The Punishing God
Recently
I was celebrating mass in a barrio (village). Before we began, a local
lady warned the children to behave or the priest would beat them.
I squirmed inside me at what was happening. For children, the God
image and the Priest image are almost the same. These children were
being told a lie about the priest and also about God. They were being
told that God was one that punishes. They were being taught that God
was violent and to be feared. They were being taught the God of Gaba
(hitting back) or the Parosa ng Dios. Where there is fear and dishonesty
there can be no love. It is no wonder that we have so much fear in
our society and belief in God as one who punishes. Often the sick
will ask, "What sin did I commit for which I am being punished
by this illness?" The problem of a barter concept of religion
was already dealt with centuries ago in the book of Job. His friends
tried to convince him that if he was suffering evil he must have done
evil. Job came to see that God is gratuitous in his actions. We can
never answer the question why God acts in a particular way and we
must resist the idea that we can control God, and make God act as
we would want, either by our goodness or by our badness. Yet the idea
of suffering being a punishment for sin continued on to the time of
Christ.
This
weekend we read in the Sunday Gospel about the man who had been blind
from birth. His disciples asked Jesus, "Rabbi, who sinned, this
man or his parents, for him to be born blind?"
"Neither
he nor his parents sinned," Jesus answered. "He was born
blind so that the works of God might be displayed in him." One
would think that would be enough to dispel the idea of the punishing
God, but the idea continues to our own day.
In
the time of Jesus the Scribes and Pharisees had a God whom they saw
as dwelling outside this world and whom they tried to placate by a
multiplication of laws. This God intervened in our world to punish
those who broke the laws and to reward those who kept them. When the
first missionaries came to the Philippines they were children of their
own history. The understanding of God that they brought was very strong
on the Father-God in heaven who, together with all other authority,
was to be obeyed absolutely. Their understanding and teaching about
the Son-God, who became a human being like us, and about the Holy
Spirit-God, who dwells in and is ever praying in our hearts, was very
inadequate. The authoritarian image of God that the missionaries brought
was useful politically for the colonizer in making it a sin to challenge
any kind of authority. It also re-enforced the fearfulness towards
the spirit world, the "not-like-us-world" of the pre-christian
animistic beliefs. This all led to the image of a punishing God "up
there" that is still part of the lives of so many people today.
But
two very significant things are happening at present. Firstly, the
Basic Ecclesial Community (BEC) is recognized as the official model
or way of being church in the Philippines and in many other places
today. This is a model of Church, similar to that of the early Christians,
where neighbors come together to share and celebrate around the word
of God in the context of the realities of their every day lives. As
they share the Scriptures in this way God is pulled out of the sky
and experienced as acting in our world. The great change in this model
of Church is that the primary location of God is no longer "out
there" in Heaven but is now "right here" on earth.
But
the BEC in itself is not sufficient. There is another presence of
God that needs to be acknowledged, that is the presence of the Spirit-God
dwelling in our hearts. This presence is now being acknowledged by
the growing numbers who are going from their reflection on Scripture
into periods of silence. In this silent meditation they just BE, without
words or images. Freeing and healing begins to take place.
A
person cannot be argued out of the fears that are deep within. But
if one can experience that there is no need to fear then the fear
will go away by itself. This is what meditation is doing. It is correcting
the image of the punishing God.
Recently
one of our meditators told us about how in the past she went to the
shrine of San Antonio, at Sibulan, Negros Oriental, on the thirteenth
of each month. She had to go there, she said, because she was afraid
that if she did not, something bad may happen to her husband or to
her children. Of late, she had noticed that she was no longer compulsed
into going there. She went if she felt like it. What was happening?
I believe that she was becoming a free person as she came to experience,
through meditation, the love of God within her and this was replacing
the punishing God that had tyrannized her up to this time.
Taken
from Sundays
into Silence - A Pathway to Life. Copyright © 1998 by Claretian
Publications
