“Seeing Jesus in the downtrodden” 

By Rev Dr Fei Taule’ale’ausumai 

Does it matter if Jesus was real when he appeared to the disciples and even ate a morsel of fish to show that he was indeed flesh and blood?  I know some people want to know the science and facts of Jesus appearance and others just trust and believe this to be so.  Of the resurrection appearances, Dominic Crossan says, none, was an illusion, hallucination, vision or apparition.  Each was a symbolic assertion of Jesus’ continued presence to the general community, to leadership groups, or to specific and even competing individual leaders.   

For me I don’t care about the science, seeing Jesus post resurrection today is what is important.  I’m not suggesting in the flesh like our Gospel reading this morning but learning to see Jesus in the faces of those who are struggling and destitute, the downtrodden. 

Who are the downtrodden?  The Oxford dictionary says “someone who’s downtrodden  is mistreated by some powerful person or group. An exploited, underpaid worker is downtrodden. It is more often used to talk about groups of oppressed people, rather than one specific person. 

The downtrodden are those pupils at school who are bullied, people of the LGBTQI community who are mistreated and misjudged, the transgender community, women and children, men and boys who also have been abused both physically and sexually.  The list goes on.  On Sunday the documentary on the abused boys at Dilworth will be airing on TV1,  I know someone who was the matron at Dilworth for many years up until her recent retirement.  Did she not see abuse happening right under her nose for all those years she was matron?   

Have you ever fitted into either of these categories? As either downtrodden or the powerful?  More often than not we would be hesitant to admit it anyway.   

Quite often if you go to an evangelical church and you will hear people giving their testimonies about how they are a changed person, having gone from the powerful to being an advocate for the powerless etc.  

But what does the downtrodden look like?   

 
Felipa Fabon waits outside a local fried chicken restaurant in Manila. Crouching near to feral cats and rubbish bins, she isn’t there to meet friends for dinner but to search through the diner’s trash bags. 

“I’m sorting the garbage, looking for ‘pagpag’,” she says. 

In Tagalog “pagpag” means the dust you shake off your clothing or carpet, but in Fabon’s poverty- stricken world, it means chicken pulled from the trash. 

Pagpag is the product of a hidden food system for the urban poor that exists on the leftovers of the city’s middle class. 

Fabon is the merchant and pays the trash dealer just over a dollar for tonight’s supply of garbage and scraps. 

In the dim haze of the street lights, she holds up a half-eaten chicken breast.  “This one, this is meat,” she says. “Now what we do at home is clean it, put it in plastic, and then I sell it in the morning. It’s very easy to sell because it’s very cheap. People in my neighbourhood want very cheap food.”  “If it’s mostly bones, it’s 20 pesos ($0.50) per bag,” she says. 

After bagging up the chicken scraps she heads home to Tondo, a neighbourhood infamous in the Philippines as one of the poorest slums in Manila.  At dawn, about six hours after Fabon first got her trash delivery, she begins to divide up the pagpag. 

Fabon sniffs the chicken, which she says has a bad, sour smell. She’s disappointed that she only has five bags to sell this morning that will sell out in just minutes. 

“Pagpag!” Fabon calls out, as she walks through the slums carrying her small cart. 

They’re being pushed to do this because they don’t have enough money to buy the food that they should prepare. 

Morena Sumanda, a 27-year-old mother of two, is the first customer. 

Sumanda lives in a shanty that sits on top of one of Manila’s biggest garbage dumps. She doesn’t have the 20 pesos to pay Fabon until her husband comes home that evening. For him, 20 pesos is full day’s pay, says Sumanda.  Sumanda’s toddler son, Nino, wails as she first washes the chicken, heats the pot and adds vegetables to the pagpag, which is mostly bones. 

“Sometimes it comes from the garbage,” she says, as she hands a small, half-eaten chicken wing to her son. 

Sumanda, and others like her, have no other choice but to eat pagpag, says Melissa Alipalo, a social development specialist and a volunteer at the Philippine Community Fund (PCF). 

“It is a private humiliation of the poor to have to eat off someone else’s plate. But it’s a survival mechanism for the poorest of the poor,” she says.  In January of this year, the Philipion Governement have enacted a law banning the sale of this literal junk food pagpag specifically because this food harbors a lot of bacteria. that can cause various diseases, 

It reminds me of one of my trips to my father’s village, when the women of the family were proud to serve us “fa’ausi” which is mashed taro cut up into cubes and smothered with burnt sugar and coconut cream.  It’s very delicious.  My sister-in-law who is not Samoan outrightly refuses to accept the dish which was offered to her and she whispers to me “I’ve seen how they make it, no thanks”.  Her first time to Samoa.  It was made in the umu shack using stones and blackened pots, but the taro, sugar and coconut cream were fresh made that morning.  Very judgemental very arrogant.  I responded, well, this is normal life for them, look how healthy they are, no ones’ died yet from food poisoning.  Every family has that one critic and often it is someone who is not of the same blook come from the outside.  We have a term in Samoa called the va fealoaaloa’I and the va tapuia.  The sacred gap of respect and relationship between people.  Know your place and respect the gap between you and others and do not step over that gap/boundary aua le toia le va.  It is very hard when you are working in a different culture and you see that va tapuia being breached everywhere you go.  But hey, it’s not my turf, we learn to walk in foreign spaces too but cross-cultural knowledge and respect of difference goes a long way.  Every culture has its basic courtesies and rules, we are told when you are in Rome you do what the Romans do.   

As we remember those who have died to suicide this week and those who are on the brink, contemplating, those having suicide ideation, these are also the downtrodden we are called to look out for.  Like the matron at Dilworth, they are right under our noses and we need to look past the facades that are smiling back to us and try and look behind those smiles.  One of the gospel readings tells the story of Jesus saying “For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.  And that person respond’s when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger, naked and did not clothe you, sick and did not visit you?  Jesus responds Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.  Every where we go, where there is destitution and poverty, people struggling economically, physically, mentally that is our invitation to go and give them food, water, clothing, visit them.  They are the faces of Jesus in our communities.  Regardless of what our theology is about post resurrection witness accounts being true or false, the message for us is that Jesus can be found huddling in the corner with the homeless, the hobo, the lost.   

Rev. Dr Allan Palanna, a lecturer in the Department of Theology and Ethics of the United Theological College in Bangalore, India, talks about the historical shifts in Christianity’s power dynamics and highlighted the influence of power in Christian communities, along with the reimagining of power as a source of restoration and regeneration. 

“The Word forever challenges faith communities to identify moral and ethical gaps in the use of power, re-imagine power as an instrument of God, and resist attempts to make power irrelevant to the cries of the most vulnerable communities and the earth and as Aruna Roy once remarked, ‘so that power will be more truthful and truth will have more power,’” 

“In a world where new incarnations of Caesar and new avatars of Herod are in power and control, our task is no different: to transform lives together by resisting and confronting empires of our times. Empires, evil systems, and structures cannot be reformed. They must be overthrown, that is what reflecting the face of Jesus in our own communities is all about.  Finding Jesus in the faces of the downtrodden whom we are called to feed, water, clothe and visit at the same time seeking justice against the powers that continue to exploit and dehumanise and denigrate.  That’s our job.  Amen.  

Audio of selected readings and reflections

Audio of the complete service