Revelation and Faith

with Salvation History

Main Reference: Believing Unto Discipleship: Jesus of Nazareth
by Fr. Lode Wostyn, CICM
 Course Outline
• The Bible: A Guide for my Life
• The Biblical Message: God Offering Salvation
• Images We Have of Jesus: Do They Matter?
• Jesus of Nazareth
• Jesus and the Kingdom
• The Suffering, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus
• Who Is This Man?
• Towards a Filipino Christ: Si Mang Hesus Isa sa Atin
Towards a Filipino Christ: Si Mang Hesus Isa sa Atin
a. Within the Jewish Culture
 b. Graeco-Roman World
(Christians began to stress the divinity of Jesus)
Portrayal of Jesus in artworks is not serious all the time.
The man of Nazareth is replaced by a series of images which are
partly products of Spanish and European Christianity. Jesus as a
spirit person, who ministered to people as a healer, a teacher of
transformative wisdom, and a prophet, is not honored anymore.
Most of the time, the message that gets across is that Jesus must
be a divine being who had to die in order to pay to an angry God
for the debt of our sins.
What about you,

Mt. 16:15
 Critique the picture
“The Incarnation”
below from the book
Christ for All People
by Ron O’Grady,
p.39
The Way of the Disciples
 The Way of the Disciples
1. Look at Jesus as he was
experienced by the
disciples.
2. Trace how this experience
came to be interpreted and
re-interpreted in history.
3. Interpret again this
interpreted experience
within our situation as
Filipino Christians. http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/its-time-again-to-
recommend-mere-churchianity
• The Greeks were right when
they tried to bring the
historical man from Nazareth
to their own world and let
him proclaim his message in
terms of their experience of
salvation as Greeks. The
same has to happen for our
own situation.
• We now attempt to meet
Jesus in our own Filipino
culture and socio-political
setting.
There is a close link between the experience of
salvation or well being and the meaning and
importance of particular historical person.
 In the same way we can state that the memory of
Jesus of Nazareth continues to survive in the lives of
our people because it helped shaped our destiny as
individuals and as a nation.
• Does Christianity, and
particularly he Roman
Catholic Church, bring
well being to the Filipino
nation?
• Notwithstanding the
proposals of PCP II, the
Church continued to lean
on the middle class and
the oligarch of society
and incurred a severe
rebuke by the poor
during the EDSA III revolt.
• Why are we confronted with
such an ambiguous attitude of
the Church?
• History tells us that Christians in
the Greek-Roman world were
confronted with a society in
decay and expected salvation
beyond this world by becoming
god-like and participating in the
life of the Divine.
• This vision developed into a
dualism, which divided life in
two areas: commitment to the
world and taking care of one’s
soul.
Following this philosophy, Christians were supposed
to be more concerned with the salvation of the soul
and less with the well being of the body and their
life in society.
As a result, the historical Jesus disappeared from
the horizon because a message concerning the
world in which people struggled to survive was not
needed.
Christ became a sacred being, a divine master, a
consoler who addressed Christians at the depths of
their hearts and prepared them through sacrifice
and prayer to share in his heavenly bliss.
• Our Catholic Church is
largely a middle class
Church in the sense that
middle class families are the
ones having greater
involvement in many Church
activities. They show up in
church and Church
organizations. They initiate
and spearhead Church
activities. It cannot be
denied that this “elite
Church” brought about
important changes in
society.
 Yet, ironically, these nice and practicing Christians often
preach a Christ that is unreal. The spiritualized Christ
seems to encourage only prayer, devotion, and warm
interpersonal relationships at the expense of an outreach
to the harsh realities of our society.
In our society are people of real flesh and blood, the poor
and the oppressed who have to struggle to survive.
If we succeed in correcting this spiritualized and imported
Christ, we may meet “again for the first time” Mang
Hesus, isa sa atin.
 How can Jesus proclaim a message
relevant to our search for humanness,
justice, well being, or salvation?
 On Poverty.
The Church keeps on proclaiming that it will become a
Church of the poor. But to a great extent, we have been
and still are a Church of the rich and the middle class.
 People live under bridges, and along esteros without
any protection while the mansions of the rich are
secured with high rising walls and barbed wire as
protection from the world outside, which includes the
world of the poor.
• Poverty is not simply a
problem of individuals
but a structural
problem. Systems in
society perpetuate
poverty. The economic
and political structures
of our society were
created to protect the
upper bracket. They
give very little
opportunity to many to
escape the clutches of
poverty.
 Local Culture.
Life is a constant experience of hirap and ginhawa. We
have to recognize the limits of human life. Yet, amidst this
limitation, we can offer one another moments of
ginhawa. “Kay sarap ng buhay kung sama-sama tayong
makaahon sa hirap.”
 Life also offers love, togetherness, food, wealth, and
blessings. Salamat sa Diyos is a common expression of
the Filipino to recognize the experience of ginhawa as
God’s gift of life and grace.
 Primary Conflict
Romans and Sadducees V.S. Peasants
 In the footsteps of the prophets, Jesus exposed the
abuses of the leadership, pronounced God’s judgement
and threat, and invited people to create an alternative
society based on justice and compassion.
• For the leadership, Jesus the
liberator was indeed a threat.
He had to be killed.
• Jesus was an ordinary Jew, a
wood worker, but a spirit
person. Experiencing God’s
compassion, God’s
kagandahang loob, he
reached out the common tao
and brought them well being.
These communities did not
forget their master and
continued to give ginhawa to
one another.
Our Christian tradition says that Jesus is fully human
and at the same time consubstantial with God,
sharing in God’s being.
• Mere beliefs “have little
ability to change our
lives. One can believe all
the right things and
remains jerk, or worse.”
• Christian life is about
meaningful relationships,
and the challenge for us
is to confess our faith in
Jesus, human and divine,
in such a way that it can
lead to such
relationships.
Many of us have priorities in life, which sound like
money, power, prestige, self, career, sex, and so on.
They are often our gods.
Jesus lived a very different kind of priorities: service,
humility, sharing, solidarity, compassion, and
commitment to liberation.
• Where did Jesus get these
priorities? What made him
live his humanity this way?
• As Christians, we confess
that in the depth of Jesus
humanity we can see God
at work. In his
commitment and
compassion we recognize
the face of God, a
compassionate Father or
Mother, a God more
thoroughly human than
any human being.
• Some modern teachers
of theology adopted a
kind of new confession
about Jesus Christ: Jesus
is the great parable of
God and at the same
time the paradigm of
humanity.
• Jesus so fully possessed
God’s kagandahang loob
that his whole life
became a manifestation
of it, an outflow of
ginhawa.
Wherever Jesus went, he brought ginhawa. How could he
manifest such goodness? Because in Jesus, the very depth
of God’s kagandahang-loob, became manifest. In Jesus,
we experience God’s very being, what divinity is really
like. This is the meaning of the statements “Jesus is God”
and “Jesus is the Son of God.”
 “God is the God of life, the one who confronts the idol of
death – greed and corruption, oppression and violence – and
liberates us to enter the fullness of life. The God of the bible is
the defender of the poor who enters into a relationship of
loving commitment with all people. Where do we find God? In
the project of Jesus, in the life of faithful solidarity and witness
to life.” - Gustavo Gutierrez
College of the Immaculate Conception – Cabanatuan