Pinoy Kasi
Simply, Jesus
By Michael Tan
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 04:14:00 12/24/2008
Filed Under: Christmas, Religion & Belief
When I was in high school many years back, we would have these Christmas charity activities aimed at getting people to donate money, food and used clothing to give to the poor. The priests in school would remind us that the message of Christmas was one of charity, citing how Mary and Joseph had no place to stay, and how Jesus eventually had to be born in a stable.
Some years later, in college, I was exposed to another interpretation of the events around Jesus’ birth, and this was how Jesus “chose” to be born in the simplest of circumstances. Simple here meant the barest of bare. The Christmas Nativity scenes we have on Christmas cards, and in our belen, tend to be stylized, with charming farm animals and the Three Kings, plus a shepherd or two carrying lambs, paying homage to Jesus. Being a veterinarian, I can tell you the warm and lovely visual imagery don’t quite match reality, especially if we want to talk about the other senses.
Lately I’ve been revisiting the Nativity story from the viewpoint of biblical scholars and researchers. I did have my column in mind, determined to write something different. I felt too much had been written decrying the commercialization of Christmas and I thought, why aren’t we talking about the alternatives to this commercialized Christmas?
Taking off from Christmas charity campaigns, I have written about the need for alternative giving—supporting non-governmental organizations, for example. But these donations can become ritualized as well, still swept up by Christmas’ artificial glitter.
Then in a bookstore I found Garry Wills’ “What Jesus Meant.” Wills is a prolific writer and religious scholar, known for books like “What Paul Meant” and “Why I am a Catholic.” “What Jesus Meant,” Wills explains, looks at the gospels as the source for what Jesus wanted to convey. Wills warns, strongly, against fundamentalism—a literal interpretation of texts—and instead offers a fascinating account of Jesus’ life and actions, taken from the gospels but with many commentaries drawn from biblical scholarship.
Books about Jesus and religions tend to be thick and difficult to read. “What Jesus Means” is a slim volume, yet it is powerful in the way it makes Jesus real. Wills himself says he meant the book as a “devotional,” an expression of “reasoning faith.”
I think this kind of reflection is especially important for us as Filipinos because of the way Christianity has often become reduced to two bipolar frenzies during the year: Holy Week and Easter marked by melancholic depths and an almost hedonistic Christmas. Lost in these collective mood swings is the central figure in Christianity, Jesus.
Jess
Let’s look at what Wills’ book reminds us about Jesus. Simplicity is the recurring and powerful theme in Wills’ account of Jesus’ early years. His very Incarnation speaks of this simplicity, his mother Mary being a young (biblical scholars say she was probably 14 or 15) small town girl—and unmarried. Dalagang ina (unmarried mother), we would have called her in Filipino, sometimes with contempt.
Joseph is an intriguing character and about him we have to rely more on apocryphal writings (non-gospel texts supposedly written by biblical personages, or people who knew these people). Some of the stories have him quite old, as much as 90 years old, a widower who had children from his first marriage. He was certainly a simple man, a tekton (Greek word for a man good with carpentry and mechanical tasks).
Jesus’ name is a simple one, in fact a very common name at that time. If he had been born in the Philippines, Jesus would have grown up with some nickname like “Boy” or “Jun” (if he had been named Jose, after his father). No “Joey” or “Pepe,” or “Jess,” or other more classy nicknames for this kid. (I was surprised to learn about the name Jesus being so common. Americans are often surprised at the number of boys named Jesus, which they pronounce Jee-sus, in the Philippines and Latin American countries, some even finding it blasphemous. My priest friends also tell me they now try to discourage naming babies Jesus because of all the scoundrels running around with that name. But then, Wills reminds us, Jesus was in a way named after the common man, good and not so good.)
Displaced
Back to Jesus the Christ and our focus on his birth. Wills writes that “Jesus is multiply displaced, made peripheral to the important places of the world.” Mary and Joseph were Jews, a troubled people, many in diaspora, all under the yoke of the Roman empire. Rome had decreed that everyone return to their hometown for a census. Joseph, as the head of the household, had to bring a very pregnant Mary back to Bethlehem. And although that was his hometown, he had no relatives, no friends there.
We know of the search for an inn, but all lodging places were full, and they ended up in a stable. We sing of the birth in a manger, which is actually a sanitized (and deodorized) version. Wills says the Greek word used to describe where Jesus was born was “phatne,” a place where they kept hay. Terribly, terribly simple.
The first visitors to the newborn Jesus were not the three kings but shepherds, pretty much at the bottom of the social hierarchy of their time. Established religions at that time were always emphasizing ritual purity before you could enter the temples, before you could pray, and the shepherds were in difficult straits, being out there tending animals.
So it was the unwashed who were the first to learn of Jesus’ birth, to pay homage, and to go out to proclaim his birth, which makes them the earliest evangelists, so to speak. It is not surprising that later in Jesus’ life, his first disciples are again simple people: fisherfolk.
Wills speculates that Jesus probably grew up illiterate. His mother tongue was Aramaic, and he probably learned Hebrew, necessary to read religious scriptures, from mystics, many of whom were active in Galilee. One of the more famous ones was John the Baptist, actually Jesus’ cousin, a radical religious reformer who went around in animal skin.
But that is going beyond the Nativity so I won’t go into the other details of Jesus’ life. I just thought we might want to remind ourselves of a simpler first Christmas, with themes that still resonate in our times, as in the displaced, including millions of Filipinos roaming the planet, often finding not just inns but homes, and people’s hearts, closed to them.
I know it is difficult to think of a simple Christmas in the Philippines, but amid the festivities, we might still want to find more moderate ways of celebrating, and of coming closer to what Jesus’ birth means. The Quakers, a small Christian group, do not celebrate Christmas, not because they reject Jesus but because of the need to honor the man we know, simply, as Jesus.
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