A blessed Christmas to all!

Here’s my Christmas gift to all my readers – an explication or analysis of the lyrics of “Ang Pasko ay Sumapit.”

The Tagalog lyrics were written by National Artist Levi Celerio around 1950 to the melody originally composed by Vicente Rubi in 1933. Celerio did not translate the original Cebuano lyrics (“Kasadya ni’ng Taknaa”) by Mariano Vestil, but instead wrote his own to match the music. Celerio also wrote more lines than Vestil. As a result (but also partly due to the ignorance of the singing public), the song is usually attributed only to Celerio.

There is an inexact translation into English of the Tagalog lyrics in www.tagalog.com (inexact because you cannot sing the English words to the original music). I will use my own rough translation of some of the lines, keeping the rhyme and meter.

The song begins with “Ang Pasko ay sumapit” (The Christmas season’s now here), establishing the context. It is to be sung during the Christmas season (which, in the Philippines, starts in September and ends sometime in January).

The song then urges listeners to sing with “Tayo ay mangagsiawit / Ng magagandang himig” (Let us sing and spread the good cheer / The carols that we all hear), a clever self-reference, since the lyrics are rarely sung by a soloist but are already being sung by a group. Celerio makes full use of the ambiguity of the Tagalog pronoun “tayo,” which can refer only to those singing the song or which may include those listening to the song.

Celerio immediately gives the theme of the song in the very next line, “Dahil sa ang Diyos ay pag-ibig” (Because the Lord our God is love, dear). The reason we need to sing to celebrate Christmas is that God is love.

This is a profound insight into the meaning of the Christmas. Jesus was the ultimate expression of God’s love for us, since giving one’s only son to be killed has to be the biggest sacrifice of all.

But even much bigger is the sacrifice of becoming human. Jesus did not have to assume human form at all and did not have to undergo all the indignities that all of us are prone to. There was no reason for a divine being to suffer, but God allowed Jesus to suffer. Even Jesus was not clear at some point about why he had to suffer and had to shout out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” God, however, was very clear about it all: the only way to make up for all the evil that humans were then doing or had done and would continue to do (up to today and even tomorrow!) was to have the Incarnation.

The antidote to all evil, the Bible tells us, is love, and Celerio captures that insight in one line: “Dahil sa ang Diyos ay pag-ibig.” Celerio draws the logical conclusion of this insight in his last stanza: “Tayo ay magmahalan” (Let’s all love one another), again echoing one of the recurring themes of the New Testament.

If we look again at the two commandments that Jesus gave us in Mark 12:30-31, we can see how deep the insight is of Celerio (and, of course, numerous others before and after him). When asked what God’s greatest commandment was, Jesus answered, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” (New International Version)

Now, if we love God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, then there is clearly no place for loving anything or anyone else. But Jesus followed up the first commandment with the second one. We have to love our neighbor and we have to love ourselves. How can we love our neighbor or ourselves if we already gave our entire heart and soul and mind and strength to God? The answer is simple. As the Bible so well puts it in only one word, “Emmanuel,” meaning, “God is with us.”

We are obviously not God, but God is in us. More precisely, because God made us into his/her own image and likeness and because God came down to earth in human form and sacrificed himself for our sins, we have become the Body of Christ.

Jesus put that explicitly in Matthew 25: 31-46, when he identified himself with the suffering: “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.” In case we did not get what he meant, he made it explicit: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

In short, what transpired on Christmas Day more than two thousand years ago was not just the birthday of Jesus of Nazareth. Christ became us and we became Christ. Christmas is our birthday as a divinely human race.