I ASKED my sister in Christ, Kimee Echavez Santiago, for permission to post her take on the Christian perspective on the Supreme Court’s decision to allow the burial of the late dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos.
As an anti-Marcos activist, I found myself struggling reconciling my rekindled faith with my quest for justice in behalf the victims of martial rule. Sis Kimee provided the discernment on the Christian attitude toward this issue. Take it away, Sis!
The Marcoses need mercy.
The action that results from mercy is forgiveness. Like the God of our own image and likeness whose imitation is the goal of our life, we must be ready to forgive to be forgiven, as Christ taught us in the Lord’s Prayer.
But forgiveness is offered to the repentant. It is offered, not imposed especially if the receiver is not ready or is merely uninterested.
Forgiveness was given to the thief after his humility. The other thief, obviously uninterested, was not forced to repent. Our gentleman of a God just allowed him, undisturbed by a wrathful sky or by lightning. Still, the truth that he was a thief remains unchanged. For mercy to be dispensed, justice, the responsibility to admit sin, is necessary.
God’s justice is not vengeance, but the upholding of the truth. It is the truth that sent the prodigal son walking back home in shame, the filthy, searing truth that the father’s mercy embraced.
For our own sake we must be ready to forgive the Marcoses to collectively free us from the poison of their memory. But like God who while loving the goats separates them from the sheep, we need to be just, truthful, and sharp in memory.
“God does not forget...Justice cannot be silenced or ignored,” writes Peter Kreeft. Because God is just and perfect, He remembers our goatness and the goatness of the Marcoses. Out of love, we have the obligation to protect goat from sheep, hero from hoax, truth from untruth.
To bury Marcos in the company of heroes would not only be a desecration of the legacy of the valiant and a seed of confusion in our future, but a repression of much needed justice. This protracted fight for justice is for all, not only for the tortured and incarcerated. It is for the Marcoses, too, so that they may also be ushered to the mercy of God which they terribly need. Justice and mercy are for the whole Philippines, the Philippines in Asia, and the Philippines abroad converging at odd hours in social media, delighted but physically distant, joyful and jealous, loved and lied to by man and meme, hurt and hurtful, merry but manipulated. Take away justice and truth, and we take away the chance at mercy.
Lastly, we must not confuse God’s mercy with our mercy, God’s justice with our justice, God’s memory with our memory. For us, our justice may start and end in violence, and our mercy may start and end in convenience and timidity. Our memory may be tainted with lies and our truth, shushed by self-preservation. But God’s mercy, justice, forgiveness, and truth (God as the Supreme Origin of all these virtues) painfully starts and ends solely in love.
No one ever said Christianity was easy.
(bqsanc@yahoo.com)