Come join the conversation to shape Penang and Malaysia’s future!

The Penang Socio-Economic & Environmental Research Institute (SERI) will be launching its latest publication “Pilot Study for a New Penang”. Senator YM Tunku Aziz will grace the launch to be held as follow:

Date: 20 March 2010
Time: 10.30am – 12.30pm
Venue: SERI (map)

After the launch, Tunku will give a table-talk titled “The Future of Malaysia: What’s In For You and Me?” at 1pm at the same venue. Tea will be served, the table talk is hosted by YB Liew Chin Tong, Executive Director of SERI.

You are invited for both the launch and the table talk!

Please RSVP to Steven Sim to reserve a place for the table talk (hp 012 5907 507,scheekeong@gmail.com).

The discussion begins with an overview of philosophical, religious and scientific discussion on life and its meaning. Essentially, life is seen as atomistic; there are smaller units working together to form complex organism and its activities. Naturally however, human beings are drawn to experience coherence and unity. For e.g. we see shapes rather than mere dots and lines, our brain with many parts working together continually let us perceive a unified mind. The question of the meaning of life is therefore a question whether there is any coherence in life. Even philosophical system which rejects “meaning” in life is a form of coherence, let’s call it life-coherence. There is a universal experience of life-coherence, that is the pursuit of pleasure. We always seek to maximize pleasure because pleasure is the quality of existence. As social being, we must also strive to maximize the pleasures for the others; in the theory of reciprocal altruism, mutual cooperation benefits the individual as much as the beneficiary. However, we will always risk having “excess in meaning”, such excess in meaning is beyond our natural experience and is called “the sublime”.

She got, as a birthday present, a 5Megapixel camera phone (Samsung Jet) and started to snap away and upload to her FB. It’s definitely not a substitute for a real camera, but I guess we are living in a different world now. There is an insatisfiable urge to record everything and share everything. I guess in this sense, a camera phone photo is much more “genuine” than a perfect-10 DSLR photo. We are sharing our perception of our world with others and the imperfection of a camera phone photo is like our personalized signature – the world through our senses.

I cannot help to think that technology such as camera phones and the web 2.0 alter the way we understand phenomenology. Are we in a way reducing the risk of Sartre’s self-destruction because we can Now we can objectify our experience (camera phone) and even our persons (Facebook). That way, are we reducing the risk of Sartre’s self-destruction as we encounter one another? Can we now more ably distance ourselves from ourselves and therefore save ourselves from being reduced to the object of another’s perception. We then provide an alternative objectified self in order to relate to another person and vice versa.

But of course, we are risking to reduce ourselves into two two dimensional bit-space on the computer/phone screens. Is this a form of suicide, a self-destruction? I must be reading too much of phenomenology.

Special thanks to YB Liew Chin Tong for his support in all this.

——————

It started with Luke’s gospel reading aloud sessions with JR and as we went through the chapters, I found myself reflecting afresh stories which I have grown to take for granted. Without realizing I have written about 6 installments of my reflections:

The Social Theology of St. John the Baptist

The Social Theology of Mary’s Magnificat

Luke’s Nativity: Caesar & Christ

The Social Theology in Jesus’ Manifesto

The Simple Reason for the Long List

Tempted to Sin-gularity

I hope to write further but will not be publishing them from now on until I have completed reflection on the whole of Luke’s gospel. Writing to put them up on my blog seemed to give me unnecessary pressure of conformity. I prefer leisure writing…

The story of the temptation of Jesus is kind of like the story of temptation par excellence for Christians. We were taught that even Jesus himself was tempted by the bible-quoting devil and we were taught that he managed to overcome devil’s trap by quoting the bible in return. There you have it, the doctrine that we must read and memorize our scripture.

If you ask me Luke’s story is interesting because, Luke inverted the second and third temptations as compared to Matthew’s account. When he does that, and we all know that Luke was deliberately putting together well known stories of Jesus for someone important (Luke 1:3-4), we can be safe to say that he was trying to construct a message.

In Luke’s version, the first temptation was the devil asking Jesus to turn a stone into bread.

Devil: If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread

Jesus: It is written, “Man does not live on bread alone [but on every words that comes from the mouth of the LORD]” (Luke 4:3-4)

The second temptation was the devil leading Jesus up to a high place and showing him all the kingdoms of the world,

Devil: If you worship me, it will all be yours

Jesus: It is written, “Worship the LORD your God and serve him only” (Luke 4:7-8)

The third temptation was the devil leading Jesus to the highest point of the Jerusalem temple,

Devil: If you are the Son of God, jump down. It is written “He will command his angels concerning  you, to guard you carefully, they will lift you up, your foot will not touch a stone”

Jesus: It says, “Do not put the LORD your God to the test” (Luke 4:9-12)

The devil, as we can clearly see from the third temptation can quote the bible as well as Jesus if not better – he quoted longer verses. I think it is safe to say that Luke probably want to tell us, it’s no good just memorizing the bible or even being a bible expert.

