Hail, king of the road!

Jesus probably has the most number of portrait versions done using all sorts of media. He appears on greeting cards, notebooks, books, leaflets, shirts, handkerchiefs and button pins. Sometimes he is white, brown, black and anything in between. We see him as a helpless tiny baby, a teen nomad or a Spanish gypsy. His icons serve as an amulet against aswang, evil spirits and the freaks. On the road, they say he works best with the Virgin Mary, so you’ll find mother-and-son team on car and jeepney dashboards and stickers, bus windows and tricycle units. If that is the case, your car, life and health insurance companies are in better hands than you are.

If he were a living person, his income from royalties would have made him richer than the Queen. Or J.K. Rowling. And this handsome Jew would have even made it big in Hollywood.

People down the ages up until now have painted their images of him from beggar to freak. But what is he really like? What did the Bible say about his life as an ordinary human?

Old testament prophet Isaiah had a glimpse of who the Messiah was centuries before he was born. He calls him the “suffering servant”. Jesus was never a Jewish heartthrob during his time.

2 He grew up before him like a tender shoot,
and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.

3 He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.
Like one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

4 Surely he took up our infirmities
and carried our sorrows,
yet we considered him stricken by God,
smitten by him, and afflicted.

Shaped like Magellan's hat

We were at Sto. Nino Parish Church in Mactan to hear mass on a late Sunday afternoon. This is the first time I attended mass conducted in Cebuano dialect and saw young women in their ministry wear long veils like the very icons in the altar. We left with no idea what the entire one-hour sermon was all about. It felt like much being a foreigner in your own land. I hope they have English and Filipino versions during the day, and even Korean. This particular area in Mactan Island is a tourist belt.

Inside the hat-shaped church on a Sunday

So in between ho-hums, unimaginable boredom and missing church services at CCF, I managed to steal shots of the Sto. Nino Parish Church. The small church is right across two major roads leading to Cordova and Punta Engano. What’s amazing about this church is its unique architecture. The building was shaped like Magellan’s hat (I would have said Anakin Skywalker’s) and its glass panels depict the image of the Sto. Nino tinted with bright colors. It is no longer as backward as what a typical parish in the outskirts of a province should be, bamboo blinds and all. Cebu churches have actually come a long way to become one of the province’s heritage sites.

Magellan's Cross, believed to be miraculous, is nothing but a deceptive tool to conquer the unsuspecting ancient Cebuanos.

I find it disturbing how some history textbooks tell us that the Philippines was “discovered” by Spanish-hired Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan in 1521. Wow Philippines has even repeated the same confusing remark when describing the island of Limasawa as a birthplace of Christianity in the Philippines. I question the use of the word “discovered” because hundreds of years before these Spanish/Portuguese explorations, the islands have long been inhabited by its natives. In fact, Mactan Island’s chief Lapu-Lapu was already there when Magellan and his team arrived.

The word Christianization also does bother me. Spain that time was using God as a scare tactic to conquer and manipulate inhabitants in the east. What the Spaniards had really brought us was an idolotrous religion that subsisted on the sweat and blood of those they have conquered. Where is Christianity there? Not even a trace.

The house built for the ancient cross

Just across the present Cebu City Hall is Magellan’s Shrine that houses the Cross of Magellan. The original cross, believed to be encased in Tindalo wood, was made a symbol of Cebu and local government seal when it is nothing but an ugly reminder of how our own gullibility made us Spanish captives for 333 years. Lapu-Lapu, probably one of the brightest minds of his time, refused this religious crap from gaining a foothold. We all know how this brave warrior made a faucet out of the Spaniard’s body. Our historians may have named a small city after him, but Magellan’s cross was made a symbol of the province the Mactan chieftain so tried to defend. Call that irony.