By BISHOP REUEL MARIGZA
ON BEHALF of the National Council of Churches in the Philippines, I greet you, “Happy Easter!” Christ our Lord is risen!
During the early part of the extreme enhanced community quarantine, more truthfully known as lockdown, a friend posted in the Facebook, a song we used to sing during our Christian Youth Fellowship (CYF) days:
The marketplace is empty, no more traffic in the streets
All the builders’ tools are
silent, no more time to harvest wheat
Busy housewives cease their
labor, in the courtroom no debate
Work on earth has been
suspended, As the King comes to the gate.
Almost accurate scene, except that the housewives never ceased their labor, and the King has not yet come. There was a sense of emptiness, a sense of isolation, a sense of being forsaken.
Jesus knew the feeling. After initiating the Holy Communion that Thursday, Jesus took the disciples to the Gethsemane, and moving further with James, Peter and John, he went a little more beyond, where in his deep grief, he wrestled and struggled in prayer. He felt alone and forsaken, his disciples could not even keep watch with him for an hour; when he was arrested not soon after, all his disciples deserted him except two, the one who betrayed him, and the one who would deny him.
Under the hands of rulers and soldiers, he alone faced the insults and jeers, the beating and the whipping, alone and forsaken was he!
At the cross he cried, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” What could be more agonizing than that?
In these days, we have experienced the sense of isolation, but more so, for those who are in the margins of our society, the poorest of the poor, who felt not only isolated but forsaken. Told to stay at home, yet without provision of basic necessities, they shouted out for food to those who had the power and the means, and what they got was threats of being shot dead, and threats of, as well as, actual arrest. Can you blame them if they cry out, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken us?”
In many junctures of human history that has been the agonizing cry: from the Jews at Holocaust to the Palestinians wanting a homeland; from the slaves of America to the sacadas of the Negros Island; from the times of bubonic plague to the time of COVID-19. “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken us?” (To be continued/PN)
