BAGUIA
President Rodrigo Duterte’s interpretation of the creation story as written in Genesis is full of errors but in the greater scheme of things sets the stage for catechesis.
First, he states that God created man out of divine loneliness.
Nothing could be farther from the truth.
The God of the Catholic faith, the God of Christianity, is not isolation.
He is community. He is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Deus caritas est, God is love, as Saint John the Evangelist wrote. The essence of the Trinitarian God is love.
Where there is Trinity, there is charity, as Saint Augustine of Hippo wrote.
Man, therefore was not created out of a godly need for companionship, but out of God’s desire to further share his love to his creatures. I say “further” because man was not the first of the works of his hands.
The angels were, followed by everything that exists in the universe, whose mere existence give praise and glory to God.
Second, the President states that God sent the snake to test Eve and Adam.
This is his premise for stating that the Creator is unwise, and such a judgment is the reason God is not God the way we would be God if we were God.
It must be clarified that God did not command Satan in the form of a serpent to tempt man.
The Evil One had been a leader among angels who aspired to the stature of God and hence fell from grace.
If we were God, we would have zapped the rebel out of existence. To do so would seem wise. But it is not. Words fail me here so let me quote our former pope His Holiness, Father (as he prefers to be called) Benedict XVI:
“It is not power, but love that redeems us! This is God’s sign: he himself is love. How often we wish that God would make show himself stronger, that he would strike decisively, defeating evil and creating a better world. All ideologies of power justify themselves in exactly this way, they justify the destruction of whatever would stand in the way of progress and the liberation of humanity. We suffer on account of God’s patience. And yet, we need his patience. God, who became a lamb, tells us that the world is saved by the Crucified One, not by those who crucified him. The world is redeemed by the patience of God. It is destroyed by the impatience of man.”
It is not the non-existence of the serpent, the absence of temptation, the elimination of concupiscence that proves God’s omnipotence or the power of love.
What proves that God is almighty is that He has loved, continues to love, and will forever love creation and humanity even in the presence of evil and in spite of man’s tendency to be ungrateful and to spurn that love.
What will prove the sincerity of our nationhood, indeed the reality of our love, will not be our elimination of the people whom we perceive to be evil, but our ability, consummated, of sharing with those who are in misery the relatively better lives that we are trying to protect at the cost of cutting them off.
What will prove us different from the ones we call hard-hearted criminals will not be our descent into tit-for-tat, calling for their blood for all of their violations, but our recognition that succumbing to the law of retaliation will only perpetuate the spilling of blood.
We do not have to dichotomize the rule of law and the rule of love. We can let love be our higher law. The call of love is this: to love the other especially when he does not deserve love, because that is the moment he needs love the most.
Perhaps, if Duterte were almighty, he would eliminate the Evil One.
That would be giving the latter a free pass.
The Evil One, in fact, as a consequence of his eternal rebellion, suffers God’s love instead of enjoying it.
That is his eternal punishment.