“SASABIHIN KO lamang po sa inyo, sa Diyos at sa tao, hindi po ako may-ari no’ng lupang ‘yan. Pati ba naman ‘yong babuyan namin, pati ‘yon air-conditioned?
Ngayon lang ako nakarinig [no’n] (I just want to tell all of you, to God and people, that I’m not the owner of that property. Even the piggery, they say it’s air-conditioned, that’s the first time I’ve heard of that).“
So Vice President Jejomar Binay invoked the name of God in denying ownership of the so-called Hacienda Binay in Batangas. This, in his visit to Pagadian City last Thursday to attend the 11th Rovers Moot of the Boy Scouts of the Philippines where he sits as overstaying president, to quote the Inquirer’s Neal Cruz.
“Sa Diyos at sa tao, taas-noo kong sinasabi na wala akong tinanggap o hiningi na anumang pera sa proyektong ito o anumang proyekto sa Makati (Before God and people, I hold my head up high and say that I never received or asked any money for this project or any project in Makati).”
So Binay made God his very witness in denying receiving or asking for any money for the construction of the Makati City Hall building – allegedly overpriced at P2.3 billion – or for any other project during his incumbency as mayor.
This, in late August when his former vice mayor started his solo concert at the Senate hall. Not once but twice already has Binay invoked the name of God. And only God knows how many more times Binay would do such. Unafraid, aye, unperturbed, as he is of the injunction attached to the Second Commandment, thus Exodus 20:7and Deuteronomy 5:11: “…for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes His name in vain.”
Binay citing Providence raises to relevance anew this 26-year-old piece on “God-given mandates” I wrote in the 7-13 October 1988 issue of the long defunct Angeles Sun, which I now retitle:
GOD, NOT patriotism is the last recourse of scoundrels.
Covenants with the Divine or those perceived to be divine have consistently accompanied Man’s laboriously long march from pre-history to contemporary times, perhaps starting with the animistic Neanderthal savage cowering in his cave as he forged a pact with the lord of thunder, the goddess of rain, and the deities among the stars.
From the primeval, God-man covenants soared to the spiritual – the Ten Commandments, the venerated Ark of the Covenant – then branched out to the political mandate from heaven as practiced in the era of China’s dynasties, and apexed on the absolute tyrannical divine right of kings with France’s Louis XIV, the “Sun King” himself, as its quintessence.
The celestial mandates to China’s emperors were by no means absolute and for-life in praxis. Fortuitous events as pestilences and plagues, droughts and floods were seen as omens of heaven’s disapproval of the reign of the emperor thereby prompting him to abdicate his throne, in favor of a heavenly-approved new ruler.
Such made the Chinese model of God-given mandates altogether different and definitely more benevolent than the autocratic divine right of European sovereigns.
Vox Dei being vox populi reinforcing, the Marxist-Leninist precept of power to the proletariat and later Mao-Tse-Tunged into power of the people gaining global adherents, the modern rulers’ mandates have shifted from being God-given to being people-granted.
God, being out of the Marxist equation. Hence, the people’s democratic republics and people-powered revolutions far numerous than monopolistic Iran’s theocratic political fundamentalism.
The charismatic to-Christ-reborning finds parallel in recent political realities with a number of leaders claiming God-given mandates once more as the bases for their rule, no matter their constant shaking of the Devil’s hand.
“My mandate came from God,” so claim many a ruler today, conjuring in the mind images of her or him Moses-like, getting the tablets from Yahweh Himself, amid the burning bush.
The reign of the same rulers, however, perpetually betrays either a blasphemous utterance or a reference to another god – notwithstanding his/her claim to be of God as his/her actions are most definitely not God’s.
God is peace. One who rules from a circle of guns therefore is not of God. God is mercy. One who is harsh to the impoverished is undeniably not God’s. “No man can serve two masters,” said the Christ, presenting the contradictory options of God and mammon. It cannot be then of God that many rulers pocket cash.
If not all those who cry “Lord, Lord” could enter the kingdom of heaven, as the Christ admonished, how much more for those frothing mouths that spew vitriol and venom? No, they can never be God’s.
Arguably, our current crop of rulers can be of God in only one thing. Christ said in Matthew 5:3: “Blessed are the poor for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” So they become instruments for that divine mission, albeit in purely secular way:
By making their people poor. So many crimes have been committed in God’s name by the most devilish of rulers – the genocide of Middle Easterners at the time of the Crusades; the near annihilation of the Aztecs of Mexico, the Incas of Peru, the Mayas of Central America by the Christian conquistadores; the colonization of the Philippines by the Spanish cross and sword, etcetera. (The demonic rampage of ISIS, currently.)
May our leaders heed their lessons from there, and may we all be restrained from uttering the name of the Lord, our God, in vain.