But what interest us in this is the dynamics of the temptation. It was not mere allurement using money or sex, something of the usual stuff we link to “temptation” these days. It sounds cliché, but the devil is more subtle than that and the dynamics of temptation is more profound.

The tempter began with the most basic physiological need of a person, food and climbing up Maslow’s piramid, he offered power and then skillfully, a chance for Jesus to realize his mission as a god-sent messiah.

The devil is a master in psychology, he posed a challenge to Jesus on what it means to be a human being. It was not something out of the ordinary; no, the devil did not appear and offered a Faustian deal, giving us an out-of-this-world ability. Instead, it was something more down-to-earth (and that’s often dangerous because we will be looking somewhere else), he challenged the idea of our personhood, how we find fulfillment in life and the enjoyment of our being.

Jesus did turn stones into breads (Luke 9), he did claim, by deeds and words, to be god’s messiah-king, not least through his actions of judgement in the temple and most notably the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18). So these things in themselves, are not evil. There’s nothing evil in finding satisfaction in our lives and the enjoyment of our being.

These things, in themselves, are not evil but the devil knew they pose a potential threat to our humanity. Our problem begins when we decide that there is no other dimension to our self except being an “individual” and thus negating the others.

I believe the strength of Jesus’ response to the devil in the temptation story does not lie in his bible-quoting but rather in his awareness of the “relational” dimension of our personhood. In other words, he was aware that to be human is to be relational.

He realized that “no man is an island”, because if we are created in the image of god who exist in an eternal fellowship of Three, then we are made to communicate, to embrace, to interact, to relate to god if not to one another, though I strongly believe to one another as well because, if someone cannot “love his brother whom he sees, how can he love the god whom he cannot see?” (1 John 4:20).

The rejection of the others is but a symptom of our rejection of the ultimate Other. To deny our relational dimension is to deny our own humanity. This is not only disfiguring the image of god in us, but it is also self-destructive.

Sin comes in when we reject the others in search of the fulfillment of our being. Money, power and sex become evil when we enjoy them individualistically, independent of, and denying and negating the joy of others in the process.

Indeed loving god and embracing god includes loving and embracing people, “you’ve got to love both” (1 John 4:21, The Message).

Christ in the Desert, 1872, Ivan Kramskoi

Luke did that as well listing out Jesus’ lineage, perhaps in confirmation to some known traditions of the Jesus story.

He was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph,
the son of Heli, the son of Matthat,
the son of Levi, the son of Melki,
the son of Jannai, the son of Joseph,
the son of Mattathias, the son of Amos,
the son of Nahum, the son of Esli,
the son of Naggai, the son of Maath,
the son of Mattathias, the son of Semein,
the son of Josech, the son of Joda,
the son of Joanan, the son of Rhesa,
the son of Zerubbabel, the son of Shealtiel,
the son of Neri, the son of Melki,
the son of Addi, the son of Cosam,
the son of Elmadam, the son of Er,
the son of Joshua, the son of Eliezer,
the son of Jorim, the son of Matthat,
the son of Levi, the son of Simeon,
the son of Judah, the son of Joseph,
the son of Jonam, the son of Eliakim,
the son of Melea, the son of Menna,
the son of Mattatha, the son of Nathan,
the son of David, the son of Jesse,
the son of Obed, the son of Boaz,
the son of Salmon, the son of Nahshon,
the son of Amminadab, the son of Ram,
the son of Hezron, the son of Perez,
the son of Judah, the son of Jacob,
the son of Isaac, the son of Abraham,
the son of Terah, the son of Nahor,
the son of Serug, the son of Reu,
the son of Peleg, the son of Eber,
the son of Shelah, the son of Cainan,
the son of Arphaxad, the son of Shem,
the son of Noah, the son of Lamech,
the son of Methuselah, the son of Enoch,
the son of Jared, the son of Mahalalel,
the son of Kenan, the son of Enosh,
the son of Seth, the son of Adam,
the son of God. (Luke 3:23-38)

That’s 77 names altogether, counting Jesus and God.

