The culture of death

The Passover feast is a commemoration of the liberation of the Jewish people from their enslavement in the quarries of Egypt. Save for the Babylonian captivity, the enslavement was by default, almost like bonded servitude experienced by many contract workers around the world. Contracted service is a quantifiably monetized value, assessing labor for its marketability, not its intrinsic human worth.

The New Testament witness has Paul testifying that “sin abounds, but grace abounds much more.” The history of Christendom missed that crucial testimony. Much of Christianity leaves a trail of warring factions in the ravages of war. As late as Georgie Bush’s presidency and his retinue of Armageddon warriors mapping foreign and defense policies, we heard articulated the justification of the preemptive offense as a military strategy. Most recently, we heard the Obama administration tick off the conditions when it was justifiable to “salvage” an American!

All these in the name of security, which has become our God! It is no comfort to haul the pacific Jesus of the anti-war movement. Jesus did not shy away from recognizing the ways of violence when he told followers that his message divides kin from the same household. As with the poor, violence will always be with us. The facticity is not the contradiction; designation of cause, and the accountability of blame, is.

The culture of death was enshrined when Augustine traced human depravity to genesis in the garden by Mesopotamia. The theistic creator of the universe condemned but sustained human degradation itself. Such force had to be appeased, and the theology of salvation was not too far behind. Jesus was the substitutionary son in the Abrahamic tradition, save the older story spared the child. In the Golgotha story, the child is sacrificed as befitting the requirements of a vengeful sovereign.

Ah, but the images we hold in our imagination determines the texture and direction of our behavior. We miss out on the true nature of education when we insist on students passing tests of memorized data rather than wringing them through the rigors of self-consciously confronting the images they live by.

The “hoodie” in the Martin Trayvon case has since come to the fore as an example of our delving in the devil of the details rather than confronting the import of the image in the big picture. Gerardo made the mistake of airing advice to parents not to let their kids off with their hoodies (a popular hooded sweat shirt). Even the White House promo on hoodies got withdrawn after the Florida incident, yet no one seems ready to confront the climate of fear that has shrouded our living arrangements as evidenced in our gated neighborhoods. The volunteer watchman gunman Zimmerman himself admitted that it was already dark and it was raining, so Martin had his hood up.

America sadly has become the biggest importer of the culture of death in our time. Our self-story has been that we were dragged kicking into the two World Wars. Not so, our historians now note. The Civil War was conducted with wide-open eyes. Our track record on non-European immigrants is not a rosy one. Our duplicity from the Maine at the Havana harbor, and on to the Gulf of Tonkin resolution is now a matter of record, and the forgiving Filipinos mired in their theistic fatalism have all but forgotten Dewey’s betrayal at Manila Bay (but now claim an unofficial seat around American hearths as the 51st State of the Union).

We hesitate to use the word “forgiveness” to apply to a case in a culture where revenge is all but sanctioned. But I heard the word used in China’s CCTV9 lexicon, its English news station, in the recent account of Zhang Yanwei, mother of Zhang Meng, her 25-year-old son who six years ago was senselessly stabbed eight times by a gang of eight young man until he bled to death. A dispute arose over a girl the young Zhang was walking home.

To lose a child in a one-child society can be the most tragic thing to happen to a mother. Yanwei kept a journal of her “conversations” with her son while the case was on trial. The verdict was the death penalty to be implemented immediately for the primary crime perpetrator and life sentences for the remaining seven. The family of the convicts appealed, sent a feeler to Yanwei for a conference of reconciliation, a procedure allowed in the Chinese judicial system that affects verdicts.

Zhang Yanwei’s “conversations” with her son led her to realize that her son was the “forgiving” kind. She consented to a verdict of suspended implementation of the death penalty. The news focused on the lifting of a heavy burden off Yanwei’s shoulders as her kin were adamant in following the vengeful dictates of their hearts, while hers in honor of her son went the path less traveled.

The Gospel accounts on Jesus’ Friday have Mark and Matthew crying the Psalmist’s anguish, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani! Luke offered words of forgiveness, and John, chronologically the last to be written, affirmed Jesus’ finitude and the almost Islamic abject surrender of the completed life.

It is the reality of forgiveness that is the antidote to the culture of death. Once a divine prerogative, it is now a human choice. Alas, Jesus still remains crucified.