A tangible, accessible God

How could Joseph and Mary have lost sight of Jesus on the way back to Nazareth after celebrating the Feast of the Passover in Jerusalem? Devout Jews visited Jerusalem three times a year to celebrate the Feast of Booths, the Feast of Dedication and the Passover Feast. Nazareth in Galilee, northern Israel, is roughly 65 km. away from Jerusalem. It would have taken a caravan of Galileans roughly five days to travel one way southward to the City of David. Women walked together and chatted about domestic issues with their children in tow or within their sight, while the men walked ahead and at the back of the caravan. As a toddler, Jesus would have walked in the company of Mary his mother and the other women. But at 12, just before a Jewish boy undergoes the bar mitzvah, the rite of passage into manhood, Jesus could have walked among the women or the men. Mary must have thought Jesus was with Joseph and the other men, while Joseph presumed Jesus was with his mother as he had always been during previous journeys to and from Jerusalem.

Frantically, Joseph and Mary rush back to Jerusalem and find the boy Jesus in the great temple, listening to the teachers and asking them questions, “and all who heard him were astounded by his understanding and his answers.” Whether Jesus was teaching the Jewish rabbis or mesmerized by their discussion of the Torah depends on one’s conception of Jesus’ divinity in human form. Was the boy Jesus omniscient, thus revealing to the rabbis truths about God and human existence? Was he fully aware of his divine personhood and eternal origins? As a first century Palestinian boy, did he have a concept of himself as the Second Person of the Trinity? Or, given that Luke at the end of the episode says that “Jesus advanced in wisdom and age”, did he grow in knowledge and consciousness of his identity, mission and vocation? As he heard the rabbis discuss scriptures, was his heart burning, was something deep within stirred? Did he intuitively sense he belonged to God the Father in a unique manner that his words could not adequately express?

Today we celebrate the Feast of the Sto. Niño. Foreigners visiting our religious stores are either delighted or appalled to see images of the Sto. Niño garbed in the uniform of a policeman, a fireman, a doctor and so on. Do we as Filipinos have an infantile faith, romanticizing and perpetuating the childhood of Jesus, turning Jesus into a cute God that we dress up and adore? Is our devotion to the Sto. Niño a way of glossing over the passion and death of the man Jesus who died because of his faithfulness to the Father and his fidelity to his cause, the Kingdom of God for all? Is our devotion to the Sto. Niño a subtle way of avoiding the cross as an integral and inescapable dimension of discipleship?

From another perspective, the devotion to the Sto. Niño celebrates the nearness of God who makes himself accessible and tangible to his people suffering under the weight of the cross of poverty and inequality. Burdened by the hardships of life, our people are looking for God and are awaiting his response to their pleas and petitions.  And in the Sto. Niño, in the eternal Son in the form of a fragile child, our people find comfort and consolation in a God who has condescended to our human condition, making himself accessible to us, assuring us of his companionship and solidarity as we carry the cross of poverty and hunger, the cross of displacement due to wars and dispossession wrought by calamities. The Sto. Niño is God’s revelation to us that he is indeed Emmanuel, God-with-us in our daily strife and in our process of growth in self-knowledge and virtue; God-with-us in our journey from Nazareth, our birthing, to Jerusalem, our dying; God-ever-with-us in our rising to the fuller life God envisions for all.