Many scholars and teachers gave different reasons for the names. St. Augustine had a very interesting thought. He saw the passage in Luke 3:21-38 as some sort of picture, where Luke began by painting Jesus as a mediator priest approved by God through the voice from heaven “You are my son, whom I love, with you I am well pleased”, and then moving upwards through the mass of humanity represented by the patriarchs, passing Abraham (contrast Matthew’s version of the genealogy) and towards God himself. It was a picture of atonement. St. Augustine even said the 77 generations represented, a “thorough remission and abolition of all sins”. Nice picture.

St. Augustine may be right, and many a sermons may be right about the reasons why Luke recorded the genealogy.

But I think at the least, Luke was trying to tell us, “Look, Jesus did not just come out of nowhere”. Reading the names, some very illustrious heroes of the Jewish people, some unfamiliar, but all probably were names not unknown to the Jewish history, the readers of Luke’s Jesus story seemed to be drawn into a richer story spanning further and further into the past.

Each names already had stories of its own, but when all the names were strewn together, they formed the familiar story which the Jewish people tells one another from generation to generation to make sense of the world.

The Marxist poet-playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote:

Who built Thebes of the seven gates
In the books you will find the names of kings.

But in Luke’s book, there were king, governor, prince, prime minister, landowner, yes, but there were also farmer, trader, workman and artisan. The story of Jesus was tied to their stories. Each of them, through their individual stories, gave context to the coming of the ultimate “Son of God”. Luke was saying, the Jesus story did not happen in a vacuum.

And perhaps Luke was also telling his readers that from now on, Jesus will enter the story which makes sense of the world.

Jesus’ genealogy in Luke’s gospel, a page from the Book of Kells (c 800 AD)

When I was younger, I used to pick up the Bible, say a prayer, close my eyes, open up to a random page, point to a random passage and then happily meditate on those verses as god’s answers to whatever questions posed in my prayer earlier.

But Luke’s Jesus did it differently. He unrolled the scroll given to him, and

“…found the place where it is written” (Luke 4:17)

He was not random. He did not just close his eyes and point a finger. He was deliberate.

The way Luke placed this story, immediately after Jesus’ baptism and trial, and before launching into his career, we can almost be sure that Luke wanted us to believe that the reading was Jesus’ conscious deliberation to underscore his mission statements, his manifesto.

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
Because he has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind
to release the oppressed
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour” (Luke 4:18-19)

Jesus’ manifesto was a quote from Isaiah 61.

With mega dose of mega Christianity these days, we would have easily imagined Jesus Christ giving a prep talk which goes: “I am here to preach reforms in religion so that now people go to worship on Sundays in churches instead of Saturdays in synagogues, read the Bible, OT and NT, not just the former, listen to sermons, pray, pay tithes, live good moral lives, convert your family and friends and wait for me to come pick you up to heaven somewhere”

Jesus saw himself as reforming religion, no less, but may I suggest he was doing something more. Or should I say, I believe Luke suggested so.

Jesus saw his divinely-ordained mission as one with a bias towards the poor, marginalized, the sick, the oppressed, those at the fringe of social setups. Of course, we can easily “spiritualize” the Jesus’ manifesto and claim that it’s all about having this subjective stuff called faith, and then believing in some doctrines and doing some religious acts and converting friends and going to heaven somewhere.

But even if Luke allows us, Isaiah would not.

Because Isaiah 61 speaks of the hope of Israel through their ancient prophet Isaiah about the day when God finally act to make things right in this present chaotic world. It speaks of God correcting the wrongs of human existence, where poverty, socio-political oppressions and even physical illness robbed human beings off their dignity as made in God’s image.

Isaiah 61 speaks of God’s healing, comfort and rebuilding. It speaks of a wedding (v10). Most importantly, Isaiah 61 speaks of a garden where the seed sprouts and grows, a reversal of the Genesis curse, a picture of restoration (v11).

And make no mistake, all these God will do because, in his “own words”,

“I, the LORD, love justice…” (Isaiah 61:8)

Jesus’ manifesto then was not simply some religious creed, because if it was, I think those who heard it would take it less controversially. Rather it was a blueprint for the restoration of the human condition, no less drawn out of god’s love for justice.

One can almost imagine the crowd astounded, “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son? What’s he thinking? Trying to start a revolution against Rome eh?”

It is much much easier to start a religious group and discuss all day about angels in the clouds, but to talk about more tangible stuff such as reforming the socio-political system; that’s another story altogether. That was the story Luke told about Jesus; Jesus who proclaimed “the year of the Lord’s favour”, a Jubilee proclamation. The Jubilee, a politically-charged theme, is the Sabbath of Sabbaths, the golden year national celebration of Israel as free people, whose freedom, they were constantly reminded was brought with blood, whose liberator, they were constantly reminded was “the LORD, your god”. And the year long Jubilee observation was a national reminder that Israel was not freed only to be oppressor of others. The agenda of the Jubilee year was so that no one will remain poor forever while his neigbours got richer and richer. That’s revolutionary.

