promote good and to punish wrongdoers (Romans 13:4). Our brand of politics has failed the country. The system has not worked and no one seems to know how to right our listing state.

In the midst of darkness and messiness we experience in this country, it is time to call out the church to be faithful to our calling to pray and work for Christ’s Kingdom to come and His will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Our mission is to spread God’s rule, where God is recognized as truly sovereign not by political or legal imposition but by a real change of heart. This goal is achieved when people decide that they have had enough of self and would now make God the center of their lives.

Politics is not going to do that, particularly partisan politics. The primordial business for the in-breaking of God’s Kingdom depends not in finding right leaders with right policies and right character to lead this country. Our business is not to improve kingdoms of the world but to make the Kingdom of God ever so real, visible and concrete in our spheres of influence individually and collectively as church. Kingdoms of the world will always remain under the devil’s realm no matter how they do and whoever leads them (1 John 5:19).

Therefore, in pursuing our calling as church we should first avoid—and this is dissonant note in the atmosphere of the electoral season—placing too much hope and faith in the election of leaders of our country to improve this specific kingdom of the world we temporarily occupy.

Don’t get me wrong. As Filipinos we must strive to have good and effective government. Christians should join the public square as responsible citizens of the country. But as believers belonging to Christ’s body, the church, we cannot employ politics as strategy nor adopt political power as goal to achieve the in-breaking of God’s Kingdom in our midst.

The church cannot get distracted with the roller-coaster ride of Philippine politics. We have serious business to do. The church has been too wrapped up in the notion that somehow the country’s salvation lies in installing a “godly” government by electing to office “godly” officials.

Satan tried in various ways to suck Jesus into assuming temporal power. But Jesus never once was tempted to take the reins of government to establish His new Kingdom. That’s why He never became embroiled with the politics of first century Palestine, which was worse than what we have in this country now. Christ’s Kingdom, and therefore ours, is not of this world. Christ rises above politics and provides an eternal solution.

If the church is to follow its Master, we should not try to find solution to the problems of our country 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, which 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.

Life in the Margins
The church is not called to dominate the world. Sure, we should leave a godly imprint in every sphere of life and show the world how it would look like when God is actually ruling His domain. But the danger especially within the context of a faltering state, like the Philippines, is to think that Christianity should become the dominant force in politics, culture and society and be in charge of cleaning up the mess. This kind of Constantinian mindset is inimical to the church and the world.

For its first 300 years the church lived in the margins. In fact, it was persecuted. The early church did not dominate society and culture although it stood distinct and counter to the culture at large and, by the lifestyle of believers, it rebelled against the sinfulness of the world.

Jesus was a marginal figure in the national life of the Jews even though he stirred strong passions among the elite and captured the imagination of the masses. He was a carpenter with a core following of twelve ragtag nobodies. His Messianic claim was largely ignored by his countrymen (John 1:11). Jesus never sought to dominate the culture and society. But His Kingdom slowly crept in outside of the limelight not through politics but through love.

The 21st century Philippine church has lost the quality and beauty of the margins. We have sought to mainstream the Kingdom of God within the kingdom of the world we are living in.

The mainstream is intoxicating and comforting. It dictates the direction of culture and provides a sense of power and control. But it succumbs to pride and the temptation to dominate. The worst pivot the church ever made was when it assumed the role of official religion of the Roman Empire. From being persecuted, it became the persecutor. As the dominant institution of society it even unleashed violence on other believers, who decided to pursue the holy life in the margins.

Some would argue that the church wasn’t dominant because it couldn’t be at that time. Christ did not participate in mainstream culture because He was still in the throes of establishing His ministry. He simply couldn’t be dominant given His circumstances. I don’t buy that.

Christ said to Pilate that He could have called thousands of angels to fight if He wished. He did not do so precisely because His modus was to stay in the margins, quietly but powerfully changing hearts to love God.

