18 - Towards A Filipino Christ 2

Revelation and Faith
with Salvation History

Main Reference: Believing Unto Discipleship: Jesus of Nazareth
by Fr. Lode Wostyn, CICM
Course Outline
• The Bible: A Guide for my Life
• The Biblical Message: God Offering Salvation
• Images We Have of Jesus: Do They Matter?
• Jesus of Nazareth
• Jesus and the Kingdom
• The Suffering, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus
• Who Is This Man?
• Towards a Filipino Christ: Si Mang Hesus Isa sa Atin
In Jesus, the very depth of God’s kagandahang-
loob, became manifest. In Jesus, we experience
God’s very being, what divinity is really like. This
is the meaning of the statements “Jesus is God”
and “Jesus is the Son of God.”
• PCP II challenges the Church to
become again a community of
disciples, which will take as its
primary task, the search to
become fully human together with
others.
• This search was the center of
Jesus’ ministry. Jesus took up the
cause of human beings because it
was the cause of his Abba. He
cared because his Father in heaven
cared. We cannot go on telling this
story without making it true in our
lives, by our efforts for peace,
justice, and freedom for all.
• Our actions in relation
to poverty, political
corruption, ecological
destruction, and the
many other issues
affecting our becoming
human together, will
have to be informed
by our vision of God
that we received from
our master who is the
great parable of God.
We do not need Jesus to become political liberators. Karl
Marx or Mao Tse Tung may be more forceful teachers.
We don’t need Jesus to teach us to champion the cause
of the poor. Ghandi is much more contemporary and, as
an Asian, he may be closer to us in terms of concrete
strategies to change society. We don’t even need Jesus to
shout together with some enthusiastic souls: “Brothers,
sisters, we are saved!” Some of the fundamentalist sects
have their own prophets better than Jesus. But we need
Jesus in his experience of God-Abba to nurture and to
add a specific dimension to our socio-political
commitment, our relationship to other persons, our care
for the earth, and our awareness and experience of the
divine or the sacred. (Edward Schillebeeckx)
You delete the special relationship to God from the life of
Jesus and you destroy at once his message and the whole
point of his way of living. It amounts to destroying the
historical reality, Jesus of Nazareth, and ends up with a
projection, a mythical being, a Jesus of your own making.”
(Edward Schillebeeckx)
• Jesus, as a lens through
which we see God, enables
us to see much. What we
see is deeply Jewish, already
found in the voices of spirit
persons like Moses, the
prophets, the psalmists, and
the teachers of wisdom. In
Jesus, those voices come
together with particular
power and eloquence. Jesus
as a lens becomes a
magnifying glass for our own
God-relationship.
If we look at Jesus, we realize that our relationship with God
should be characterized by the following:
• Life centered in the Spirit
• Inspired by alternative wisdom
• Marked by compassion
• Concerned about justice
• Lived within the alternative community of Jesus.
1.Life Centered in the
Spirit
• God is near, at hand,
and can be
experienced. God is
the one “in whom we
live and move and
have our being” (Acts
17:28).
• To live a life centered
in the Spirit is to enter
into a conscious and
intentional relationship
with God.
2. Inspired by Alternative Wisdom
• Jewish and Christian traditions have often
claimed a monopoly on access to God.
• Jesus represents an alternative wisdom. He
taught and embodied an un-mediated
relationship with the sacred. In his preaching
and healing and table fellowships, he
communicated a God who was accessible to
those who were “not much” including the
radically marginalized and outcasts.
• Religious traditions, institutions, structures,
laws, and rituals have their importance, but
Jesus tells us that they do not constitute our
relationship with God. Rather they are
instruments to help us clarify, express, and
share with one another our religious
experiences.
3. Lived in Compassion
• Compassion is not simply the will of God, but the very quality of
God. God’s compassion is life-giving, nourishing, embracing:
God feeds the birds, clothes the lilies, makes the sun rise on the
just as well as the unjust, and sends rain on the righteous and
the wicked.
• Adopting God's compassion, we no longer divide people into
the cultural categories of attractive and unattractive, successful
and unsuccessful, deserving and un-deserving, interesting and
uninteresting.
• Compassion and empathy allows us to go beyond this
convention and see people in the wider picture of an
interconnected web of life which is sustained by a loving,
compassionate God.
