Gethsemani and Golgotha

I usually do some mundane chore during my thinking time. From my second floor tenement dwelling that I now occupy 30 days ago after I moved out of the faculty room at Shenyang Aerospace University’s Friendship Villa, the chore takes the form of sweeping the steps and mopping the dirt off three floor landings, at least two times a week.

Twelve steps down the ground level are basement rooms used by local entrepreneurs to warehouse cartoons of goods. This week, I decided to tackle the bowels of my buildings’ accumulation of dirt and years of stairs’ sweepings, and while I was carting out mounds of dirt and trash from the basement floor to the ground level landing on to the trash bin outside, a young businessman in leather jacket came to retrieve a couple of huge boxes with his dolly.

He might have noticed that he no longer needed to gingerly avoid trash on his way down, and in fact, could feel the cement steps under his shoes without worrying about slipping down from the accumulated loose dirt. It was on his second trip, after exchanging words with one of the tenants who might have mentioned that I was the foreigner who lives on the second floor who has this crazy obsession of wanting to keep the place tidy and clean, i.e., scraping the unsightly pasted ads on the stair walls and doors as well as leaving potted plants on the stair’s windows and landings, that we connected.

On his way out the young man motioned to me and opened his jacket, proudly pulling out from under his shirt a silver crucifix necklace. He was not a Protestant because the crucifix was not bare. The icon of the suffering Jesus crowned with thorns made me suspect that he’s run into a padre or two madres (they always seem to go by pairs) in his wanderings, and had heard not a few catacomb stories when the faithful were forced to keep identity a secret.

I had mixed feelings. Raised in the evangelical/revival tradition, I reflexively appreciate those who hold convictions. Yet there was more pride than faith in his demeanor, and I would not have been surprised had he attributed whatever success he had on commerce, not unlike his Korean kindred, on the sunshine attributes of his sovereign, “Thank you, Jesus!”

A few days before, I had lunch with former students (who always insist on going Dutch), one named Kiwi who received my former VA car tag “Kiwi One,” my er lao po and I once got in honor of our daughter Andrea conceived in Wellington, NZ, years back. The tag handover was delayed a month because Kiwi broke her waist. Hospitalized, she refused the surgery offered and in the process discovered the power of quiet meditation. Though influenced by Buddhists, she decided to use the theistic language of the intervening other to describe her “miraculous” healing and the source of her new strength.

Being a former theologian, challenged for half a century to shun the theistic metaphor, I was nevertheless delighted that she articulated the existential sense of the awe and the awesome, being herself an awed one. She is in good company. In writing of the events told them, Luke portrayed a wavering Jesus in his “let this cup runneth not over me, but thy will, not mine, be done.” Mark had a more plaintive and traditional cry on the cross: “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” (My Lord, my Lord, why have thy forsaken me?)

Our pictures of the vigil in Gethsemani and the crucifixion at Golgotha (aka, the Skull), heavily influenced by Iberia to pacify natives in their use of the sword to further the cause of the cross, are the image of a quivering Jesus in deep doubt on the one hand and a victim betrayed and forsaken on the other. This is not a complete picture.

In my own clarity, the image set in this whole Holy Week scenario begins with a big hoopla of a triumphal entry into the portal of powers, and then a willful demonstration of the coercive inefficacy of death in determining the meaning of life. Put bluntly, Jesus was not a victim as wailed many times over on the 14 stops to the Stations of the Cross.

Luke was clear about Jesus:

“When you see a cloud rising in the west,
you say at once that it is going to rain,
and so it does.
And when you feel the south wind blowing,
you say that it is going to be hot,
and so it is.

You frauds! You know how to interpret the look of the earth and sky.
Why can’t you interpret the meaning of the times in which you live?
And why can’t you decide for yourselves what is right?”

That, perhaps, was the source of my discomfort with our proud young businessman with the crucifix necklace. I do not think he ever got the chance to plumb the depth of the cost of discipleship, as Dietrich Bonheoffer once did, and paid with his life for it. At the core of “faith” is the human decision. Jesus decided. He chose to be crucified.

Now, as for me, from dust I might have come but in dust, I shall refrain. So please, pass the broom and the mop, and I trust you will get those plastic wrappers off the street and into the trash bins! To paraphrase old Mom, “Tidiness is next to awesomeness!”

Jaime Vergara previously taught at SVES in the CNMI. A peripatetic pedagogue, he last taught in China but makes Honolulu, Shenyang, and Saipan home. He can be reached at pinoypanda2031@aol.com.