No wonder the crowd at the synagogue was astonished, “Isn’t this Joseph the carpenter’s son?” And then they tried to kill him.

Isaiah Scroll found in Qumran

Have a blessed and prosperous New Year 2010. May it be a year of Lord’s favour in and through your life.

There are many things we can say about the Pakatan Rakyat Common Policy Platform, but I would like to focus on one thing, there is a new confidence to embrace one another as Malaysians.

This was symbolized by the breaking away from the Government-imposed taboo of speaking about race and religion. Not only was the so-called racial superiority quashed, but socio-economic and political equality were affirmed in the common policy document. The issue of race and religion was discussed without fear. There was an openness in the atmosphere so unlike anything we knew before. People of all races, including Malaysians from Sabah and Sarawak sat and stood side by side listening to leaders thundering about the need for inclusiveness and condemning racism in our Country.

We grew up in a Country where race and religion are deemed live wires, issues which are too fatal to even go near. You cannot discuss it in school, in university or in the Parliament, not in the five-foot ways, not on TV, not in the press, not in writings, not in cartoons, not in forums. The UMNO-Barisan Nasional Government tells us these topics are “too sensitive”. If you ever have the guts to talk about it, the Malays will suddenly pick up “parangs” and chase after the non Malays. We grew up with the May 13 bogeyman tale.

But we all knew deep in our bones, something is terribly wrong with the way things are. Now and then, some of us recall the good old days when our Malays neighbours were friendly or when our Chinese neighbours were helpful and our Indian neighbours were kind. Now and then, we remembered not too long ago, Malaysians and the Malays were nice people who know how to laugh at the world and themselves, in the serious P. Ramlee way, not in the stupid jokes allowed on TVs these days.

We know the caricatures of Ah Chong, Ramasamy somehow did not fit into our experience with the grandpa-like Ah Pek in the neighbourhood sundry shop or the motherly Indian lady who taught us Bahasa Malaysia at school. We know deep inside us, something is very wrong with the way our Government tried to scare us into toeing the line using the May 13 bogeyman tale.

The irony is, all of us know something is wrong, but we cannot discuss it. If we do, the Malays will pick up “parangs” and chase after the non-Malays.

A greater irony is, see how racial category matters in Malaysia. In your National Registration Identity Card you are either bumiputera or non-bumiputera, in Economy, being poor and rich is not enough, you are either bumiputera or non-bumiputera, in Education, being good or bad student is not enough, you are either bumiputera or non-bumiputera, even in the ruling party Barisan Nasional, you are either (Malay) UMNO, (Chinese) MCA or (Indian)MIC, all other agendas seemed to be footnotes.

But of course, we cannot discuss race and religion. Because the Government tells us the Malays will pick up “parangs” and chase after the non-Malays.

When Pakatan Rakyat created history by wrestling five states from UMNO-BN and denying the Government 2/3 majority in Parliament on March 8, 2008, many feared that UMNO-BN’s bogeyman will come after us. SMS-es were sent frantically to instruct friends and family members to stay at home. Leaders issued calls for supporters to celebrate quietly and disallowed victory parades. Many folks began to sweat thinking if UMNO-BN was right after all, the Malays will pick up “parangs” and chase after the non-Malays.

It has been more than a year since March 8, we all know the bogeyman did not turn up that night or the nights after.

Yes, there were some who tried to fan the sentiment and invoke the bogeyman in many different ways – hate posters, noisy demonstrations and even  bloody severed cow head – but the bogeyman did not turn up.

Someone said, true national unity and racial harmony cannot happen in this Country – Dato’ Onn Jaafar tried it, he failed, many tried it, they failed. True, but when Dato’ Onn Jaafar tried to enlighten UMNO half a century ago, Barrack Obama is still not the President of USA.

The May 13 bogeyman lived, if at all (read Kua Kia Siong), when Barrack Obama is still not President. It was a different era, when UMNO-BN can still use the old British weapon of race and religion to rule. Today, even Britain’s Prince Charles said he will have a multi-faith ceremony in his future coronation.

Slowly, and with trembling hands and knees, Malaysians since March 8, or probably somewhere before that date, were threading into a new world. It is a world of new openness, new accountability and new democratic space unbeknown previously.

