ACCEPTING SUFFERING NONVIOLENTLY - C: Passion Sunday

First Reading: Isa 50:4-7 (10 April 2022)

“I did not cover my face against insult: I know I shall not be shamed” (Isa 50:6).

Isaiah 50:4-11 is the third part of the series of songs of the so-called Suffering Servant in deutero-Isaiah. The servant described here does not only openly accept insults but even embraces blows, spits, and physical harm (v. 6). The dilemma is why this servant is so complicit to suffering to the point that he does not bother to retaliate or, at least, question the offender. Does he have a low self-esteem that he does not anymore hope that justice can be served? Is he a masochist who delights in tolerating punishment to be inflicted on the self? Does he strategically accept pain to gain leverage over the abuser at a future time of vengeful reckoning?

The answer to these questions is elucidated by the overall usage of the theme of the Suffering Servant in the liturgical season of the Holy Week. As part of the representation of the Christ in his paschal mystery, this motif is not only a narrative device in stating what happened to Jesus prior to his crucifixion.

Rather, Jesus as the Suffering Servant is a symbol in itself that directs present-day sufferers to an ideal attitude in dealing with abuses, i.e., the nonviolent approach.

Being nonviolent, however, is not equivalent to complicity. Understood in its concurrent broad meaning, it can also denote active resistance and confrontation of injustice. In modern times, Mahatma Gandhi is often mentioned as the quintessential representative of nonviolent resistance. When India was still under the imperial British rule in the first half of the 20th century, Gandhi called for a nationwide civil disobedience as a way of making the colonizers irrelevant and powerless over the populace, who became self-reliant in their deliberate non-dependence to the government. In 1964, Martin Luther King, Jr., a known Gandhian disciple who advocated human rights for African Americans, described nonviolence as

“a powerful and just weapon ... which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it.”

Similarly, nonviolence has been perennial in the lives of acclaimed Filipino heroes. There is the national hero Jose Rizal who declined raising arms against the Spanish conquistadors in the late 19th century, proposing instead to fight with the pen and with a prerequisite education of the Filipinos. Ninoy Aquino was also nonviolent in opposing the Marcoses, allowing himself to be imprisoned and exiled for several years before bravely returning to the country to emancipate the nation from an abusive dictatorship through fair elections. The many nameless heroes of the People Power in EDSA in 1986 employed the nonviolent way of locking each one’s arms and offering flowers and prayers to the military to keep them from advancing their tanks. This event is dubbed as the first nonviolent revolution in the modern world that inspired many constituents of the then U.S.S.R to oppose their capital Moscow via massive protests.

Nonviolence has been indeed a part of the Filipino collective psyche for more than a century already. It has proven itself as a seemingly sacrificial but strong means in social transformation and liberation of the oppressed. Likewise, the metaphor of the Suffering Servant is a typology for nonviolence since he accepts suffering as a potent instrument to turn oppressors powerless before the Almighty God (v. 7), who is hoped to punish them in an eschatological moment.

As we enter the Holy Week, let us reflect on the image of Jesus as a Suffering Servant as our prototype of confronting an oppressive political system and emancipating the marginalized.

- Rex Fortes, CM