The Kingdom of God is not about political power but about the practice of authentic love by Christ’s followers. Such love is internally generated, not imposed as a duty from the outside. A Christianized culture, one that is dominated by Christian mores and ethos, is not necessarily the end we want. What we want are for people to voluntarily live godly lives because their hearts have been transformed and not because a slew of laws and a set of ethos hung over their heads ready to pounce in case of deviant behavior.

A dominant church loses its vitality. It blurs its distinctiveness from what is the sphere of the kingdom of the world from the Kingdom of God. It hurts the church, but, more grievously, it also hurts the world. True Christianity loses its punch when it is co-mingled with the culture at large. When it does the world suffers.

Participate in elections. Do everything to make them clean and honest. Choose government leaders wisely.

But our hope and joy as Kingdom people must never be too wrapped up in this process. Our mission is more encompassing because it is eternal.

Let’s get to work.

I’ve always wondered about 2 Chronicle 7:14

I’m a Martial Law baby, meaning to say that I had spent my formative years during the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines (1972-1986). In the beginning I had a positive view of military rule in the country. To its credit Martial Law halted the country’s march to oblivion.

But nothing could fully deodorize the dung heap of any totalitarian rule. Marcos’s Martial Law ultimately proved to be nothing but a petty dictatorship drenched in violence, “kleptocracy”, and cronyism.

At a certain point I wanted to see the dictatorship end. I could not support Marcos but my Christian sensibilities would not permit me to be caught dead with the opposition groups, most of whom were in bed with Marxists and their atheistic ideology. I wandered in a political wilderness, which, I think, pretty much represented the same conundrum faced by the church about Marcos’s dictatorship.

In that state of confusion, the motif of many sermons at that time was God’s straightforward response to King Solomon’s prayer as recorded by the Chronicler.

“[I]f my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.” 2 Chronicles 7:14 [NIV]

I took comfort in these 40 words as the clearest prescription on how God would go about ‘healing’ a nation. The verse packs the certainty of an “if…then” formula.

People Power finally deposed Marcos on February 25, 1986. I thought then that 2 Chronicles 7:14 was finally kicking in to ‘heal’ the country. But the promising start has sputtered along the way. Twenty-one years after the EDSA Revolution our neighbors in the region have made great leaps forward while we have moved southbound deep in the Third World region. We are a whisper away from becoming a banana republic.

When will God’s ‘healing’ finally touch the country?

As I pondered this question, I realized that I don’t have any idea on what God’s ‘healing’ actually looks like.

Is the rate of GNP growth a way to measure God’s favor? Will the level of poverty or unemployment shrink if God ‘heals’ a country? Is it required for the government to be democratic or serious protector of human rights to say that God has blessed a country’s inhabitants? Are there macro economic standards or political benchmarks to prove God’s pleasure on a country?

There are historical ambiguities as well in applying economic and political measures to assess the ‘healing’ of a land. Does it mean that God favors First World countries over Third World countries? Does it mean that the wealthy European nations are praying more sincerely and submitting to God more faithfully than the poorer countries in Asia and Africa? The last I heard not even one percent of the population of most wealthy countries of the North regularly attend church. On the other hand, it is well documented that Christianity is gaining leaps and bounds in the countries of the South. What gives?

The problem, I realized, is that too much focus is placed on the ‘healing’ part of God’s response to King Solomon. The overemphasis on “what is in it for us”, it seems to me, is unwarranted and has led to confusion and frustration on the part of Christians regarding the conditions in the country.

As an exegetical point, the promise of healing in the verse pertains to drought, plagues and pestilence that have come upon Israel for their apostasy. It was God Himself who brought these calamities upon His people for their disobedience. God promised that He would remove His curse on them if they would find their way back to Him.

Aside from the fact that Israel was a theocratic regime at that time, the “if…then” clause is God’s response to King Solomon’s specific prayer in the earlier chapter (see 2 Chronicles 6:26-31). Outside of that context, I don’t know how one could measure in specific terms, as King Solomon and the Israelites could do in their situation, the ‘healing’ of a nation in our time. There are too many variables to be able to pin poor political and economic conditions in a country to the machinations of God. Being destitute does not necessarily mean that God has imposed some kind of curse on poor countries. Conversely, good economic performance by rich countries doesn’t necessarily mean they are enjoying God’s special fondness.

