Each one cares for two

Two coins in one basket mark Yoshua Ibn Nazareth’s last visit to Jerusalem by Mark of the first Gospel account, two generations later. The first marker is the poor fig tree that gets cursed for not bearing fruit, and the second the indignation over the moneychangers in the Temple for living off financial instruments at the expense of those who really labor to earn their dinars and shekels. Making profit out of the exchange of currencies is what financial institutions do, creating illusory phantom wealth, but nevertheless, exercising actual power and influence!

The conservative impulse to condemn unproductivity of individuals, not so much because it is suicidal not to care for one’s self as that it puts the onus of social responsibility to create social nets to save “laziness” and “failure” in the hands of the wealthy ones and publicly mandated societal institutions, has just passed the House in its intent to privatize Medicare and Medicaid, among others. Deeply ingrained is a deep distrust over the genuine accountability of public structures, a repulsive presumption but held widely and regrettably, with seemingly good reasons. 

The so-called economic liberalization adheres to the mythology of the “invisible hand” of the market that guides well the destinies of social capital if left unfettered by regulatory interference. The Chicago boys have shown evangelical seal in promoting this gospel, and its short-term effect lauded in the streets of Santiago under Pinochet is much heralded amongst economic theorists.

Bill Clinton, a popular and high-approval rating 42nd U.S. President, noted for his first political campaign with the slogan “the economy, stupid,” proceeded upon assumption of office to leave the financial giants and the stock market alone to its devices, leaving the accountants’ ledger with surplus after he left office, but alas most of it illusory that did not hold water when squandered by the younger Bush’s wars of adventure.

Holy Week in Christendom is a time of meditation (learning from memory and recall), contemplation (being radically and affirmatively present to the present), and prayer (actively wedging one’s being in the reformulation of the future, by the GoG, but over my dead body, as it were). Our time sure requires a lot of praying, not of the kind where we sit in the comfort of cushioned dagans but in the liturgical sense of throwing one’s body in the barb wires of history.

One of my teaching colleagues in the U.S. eastern seaboard promotes a program that invites each reading learner to teach two. As a pedagogical tool, learning a subject is best accomplished when taught, so learners seek not only a learning partner but another object of pedagogy as well. Learning is thus reinforced, at least three times!

We borrow this image in our prayerful stance this Holy Week for what happens in the practical import of “each one cares for two.” In China with the urban single child policy, we witnessed two parents doting on one “little emperor,” and the society is now awakening to the rapid graying of its population into senior citizens’ wards, so the scramble is on at the governmental level for an adequate response to an unprecedented phenomenon and the unusual increase of cases of parents taking their children to court for filial neglect!

This is beyond the usual injunction of “loving one another.” It is an invitation for everyone to consciously and freely decide to be a support structure of two other beings, whether it be physically, emotionally, mentally or institutionally.

We foist this picture particularly among those who consider themselves followers of one who dared confront the powers-that-be in his time. The medieval interpretation of that act tended to be a substitutionary one, of the innocent liege lord taking the place of a convicted “sinner” deprived of the empires’ feast until properly “saved,” with all the romanticism and sentimentality in the telling.

The ancient one is really about an ordinary guy who in effect said to his enrobed contemporaries and peers in Jerusalem, “You are waiting for the Messiah, an Elijah to deliver you from the rule of the Romans. Well, I have good news for you. No one is coming, and I who tell you that truth is the only Messiah you will ever get. So, you want to get well? Roll up your sleeves, pick up your life and walk!”  Those with the faith to see and saw the truth let Yoshua aka Yohoshua and Iesu earn the appellation of Kristo Rai.

Unfortunately, in the retelling of the Passion of the Christ story, like Mel Gibson’s movie and the Oberammergau Passion Play, it is stuck in the medieval retelling and ecclesiastical orthodoxy requires faithfulness to the old form rather than the function.

Back to the fig tree and the moneychangers, or, if we were given liberty to restate, the entitled perennially dependent on the dole, on the one hand, or the rapacious usurer and speculative investor, on the other, are properly condemned options. Caring for two, beyond the self-centered replacement of one’s self, is an offered option, a rather very Christian one, if we may add, and that’s the caring-for-two path, and my invitation to others this way this week.

Let us meditate. Let us contemplate. Let us earnestly pray!