|
CHRISTENDOM’S two most important anniversary events
are often celebrated with meaningless fanfare. Merchants are
aflutter in decorating their department stores with mythical symbols
of the seasons. These seasons are indeed occasions of world
rejoicing but not in the opulent and materialistic manner that they
are being commemorated. During Christmas, malls are ablaze with
flying reindeers and an obese, hirsute geriatric in a fiery red
winter coat and oversized pajamas. But what really is the
connection, if any, of that heckler and his reindeers with the
solemn celebration of Nativity, which was a time when the Infant
Jesus was nearly slaughtered with hundreds of neonates by an
ambitious king. And during Easter, in which we now find ourselves,
supermarkets are once again memorializing Easter bunnies and colored
eggs, which have no relevance or materiality whatsoever to
Christ’s resurrection, a Man who had just been disemboweled
through a gruesome flogging, crowning of thorns and a bloody
crucifixion with nails hammered into His palms and feet. Where was
that ubiquitous rabbit then during the ultimate sacrifice of a
Man-God? Why was the rabbit laying colored eggs during the
Crucifixion? Ironically, Christmas and Easter have just become
commercial opportunities for the Filipino business elite to once
again exploit a Christian feast, rather than contribute to
people’s socioeconomic upliftment from their misery. What really
is Christian about celebrating Santa Claus and the Easter bunny
except that they further enrich the already opulent rich, who give
back nothing to a society drowning in a quagmire of its squalor?
During the past week, the world
must be recalling Christ’s last remaining hours on earth—His
despair at Gethsemane; His condemnation by Pontius Pilate; His agony
on the Cross; His entombment. Uppermost in our minds should be a
feeling of compassion for Christ, with an ability and willingness to
suffer as He suffered. It should have also been the feeling
uppermost in the minds of the Apostles and His disciples. Yet they
had utterly failed Christ by their abandonment in His final moments
of Passion and death—overwhelmed perhaps by the stark tragedy over
their Messiah treated as a common felon, then by a sense of final
separation, heightened by the thought of their cowardice in fleeing
persecution at the time when Christ needed them the most.
But during Easter Sunday itself,
the day of Resurrection, the world must rejoice, not with colored
Easter eggs purchased from a megamall that cheapens the joyful
celebration, but with the jubilation of one with Christian
compassion, who aspires to elevate humanity from its misery to
spiritual glory. Certainly, Easter is a momentous day as we
celebrate the love of a Man, who even in His last dying moments
forgave the people that crucified Him. In such selfless altruism, it
is a thought that corrupt politicians, ambitious actors and
athletes, greedy merchants and bankers, and even brain-dead justice
secretaries, may be redeemed if only they strive to understand
Christ’s selfless human sacrifice, who brought nothing earthly
from this world into the Great Beyond.
Man’s conquest of death was
made possible by Christ, who shackled Himself to the fate of the
oppressed and marginalized. The Divine indwelling, or Christ’s
communion within us through His travails and hardships, hammers the
message that death is conquered through charity and compassion. Only
in replicating such indomitable courage and selfless sacrifice in
our daily human struggles, in devotion to His memory and
humanitarian causes, are we enabled to immortalize ourselves. He
brings us hope of immortality because without such hope, the
hedonistic opulence of merchants is justified by such mundane
belief: “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die,”
appealing to many people in their materialistic lifestyles to
temporarily satisfy beckoning creature comforts, but when pursued
begets only a feeling of overwhelming hopelessness and despair.
For true Christians, death holds
no power and manifests no arrogance. We rejoice in the hope of
sharing in God’s glory, rejoicing even in the midst of suffering
because we know that suffering produces endurance; endurance
produces character; and character produces hope. Hope does not
deceive as God’s love is abundantly proven by a humble Man’s
ultimate sacrifice in freeing humanity from the shackles of its
greed and blind ambition.
|
