Nazareno

Goenawan Mohamad ()

Every January 9—except perhaps this time of Covid-19—hundreds of thousands of people crowd the streets of Manila. They move, tightly, waving white handkerchiefs, holding up maroon banners, crying “viva! viva!” and following for hours a black statue—a statue of Jesus.

Their worship is impressive, their faith confusing.

This Traslación ceremony is actually not rambling: the huge procession accompanies the statue of the Messiah from one church in Intramuros to another in Quiapo, a distance of only 6.5 kilometers. But the journey can take up to 22 hours, until the statue’s arrival at the small basilica that is its destination.

In the middle of the procession is a carriage pulled by ropes that inches forward. On top are youths in yellow shirts—the Hijos del Nazareno, whose job it is to protect the Poong Itim na Nazareno, the life-size wooden statue that is an image of Jesus, the Nazarene, on his journey to death.

The ‘Black Nazarene’ statue is impressive. It dates from 415 years ago. Carved by an anonymous artist in Acapulco, Mexico, in the 16th century, it was taken to the Philippines in 1606. It depicts Jesus carrying his cross as he climbs the hill to Golgotha.

But unlike usual depictions, this Jesus made of black mesquite wood looks handsome: he wears maroon velvet vestments, with white lace collar and cuffs in a floral pattern, and gold embroidery on the chest. His belt is gold-plated and spells out “NAZARENO.” He wears a crown not of thorns, but one decorated with three beaming rays of precious metal and shining glass.

We do not know how precise this extravagant picture of Jesus is. Probably people do not even realize that this is not the original statue. For four centuries Philippines history has been one of war and disaster. Time destroyed the original. A replica was needed.

But it is not the Nazareno statue’s authenticity that determines its aura. On the one hand, the people in the procession certainly know that Christ is not in the carriage inching along its way to the Quiapo Basilica. But on the other hand, with sincere Christian faith, they compete to wipe white cloth on the body of the ‘Black Nazarene’ to heal their illness, or to obtain good fortune.

We know that religion lives with ambiguity.

And not only on this day.

The Bible prohibits the faithful from making pictures of humans and from worshipping idols, as do the other two Abrahamic religions. The history of the Christian world has witnessed a few episodes of ‘iconoclasm’, movements to destroy statues: in the 8th and 9th centuries in Byzantium, and at the beginning of the 16th century in Europe, when the Protestants burnt statues and paintings in churches.

But iconoclasm was never total. Martin Luther himself, the founder of Protestantism, thought that when people read the Bible and imagined Christ, this was no different to putting His statue in a cathedral. Before Luther, there was the edict of Thomas Aquinas, the 13th century theologian: “Religious worship is not directed to images in themselves, considered as mere things. The movement toward the image does not terminate in it as an image, but tends toward whose image it is.”

Aquinas’s words seem to resound in the French Catholic thinker Jean-Luc Marion’s The Idol and Distance (1991). He has a famous dichotomy: there is the idol (idole) and there is the icon (icône). The two not only differ, they are complete opposites.

When thousands of people in Quiapo gaze at the statue of Jesus, it is not merely as a sign, but as the Beneficent Himself—whose blessings they can order directly—they are no longer exalting Him the all mysterious, the infinite. They have already shaped God—and they shape according to their desires. God is only their self reflection. The instrumental God.

This differs to when we are bent in fervent prayer. At that moment, it is not idols that we venerate, but the all-unrepresentable. Like Moses on Mount Sinai, when the face of God did not appear, or like Amir Hamzah in his prayer-like poem: “Where You are/ there is no form/ sound is muffled…”

At these moments, what is present is the icon.

But the Traslación ceremony confirms that the difference between ‘idol’ and ‘icon’ is not the difference of the object—it is still that particular black statue—but rather in the position of viewing it. Here one really feels the ambiguity of religion and anxiety of belief. Do I sin because I worship idols? Or am I blessed, because, with great effort, yet sincerity, I venerate the all-infinite?

And so people gather in their hundreds of thousands, giving strength to each other: look, we are on the right path!

Maybe this is why religions—as the expression of ambiguity and anxiety—always have ceremonies where people crowd together. In the clamorous procession to Quiapo, we hear the cry, viva, viva!... The sound of hope. The sound of fear.