And of course, back to where we began, there is a new confidence to embrace each other. This new confidence may develop in different pace in different parts of the Country. There will be some people who still insist of going back to the old world, the era of the bogeyman. But the Pakatan Rakyat Convention and its Common Policy Platform are like the election of Barrack Obama, a Country owning up to the terrible wrongs of its past, the wrongs we know deep in our bones, and then swept by the tides of progress.

Which is why the 308 Political Tsunami was not our goal, do not ever mistaken March 8 as “we have arrived”. Some did and felt disappointed when Pakatan Rakyat could not do much after a year. March 8 was the beginning of the new world, and if it’s new, there is much work to be done to build it. The Pakatan Rakyat Common Policy Platform is then the blueprint of our new world, one in which the bogeyman has no place.

If we have it our way with correcting the wrongs of the world, we will probably do one of the two extremes; come down in chariots of fire with legions of angels to defeat the evils of the world, or to quietly change the minds of humanity towards goodness by a soft swirl of some magical winds. Either way, we have the upper-hand in overwhelming our helpless enemies.

Imagine if we were to write the story of god saving the world. We will probably end up with an epic of heroic wars. Which is what we get in the old poets and story tellers, Greek, Roman, Chinese, Indian, Anglo-saxon.

But Luke would have it slightly different, though no less epic.

“In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria. And everyone went to his own town to register” (Luke 2:1-2)

Caesar Augustus was a name quite immediately identified, at least during the times of Luke, with power, no, superpower. The great Julius Caesar was his grand uncle, but he was a statesman as much as the elder Caesar. Augustus was destined to give his borrowed surname, Caesar, to the world to title emperors and rulers. His reign was known as the era of peace, the pax romania or pax augusta.

Augustus prided his achievements as such that he had them inscribed in his kingly mausoleum as the Res Gestae Divi Augusti – the deeds of the divine Augustus. Yes, divine, for having a hand earlier in his career to deify his deceased predecessor Julius Caesar, whom he called “father”, he effectively became god’s son sharing in his father’s divinity. When he passed on, he was in turn worship as a god himself, establishing a cult which will last about three hundred years with temples dedicated to him everywhere in the empire.

Luke set the opening of his epic against the background of this great god-man, Caesar Augustus, the “Revered Emperor”, more a title than a name, but almost indistinguishable. The Emperor called for a census to be taken of his empire, to gauge the breath and width and depth of his rule as the sole global superpower of the known world.

Then, as if picking up a rock only to throw it away again, Luke left the god-man Emperor behind and went on to describe with the full paradox of the great empire of Caesar Augustus in the background, the humble family of Joseph with his expecting young wife, Mary making their way to the small town of Bethlehem to participate in the census. Few more words follow through, and Luke said,

“…the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son” (v6-7)

And as if to amplify the distance of greatness between rule of Rome and her divine king Caesar Augustus and the humble Jewish family, Luke wrote that the child

“…was wrapped in cloths and placed in a barn, because there was no room for them in the inn.” (v7)

If Luke was writing about how the hero saved the day, his protagonist was never Rome’s god-king; it was the little child born in an animal shed to an artisan family. True, Augustus was eminent at the beginning of the Luke’s epic. And perhaps there were times in his story when the hero was proved to be nothing more than a little child whose family probably had no money and socio-political connections to get an inn-room in their own hometown.  There were times when the hero was as weak as Caesar’s Rome wanted him to be, helpless, beaten up, bloodied and sentenced to a shameful death.

But Luke had always knew the ending of his story would be different, because if god was the one who inspired the story, or even better, if he had actually acted in it, it would be different.

But of course, Luke himself did not foresee the day when the little peasant child would be given a kingly title almost indistinguishable from his own name – the Christ.

He did not foresee the day when the little child would supplant the divine Augustus not only in Caesar’s temples but also on Caesar’s political throne.

Luke did not foresee the day when pax romania and pax augusta will be superseded by the peace of god which surpasses all understandings.

Luke did not foresee the day when the symbol of Caesar’s mighty power, the “stauros”, the instrument of execution used on the worst of criminals (the “cross”), Caesar’s solution to world’s problem, would become the symbol of god’s mighty love in and through the Christ, god’s solution to world’s problem.

Luke’s story, you see, is not merely about converting people from one religion to another. It is much bigger; Luke told the story of a baby born during the rule of great Caesar Augustus and destined to one day replace the value system and worldview of the old Empire. It has a happy ending alright, but before the “happily ever after…”, many more adventures will be told and retold, all hinging back to Luke’s original story of the birth in the animal barn. Remember how Luke story started with a little baby in the huge messy stage of the world of superpower? That’s god’s way of doing things, now will we follow suit? Or we prefer our own ways?

Have a merry Christmas…

Nativity scene – Andi Harisman, Indonesia