Where justice and mercy meet

As a child growing up in a Catholic family, I wondered about the meaning of the images seen in the culture—the “bleeding heart” of Jesus stuck on jeepney dashboards, the Black Nazarene in Quiapo, the Santo Entierro lying dead and supine in a glass case, the Lenten cenaculo, pabasa, pasyon and salubong, and other such folk narratives and ritual reenactments surrounding a man whose dying and rising again 2,000 years ago mysteriously birthed a major religion in the world.

Naively, I asked why the Son of God had to die at all—why didn’t God, from his perch in heaven, simply pronounce forgiveness for all, a kind of general amnesty for people who have done bad things, big and small?

Years later, with a more conscious “faith seeking understanding,” I came across this text from the writer of the letter to the Hebrews: “…without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness.”

Historically, the Jews understood that the shedding of blood is somehow connected to life and forgiveness. Just before their massive exodus out of Egypt, they were told to slaughter unblemished year-old sheep or goats. They were to sprinkle the blood on their door posts as a sign to the angel of death to spare them from slaying their first-born: “When I see the blood, I shall pass over you.” This memorial to the Passover is celebrated to this day, and the elaborate sacrificial system that was subsequently established in ancient Israel conditioned them to think of the blood of bulls and goats as somehow efficacious in cleansing sin.

This sense that some sacrifice must be offered, some blood shed if the land that is laid waste is to be healed, is present in all cultures. Our tribal peoples would kill a white cock, there on a hill under the pale light of the moon, to still the spirits that roam. Others would slaughter pigs and divine from the entrails the cause of the pestilence that has ravaged the land.

Deep and strong in our nature is the primal sense that “the wrath of God is shed abroad”—and we must somehow do something terrible and hard if we are to turn this wrath away from us. Martin Luther, a monk before he turned Protestant reformer, went to Rome and climbed the Scala Sancta, the great sacred stairway, on his hands and knees, seeking spiritual relief. In this country, devotees gash their knees on the hard stone floor of churches as kneeling they “walk” from door to altar. Penitents, usually men, flagellate themselves with steel-tipped lashes or get themselves nailed on a makeshift cross. Other religions tell their adherents to walk on fire, eat no meat, sleep on a bed of nails, or do some such excruciating vow to convince the Almighty that we are in earnest.

Running through all this is the intuition that the face of God is distant, like Bathala of our pre-Hispanic culture, who is said to hide his face behind the clouds. “He is a dark lord,” said the natives, according to the account of the early Spanish missionary Fray Chirino, who asked why our ancestors offered sacrifices to the anito, but not to their supreme god. “He is so high we cannot speak to him,” the missionary was told, “but these spirits we know.”

The biblical narrative affirms that there has been alienation between us and God since Adam and Eve were banished from paradise. We are all, as the

Puritan Jonathan Edwards put it, “sinners in the hands of an angry God.” While most of us are fairly decent and not liars or murderers or thieves, and not incapable of being roused to some good and just cause, our law-keeping is simply not enough. Either we keep the whole law or not at all, said the Apostle James, and the law is hard: Adultery is not just going to bed with but also looking at a woman lustfully; loving God and neighbor means we organize our entire lives around God, and to fail to feed the poor will send us to hell, according to Luke’s story of the rich man and Lazarus.

“The soul that sins, it shall die,” we are told. God cannot simply sweep things under the rug; someone has to pay for all the tears that have ever been shed and all the crimes that have ever been committed. Not unable to sympathize with human weakness, God in mercy became like us so he himself can stand in our stead, and die the death we all must die. On the cross, God’s justice and mercy met: Jesus satisfied the fierce demands of a law that is too exacting for our feeble goodness and too justly intransigent to soften retribution.

To be able to forgive, the dying Christ absorbed the violence and the utter desolation of the punishment due us, not the least of which was being sundered from his Father, the agony of which rent and tore the very earth itself.

It cost God his very Son to forgive and reconcile the world to himself. It was not cheap, as is the kind of reconciliation being bandied about these days as the way to unity and peace. Without an equivalent “shedding of blood”—radicals call this “revolution,” religionists “retribution” and “restitution”—there can be no forgiveness for those who refuse to acknowledge wrongdoing, insisting instead on a shallow handshake while the thing at issue rankles and leaves the aggrieved wounded.

Unfortunately, we live in a culture whose sense of mercy tends to make our institutions soft and unable to mete out justice. In other places that suffered authoritarian rule, as in Romania, conjugal dictatorships like that of Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife are put on trial and get shot. In this country, not only does the dictator’s kin run around free, they also have the temerity to run for office and ride roughshod on demands for accountability.

Dr. Melba Padilla Maggay is a social anthropologist and president of the Institute for Studies in Asian Church and Culture.

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