By focusing so much on the ‘healing’ portion of the verse, we have become inured to the idea that economic progress and political stability are the ultimate markers for the ‘healing’ of the country.

To read that much in the verse is misguided. It carries the false assumption that God has caused our woes, or that He has somehow lifted our protection from evil for reasons of His own, which He has kept from us. It is further confounded by the enigma that God has shown displeasure to a country where 8 of 10 people would express love for Christ but at the same time has granted tremendous economic progress to neighboring countries that are predominantly Islamic, Buddhist, Shintoist, Communist and Marxist. The theory pollutes our view of God.

The ‘health and wealth’ reading of 2 Chronicles 7:14 has led many of our church leaders to act in ways inimical both to the interest of the kingdom of God and the interest of the country. They have aligned the church to politics, which has damaged the cause of Christ. Doing so has also damaged their witness and ministry and, in turn, the country, which needs such witness and ministry more than anything else.

This verse does not promise that God would be serve as our economic guru or political operator if we only turn back to Him. The economy and politics are the stuff of the kingdoms of the world. Being a follower of Christ is not a pre-requisite to good citizenship in those kingdoms. Neither do Christians monopolize selfless commitment to civic duty.

The Kingdoms of the world would do what they have to do. Some of them will do well, and some of them will fail. No matter how they perform, all of them remain under the control of the devil, a fact that Christ does not dispute when the devil offered Him the position of the world’s CEO while retaining overall control.

Christ’s kingdom is not of this world. There is no distinct role for Christians, as Christians, in running the kingdoms of the world. There is no Biblical mandate, much less from looking at Christ’s life and ministry, for Christians to take over the reins of the kingdoms of the world to establish God’s rule on earth. We have no special claim, entitlement or responsibility to assume political power just because we are God’s children.

It is unfortunate that the country is struggling under poor leadership at every branch of the government. Our government leaders have no accountability and our society has served the interest of the haves at the expense of the have-nots. Sin and demonic oppression have caused havoc in our oligarchic, elitist and self-centered leadership structure and body polity. It is a somber reality.

But the mission of the church does not concern the economic and political arena. God’s response to King Solomon is not a divine formula for economic progress and political stability. The Philippines could become a first rate country and the church could still fail as God’s representative on earth.

Christ did not die to bring double-digit growth to the country’s economy nor did he die so that we can have political stability. Christ died to spread God’s kingdom through the changing of the hearts of individuals. That is our calling. And our strategy to achieve that goal is not through political power but through sacrificial love, which, in Christ’s more vivid language, means daily taking up the cross and denying our own self.

The measure of God’s true ‘healing’ is found in changed lives rather than on economic or political indicators. It’s when we learn to forsake self and live for God could we say that we are healed.

Whether the Philippines would remain the doormat of the region would depend on the collective fortitude of the Filipino people to do something about their situation. In the meantime, the church, under the radar screen, must continue to be faithful in its work. We cannot despair in what’s happening in the country and decide to engage in partisan political combat to salvage the country. That’s engaging the wrong battle. Our struggle is not against flesh and blood.

What we need to do is to trust God and remain faithful to Him. Yes, we must earnestly pray to God for peace and justice in our land. And the message of 2 Chronicles 7:14 is that God can intervene and can change the course of things, should He wish to do so.

In the meantime, our reality as a church must transcend the economic and political conditions of the country. Our weapons are spiritual and our cause is eternal. Sure, we must do our duties as good citizens. But what our country desperately needs is for the Body of Christ to create, in the midst of our present morass, an alternative reality of love and servanthood. That’s a lifetime to accomplish. The church in politics only detracts us from our calling.

Failure of Politics

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.