LAST week saw the basal, the animal, within us as people panicked to stock up on essentials and non-essentials simply because they can and they fear.
That face masks became scarce a month ago and alcohol started disappearing from the shelves two weeks later was just a prelude to how rabid, yes, like animals with rabies, a person can become when fear takes over.
We laughed over videos shared on social media, said to be in Australia, when three women tore each other’s hair over a 12-roll tissue pack even as two of them already had one full cart of tissue paper. Many leered, many believed they were better than these barbaric women.
But when the number of Covid-19 cases increased in the Philippines and a Red Alert sub-level 1 was announced followed by a sub-level 2 proclamation just a day or two later, the barbarians took over and hoarded, unmindful of other people who need these essentials as well. Worst, others were hoarding not for their families but to have something to sell at very high prices.
No wonder, the Christ needed to die for the sins of mankind. But, apparently, it takes more than one death of a God made Flesh to cleanse us. How sad.
We cannot blame these people. After all, it takes a spiritually mature soul to see into all these and respond only in love for humankind and not just for the family – free from the confines of fear, doubt, worry, and lack. After more than four centuries, the world’s largest Roman Catholic country still has a lot to learn about the faith of a mustard seed.
But then, that’s understandable if this Bible parable is taken as how many priests explain it: in terms of the mustard seed’s size. Because I believe it’s not.
While we were bombarded by interpretation of the parable since we were kids in a Catholic school that a tiny dot of faith is all we need because that is what Jesus said in the Gospels. This was further interpreted as being in a better position of having that tiny faith than having none. It also was interpreted as the potential of a tiny seed growing into a vast kingdom. But wait... is that really how we should be looking at it at all as individuals granting we are really more family-inclined than kingdom-builders?
First, sorry guys, the mustard here is not the ‘mustasa’ we know. Interpreters say it’s the black mustard plant, a large annual plant that can grow up to nine feet in height, very much unlike the mustasa that we pickle in brine. This nine-foot plant grows from a tiny seed.
That it is seemingly exclusively referred to how big you can be is because an earlier reference in the Gospels does talk about Jesus describing what God’s Kingdom is like. But in a later chapter, the same seed is used to describe all the faith you need. Along the way, lines were crossed.
I’d say, what’s being said in the amount of faith required of us is the certainty of that mustard seed, a tiny seed as described, that it is growing to be a mustard plant nine feet in height. Like nowhere in the seed’s life did it ever think it will grow as a Sequoia tree or a pechay. It is a mustard seed and a mustard it will grow, never mind if it is just a dot and its parent is nine feet tall. After pondering on that, I felt better about what I was reading, and so I knew this must be it. Priests and preachers can interpret it the way they have always been interpreting it, I’d repeat mine over and over to anyone who cares to listen. It was never about the size, it was about the certainty, as certain as that we are the perfect image and likeness. I am free.
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