4. Concerned about Justice
• We saw that Jesus’ passion for justice in the name of God was the
cause of his death. He challenged oppression and suffered the wrath
of the oppressor.
• A compassion that does not recognize that much of the world's
misery flows from systematic injustice is a compassion that is partially
blind. We are called to become politically aware as well as loving.
5. Life in Community
• Like the Jewish tradition in which he stood, Jesus saw the
covenant with God as not simply about a relationship with God,
but also as relationship with others.
• For us today, life in the community of Jesus nourishes life in the
spirit. Our worship together celebrates and mediates the reality
of God; our learning together draws us deeper into the way of
Jesus; and our acting together seeks to incarnate “the dream of
God,” namely, compassion and justice in the world of everyday.
When we declare ourselves disciples of Jesus of Nazareth in
today’s world, we do it because we still experience Jesus, the
Christ, as an offer of salvation, liberation, and wholeness. He
continues to reveal a compassionate God among us his disciples,
inviting us to become loving and compassionate human beings
(mga taong may malasakit sa kapwa at kalikasan).
If we can look at Jesus as the parable of God and the
paradigm of our humanity, it is because we see him as isa sa
atin. He is one of us and one with us. As deeply human and
humane, we can see in him who God is and what we are. As
isa sa atin, we can identify with him and become his
disciples.
What happened in the history of Christianity was that the message of
Jesus had been purged too much of its originality and harshness. It had
been toned down. The rough and sharp edges had to be removed to
make it less disturbing for people who prefer a benign and almost
effeminate Christ to a Jesus who is passionately inclined to speak out
his mind and act against the maladies of his society.
The sting or bite of the message got lost. The result is that
there are some Christians who do not feel angry at, or
challenged to action by, the dehumanizing poverty, the
corruption, and oppression in society.
If Jesus is indeed isa sa atin, then we owe it to him (as our
kasama) and to ourselves and to one another to make his
message ring out once more with all its unflinching urgency and
concreteness, crying out a challenge to a society that has become
blind or indifferent to its own problems.
We have to let Jesus speak once more with all the “untamed
incisiveness of his words” (S. Kappen), challenging us to concrete
actions that may hopefully contribute to the betterment of our
families and communities.
“Lord, for by your Cross and Resurrection you
have set us free, you are the savior of the world.”
Freedom is at Hand
(Assignment)
Write a reflection paper on any of the
following topics (choose 1 only)
• Jesus and the problem of poverty in the Philippines.
• Jesus and Church-State Relationship.
• Jesus and Ecology.
• Also, write a reflection about your learning in CL
102 as a whole.
Note:
1. Type-written on a short bond paper
2. Double-spaced
3. Garamond, font size 12.
Leader:
O God, you have loved us with a love
unequalled since time begun. Jesus came to
speak about that love to us. May we be
recipient to his spirit as we pray together
today.
O God, who starves on the sidewalk, who
scavenges the garbage dumps to find edible
scraps in garbage heaps,
All: Help us to see you in the poor and the
needy.
Leader:
O God who watches when surplus foods are
dumped into the ocean; who sees food rot
for want of a picker; who sees crops
destroyed to keep prices high and business
profitable,
All: Open our hearts to the starving.
Leader:
O God, the facts cry out. In our world, 200
million families live in subhuman conditions
while a few enjoy prosperity. Two-thirds of
the world’s population does not get enough
food to eat each day. Fifty million die of
starvation a year: more than any war has ever
destroyed.
All: Fill our hearts with compassion, Lord.
Leader:
O God, who is present at board meetings of
big corporations, where important people act
like they did not know people need to eat, to
live in peace, and to enjoy life; who is present
at strikes where workers are bullied and
forced to give in because their children are
hungry; who everyday sees children with
hollow eyes,
All: Shatter our indifference, Lord.
Leader:
O God, who furrows a field with a patched-up
plow; who raises scraggly vegetables in a field
crying for rest; who lived on fish until they
polluted the streams,
All: Inspire us to work for a better world; a
world we can call home. Amen.

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Revelation and Faith

with Salvation History

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